Neutrality of Sport
Anna Smirnova posted an article entitled, “How Neutral is Autonomy of Sport?” on September 10, 2026 on LinkedIn. Ms. Smirnova has significant subject matter expertise in sport. In this article, she examines the tension between sporting autonomy and the regulation of athletes’ political conduct, focusing on the Individual Neutral Athlete (AIN) framework and the recent revocation of AIN status from several Russian figure skaters. She questions how far autonomous sports bodies may go in assessing athletes’ political conduct and what legal safeguards constrain that authority.
How Neutral is Autonomy of Sport? By Anna Smirnova
Sporting autonomy traditionally has been understood primarily as the protection of sport from political interference. Yet the history of “neutral” participation shows how sports bodies have repeatedly had to define the “scope of neutrality”, the relationship between athletes, states and international sport. The Independent Olympic Participants (IOP) at Barcelona 1992, the later Authorised Neutral Athlete (ANA) regime in athletics, and today’s Individual Neutral Athlete (AIN) framework are legally distinct categories, created in very different contexts. What unites them is the attempt by sports governing bodies to preserve individual participation while distancing that participation from the athlete’s State; but how successful can that distancing ever be in reality?
The AIN framework goes a step further than the other regimes. It does not merely remove national symbols or representation; it requires sports bodies to scrutinise the athlete’s own political conduct and associations. This raises a different question of sporting autonomy: not simply how sport protects itself from political interference, but how far autonomous sports organisations may go in assessing the athletes’ conduct, political or otherwise.
On 5 September 2026, the International Skating Union revoked the AIN status of Russian figure skaters Kamila Valieva and Mark Kondratiuk, both of whom had been declared eligible less than a month earlier, on 7 August. Alexandra Stepanova and Ivan Bukin were also subsequently found ineligible under the same framework. On 10 September, the ISU confirmed that the four athletes did not satisfy the AIN requirements. The individual reasoning and evidence remain undisclosed, and further appeal rights are still available.
This makes the chronology particularly interesting: if Valieva and Kondratiuk passed the individual assessment on 7 August, only to lose their AIN status weeks later, what legally changed in the interim?
The ISU framework appears simple: an athlete is presumed eligible unless one of three disqualifying criteria is established, including having “actively and publicly supported” the war since February 2022. Yet the Communication says remarkably little about how that criterion is to be assessed. There is no definition, evidentiary threshold or methodology for distinguishing active support from association or appearance.
This is where the emerging Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) jurisprudence becomes particularly instructive. A broad, objective concept of “active support” has already been accepted: the focus is on how an athlete’s conduct would appear to a reasonable observer, rather than on the athlete’s subjective political intent. Relevant evidence may include social-media activity, participation in public events, symbols, photographs and association with certain structures. Yet the allocation of the burden of proof remains highly dependent on the regulatory framework: in CAS 2024/A/10722 the athlete bore the burden of showing that the AIN criteria had been misapplied, whereas the ISU’s current rules expressly presume eligibility unless a disqualifying criterion is established.
The timing is particularly striking because Valieva is simultaneously testing the limits of sports governance on another level. Her applications, together with those of several other athletes, against Switzerland, arising out of the CAS proceedings and their review by the Swiss Federal Tribunal, have recently been communicated by the European Court of Human Rights / Cour européenne des droits de l’homme. Strasbourg is therefore being asked to examine, from a human-rights perspective, some of the same broader questions about the reach of autonomous sports adjudication and the safeguards available to athletes.
The two disputes are legally distinct. Yet conceptually they raise a related question: how far may autonomous sports bodies go in regulating an athlete’s status and conduct, and what external safeguards constrain that power?
A neutrality test can begin to resemble a political loyalty test when eligibility depends on how an athlete’s public conduct is interpreted. And if proximity to political power is relevant to the autonomy and integrity of sport, the principle arguably raises questions not only for athletes, but also for sports governance itself.
Can sport claim autonomy from politics while exercising unlimited autonomy over the politics of athletes?