Cabinet considers visa blocks for Russian athletes

The Dutch cabinet will do everything it can to prevent athletes from competing under the Russian flag at international sporting events, including the upcoming 2030 winter games in Heerenveen, sports minister Mirjam Sterk has said.

She told De Telegraaf that the government is actively lobbying the International Olympic Committee to reverse its decision to readmit Russian athletes, which it made this summer, clearing the way for the 2028 summer games in Los Angeles.

Russians were suspended in 2023 after the Putin regime began using sports bodies from occupied Ukrainian territories.

The cabinet’s stance would have consequences for the 2030 winter games at Thialf in Heerenveen, which will be the first Olympic competition on Dutch soil since 1928.

Asked what would happen if Russian skaters qualified to race there, Sterk told the paper: “You would have to look at what that means for the visas.”

“The cabinet considers the participation of Russian and Belarusian athletes and teams under their own flag and national symbols at sporting events in the Netherlands undesirable and will do everything within its power to prevent it,” she said. “That applies to individual athletes, national teams and club teams from both countries.”

Pressure on IOC funding
The Netherlands is one of nine EU countries, led by Estonia, that asked the European Commission in July to cut the IOC and other federations that readmit Russia out of Erasmus+ and other EU funding programmes.

Sterk said the primary responsibility lies with the sports federations, but that the Netherlands is raising the issue with them directly. “Russia also uses this to make political statements,” she said.

D66 MP Hanneke van der Werf backed the minister but said the message should have been made “much more emphatically and more widely” at the time. “Sport is not separate from reality when a regime deliberately uses it for political ends,” she told the Telegraaf.