Belarus Shuns Athletes Who Protested Lukashenko
The Belarusian-born sprinter Kristina Timanovskaya set off the biggest political crisis of the Tokyo Games after her delegation tried to forcibly send her home for publicly complaining that the head coach had signed her up for the wrong Olympic event.
Three years later, she has left behind Belarus and its sporting community — whose leadership mirrors the wider repression in the country — and finally been able to compete in the Olympic events she had been training for over her whole career, the 100- and 200-meter dashes, for her new home, Poland.
“As soon as I arrived in Poland, I had no other goal but competing in the Paris Olympics,” she said in an interview in the Olympic Village. “It was so important for me to go and run my own distance.”
Ms. Timanovskaya, whose name is also transliterated as Krystsina Tsimanouskaya, is one of the few lucky ones. Only one other Belarusian athlete, the high jumper Maryia Zhodzik, was able to change her citizenship to compete for Poland.
Many others who dared to speak out against the leader of Belarus’s autocratic government can only watch on the sidelines while Belarusian athletes who stayed quiet or showed loyalty to the president compete in Paris.
For months in 2020, citizens of Belarus, a country of 9.2 million people, protested by the thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands. They were contesting the validity of election results that showed a victory by the president, Aleksandr G. Lukashenko, who took control of the country in 1994 and has ruled with an increasingly authoritarian bent since. After Mr. Lukashenko arrested or exiled opposition leaders, prominent athletes banded together to oppose his rule, continuing to protest along with ordinary citizens.
Ms. Timanovskaya attended protests and even posted about them on Instagram. When someone from a sporting federation called her threatening to remove her from the Olympic delegation, she said she was ready to have her name withdrawn from the participant list. But then the person mentioned her parents and her brother, who was in college at the time, suggesting that they might run into trouble at work and school. She deleted the post.
“They found everyone’s pressure points,” Ms. Timanovskaya said.
More than 35,000 people were detained. Dozens of athletes, including some who had won multiple Olympic medals for Belarus, were forced into exile. Out of favor with the government, they have found themselves unable to compete in the Olympic Games.
Instead, Belarus is represented in Paris by 17 athletes who are participating under a designation of “neutral.” Russian athletes have the same arrangement; both Russia and Belarus, a close ally, are banned from the Olympics because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
“The moral of this story is that you must keep silent, you have to support the dictatorship, then you can go to the Olympics,” said Andrei Gnyot, 42, a co-founder of SOS BY, a group of opposition-minded athletes forged during the protests. “If you oppose the dictatorship, you lose everything and can’t even count on international support because they don’t want to hear you and don’t want to talk to you.”
In 2016, the Belarus Olympic Committee proudly shared the news that Stepan Popov had become the first sambo wrestler to win an award from the international organization Fair Play, for carrying his injured opponent off the mat.
Today, he lives in exile in Poland, where, without a team to compete for, he makes a living as a taxi driver.
“Today, athletes in Belarus are either propagandists or extremists,” Mr. Popov said in a video recently shared to social networks.
Dozens of organizations and hundreds of individuals in Belarus, including Olympic athletes, have been designated “extremists” for their opposition to Mr. Lukashenko. Liking or subscribing to the athletes’ pages on social networks can carry a criminal penalty. There are 1,388 political prisoners in the country, according to the human rights watchdog Viasna. The organization’s founder shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022, but it is considered an “extremist group” in Belarus.
Sports are so important in Belarus that Mr. Lukashenko headed its Olympic committee from 1997 until February 2021, when his son Viktor, now 48, took the reins.
“Sport is our ideology,” the elder Mr. Lukashenko is quoted as saying on his official website. “Raising the national flag, singing the national anthem in honor of our athletes enhance Belarus’s image internationally but most importantly make millions of Belarusians feel proud for the motherland.”
Though Belarus’s athletes in Paris are classified as neutral, competing without the presence of their flag, national anthem or state officials, their national Olympic committee is still behind all of the decisions about who participates.
Among the members of the Belarusian Olympic delegation is Ivan Litvinovich, 23, a trampoline gymnast who won a gold medal in Paris, as he did at the Tokyo Games.
The exiled athletes resent him because in 2022 he filmed a video campaigning for a referendum that would help Mr. Lukashenko consolidate even more power and pave the way for nuclear weapons to be stored in Belarus again.
The advertisement implied his support for the desired outcome: constitutional amendments helping Mr. Lukashenko to remain in power until 2035.
The successful vote was held just days after President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia invaded Ukraine, with Mr. Lukashenko aiding the effort by allowing him to use Belarus as a staging ground.
As a result, Belarus was initially banned from the Paris Olympics because of the war, just as Russia was. But the International Olympic Committee decided last year that athletes from both countries could participate as “neutral” if they met the qualification criteria, including that they were not members of or active supporters of the military.
“The result is those athletes who sat in Belarus either quietly kept silent or even supported the regime, they’re going to the Olympics right now,” said Aliaksandra Herasimenia, a three-time Olympic medalist in swimming and a former 100-meter freestyle world champion who was a founder of the Belarusian Sport Solidarity Foundation. “And those athletes who spoke out against the regime, who dared to go out, don’t have the opportunity to do so. Where is the justice? Is this the fairness that everyone claims it to be?”
Starting in 2020, Ms. Herasimenia, Mr. Gnyot and many others started lobbying the I.O.C. and Western sports governance bodies to find a way to allow qualified Belarusians who risked their futures to stand for many of the same values enshrined in the Olympic Charter to compete.
In an email to The New York Times, the I.O.C. did not answer whether it had received messages from advocates of the spurned athletes and reiterated its eligibility policies.
“We wrote and tried collectively,” Ms. Herasimenia said. “They don’t even answer, they just don’t react at all,” she said of the I.O.C. “If they answer, it is very dry, in short, formulaic replies.”
She said she was happy for the two athletes who received Polish passports.
“Nowadays, there are many Belarusians, well-known artists and athletes, who no one here needs,” she said. “They’re just trying to get a job at a store, a cafe or something else. And their talent is buried in the ground.”
Ms. Herasimenia, 39, now teaches swimming classes to children as well as the occasional master class. She was sentenced in absentia to 12 years in prison by a Belarusian court, along with her fellow B.S.S.F. founder, Aleksandr Apeikin.
Mr. Popov, the sambo wrestler, left the country and was sentenced to 10 days in jail in October 2023 along with his parents and brother, who had stayed behind in Belarus. The punishment was because they had been following social media pages deemed “extremist” by the government. Because they couldn’t show up for work, they were fired from their jobs as sambo coaches at a school.
Three months ago, Ms. Timanovksaya learned that a criminal case had been opened against her, and her parents’ house was searched. She has not been able to see them since seeking asylum in Poland.
And Mr. Gnyot is under house arrest in Serbia. He was detained in October on an Interpol warrant after he came to film an advertisement for the Tele2 telecommunications company. A Serbian court ruled that he could be extradited to Belarus, which he said would be a “death sentence” because of the number of activists who have died or disappeared in jail. (Belarus is the only country in Europe where the death penalty is still legal, and last month a court sentenced a German citizen, Rico Krieger, to death, though he ended up being part of a multinational prisoner swap this month.)
Mr. Gnyot, a journalist by profession, spent months in detention before being released to house arrest pending an appeal.
Ms. Timanovskaya said she felt very lucky to be able to continue competing.
“So many athletes want to keep doing sports, they want to compete on the international stage and they simply don’t have this opportunity,” she said. “No one is particularly interested in this, and there is no one who can help them.”
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