Can Russian Skiers Actually Compete in the Olympics? It’s Largely up to F.I.S.

By Gavin Kentch

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Update, October 21: FIS voted earlier today to bar Russian and Belarusian athletes from the start of the 2025/2026 World Cup season, thereby closing off the final possible avenue for Olympic participation by athletes from these nations. I have not edited the rest of this article in any way, not even the sections where I say that FIS will probably let Russia race this year.

Last month’s announcement that qualifying Russian and Belarusian athletes may compete in the 2026 Winter Olympics under a neutral flag has prompted a number of questions about whether this will actually happen, and, if so, how it will work.

Here’s the TLDR answer: The athletes’ fate rests largely with the International Ski and Snowboard Federation, or FIS, which will vote on athletes’ participation in the upcoming World Cup season at a meeting later this month.

If the decision coming out of the October 21 session of the FIS Council is to bar Russian and Belarusian athletes from the 2025/2026 World Cup season, then Russian and Belarusian athletes will not be at the Olympics because the only possible qualifying pathway to the Games will have been closed to them. On the other hand, if FIS allows Russian and Belarusian athletes to resume World Cup competition this year, then — while their Olympic participation is not a fait accompli — you should assume that at least a few athletes from Russia, possibly also from Belarus, will be on the start line in Val di Fiemme in February.

Read on for more.

The gatekeeping role of the international federation

“Individual Neutral Athletes (AIN) who have qualified through the existing qualification systems of the International Federations (IFs) on the field of play will be able to compete at the Milano Cortina 2026 Olympic Winter Games under the exact same conditions as for the Olympic Games Paris 2024,” wrote the International Olympic Committee, or IOC, in its September announcement. (The reference to 2024 standards means neutral uniforms, no team events, no “Z” symbols on display, etc.)

“Only Individual Neutral Athletes who have fulfilled the specific eligibility and sporting qualification criteria set by their [international federation] can be considered by the IOC for entry” into the Games, echoes the IOC’s more detailed explainer. “No new or additional qualification opportunities will be made available to any Individual Neutral Athlete. Such athletes must qualify through existing qualifying events sanctioned by their respective International Federations.”

Reading these excerpts together, two things are clear: Russian or Belarusian athletes are only getting in via established qualification pathways (in this case participation in World Cup and/or World Championships races, as explained below). And the international federation gets to make the threshold determination on whether or not athletes have access to these pathways.

Examples of international federations include the International Biathlon Union, International Ice Hockey Federation, World Athletics, and so on. The relevant international federation here is of course the International Ski and Snowboard Federation, or FIS (the acronym comes from the French Fédération Internationale de Ski et de Snowboard; don’t think too hard about the final three words here). If you are reading this website you are likely aware that FIS has banned Russian athletes from World Cup competition for the past three-plus seasons, beginning on March 1, 2022, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine a week prior.

FIS was set to revisit this decision at their late-September meetings. But they pushed this back for the time being, ultimately announcing that a decision will come out of the FIS Council meeting to be held two weeks from now.

So what will FIS do on October 21, anyway?

Multiple sport federations have already issued a decision on the question of Russian participation in regular-season competition for 2025/2026. The sliding sports said no. Biathlon said no. Figure skating said yes, to at least a few athletes, as did speed skating and SkiMo. “But the association that represents almost exactly half of the 116 gold medals to be awarded in northern Italy” has not yet said either yes or no, an NRK columnist wrote of FIS last month in an auto-translated article.

So which way is FIS leaning? The inclination at the top is clear: “Russian athletes should be allowed to compete under a neutral flag,” FIS President Johan Eliasch stated in January. Eliasch doubled down on these comments in a March interview, saying, “The athletes can’t choose where they were born” and arguing for Russian Olympic participation as neutral athletes.

So Eliasch wants the Russians in. Norway is the most prominent voice in a Scandinavian bloc that all wants them out. (Norway also wants Eliasch out at FIS, fwiw, but was unable to make that happen. For his part, Eliasch wanted to be president of the IOC, but lost out to current leader Kirsty Coventry in an election earlier this year.) Stay tuned.

What happens if FIS says no?

That’s it. As discussed in the lengthy quotes two sections above that you probably skimmed because they were boring and had a lot of acronyms, athlete qualification for the Olympics has to occur through established pathways. For would-be cross-country skiers at the 2026 Winter Olympics, these pathways are (1) performance at 2025 World Championships or World U23 Championships, (2) performance on the World Cup during the 2024/2025 season, and (3) performance on the World Cup during the first part of the 2025/2026 season.

Options (1) and (2) have already come and gone without Russian or Belarusian participation. If FIS votes later this month to extend the current ban into the 2025/2026 World Cup season, then that will foreclose option (3). Because athletes have to qualify via “existing qualification systems . . . on the field of play,” and no “new or additional qualification opportunities” are allowed, there would be no way for Russian or Belarusian athletes to qualify for the Olympics apart from racing on the World Cup in Period 1 of the 2025/2026 season. (Quotes in preceding sentence are from this IOC document.)

What happens if FIS says yes?

If FIS allows Russian or Belarusian participation without limitation, then the start of the 2025/2026 World Cup season would probably evoke the whole of the 2021/2022 World Cup season. The top 10 in men’s distance events would probably be split roughly evenly between Russia and Norway (plus also Gus Schumacher and Zanden McMullen hells yeah), Alexander Bolshunov (who is still only 28) would probably win some races, and Veronika Stepanova (who is still only 24) would probably win some races, then make strident pro-Russia comments afterwards.

FIS could potentially impose an eligibility test for participation in World Cup races, analogous to that the IOC has put forth for Russian athletes to qualify as neutral athletes (e.g., they may not have publicly supported the war in Ukraine). While I cannot tell you what FIS will do here, I would personally be very surprised — and this is an informed surmise based on my research, not just random speculation — if FIS opts to make itself the arbiter of this; I think that FIS does not want to be put in the position of making these decisions.

I also think, not to be too Realpolitik about it, that FIS values the Russian television market, and so has a further incentive to let in all Russian athletes now and let the IOC worry about neutrality and Olympic qualification later. Finally, as noted, the president of FIS has said things like “Athletes should never be used for political purposes”; this is not the statement of a man who wants his federation to spend its time poring through athletes’ Instagram history to see if they have liked pro-revanchist posts. If FIS lets in Russian athletes this year, I think it’s pretty clear that they let in all Russian athletes.

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So assume Russia makes it to the World Cup next month. What does the path from the World Cup to the Olympics look like, anyway?

Qualification for the cross-country skiing events at the 2026 Winter Olympics is based on this document from the IOC. There are a total of 296 quota spots available, 148 per gender. No country gets to send more than eight men and eight women total, and no country gets to start more than four athletes per gender per event.

There are a handful more criteria that apply to all athletes, such as having low enough FIS points, being at least 15 years old, and complying with the World Anti-Doping Code. For purposes of this article, assume that any Russian or Belarusian athlete racing on the World Cup in Period 1 of the 2025/2026 season meets all of those criteria. No comment on the validity of internal Russian drug testing prior to this season.

Back to the three qualification pathways discussed above. Per the IOC document, they are:

1. Basic quota

Every country that had an athlete do well enough at 2025 World Championships or U23s (300 FIS points or fewer for a male athlete, 330 points or fewer for a female athlete) (this is a very low bar to clear) gets a basic quota of up to one spot per gender. Russia and Belarus had no athletes racing at either world champs or U23 champs last year, and so qualify zero athletes via this criterion.

2. NOC quota (National Olympic Committee quota)

The IOC next looks to a country’s standing in the Nations’ Cup rankings. These standings are based on each country’s athletes’ cumulative performance during the 2024/2025 World Cup season; Russia and Belarus had zero World Cup starts during the 2024/2025 season; they are not on this list. They qualify zero athletes via this criterion.

(Some interesting math ensues here involving iterative qualification pathways and multiple rounds of assigning quota spots for countries ranked within descending tranches of this list. Again, however, Russia and Belarus are not on this list, so that is all you need to know for now. I will delve into these specifics later for another explainer on how many spots the U.S. gets for these Olympics; if you’re curious now the short answer is going to be eight for the women and either seven or eight for the men.)

3. The final ten quota spots per gender

The two steps described above will account for nearly all of the quota spots available for the Olympics, up to 138 per gender. But 138 is less than 148; that leaves ten spots per gender still available.

Back to the IOC for this final stage:

“The remaining 10 quota places by gender will be assigned to all NOCs which were not able to achieve a quota until [should probably be “before”] the end of the season 2024/2025 if they have at least one (1) male athlete respectively [should probably be “or” here] one (1) female athlete scoring less than 300.00 FIS points (including penalty) at one (1) individual FIS World Cup competition in the first World Cup period 2025/2026.”

If more than ten nations are seeking quota spots under this catchall provision, then “the quota (max 1 per NOC) will be allocated in the order of the nations represented by their best athlete FIS points achieved” during Period 1 of the 2025/2026 World Cup season.

Okay, so we have finally reached Russia, which boasts multiple hundreds of athletes who could log a sub–300-point World Cup race in their sleep. Should we assume a full 16-athlete Russian team, and a fortnight’s worth of must-watch Bolshunov vs. Klæbo showdowns?

Probably not. Part one of this final pathway is the number of quota spots available to Russia and Belarus; part two is finding athletes from those countries who meet the neutrality criterion set forth by the IOC (keep in mind that these are theoretically neutral athletes after all). And there are issues here with both team size and Bolshunov specifically.

Fans of Russian skiing may be, no offense, rooting against the performance of athletes from less traditional skiing nations as the World Cup season kicks off. Let’s say that the New Zealands and Perus and Albanias of the world all come out on fire to start the season, and by the end of Period 1 Russia is just one of eleven countries per gender seeking quota spots under the catchall provision. We are then unambiguously into the territory of “max 1 [quota spot] per NOC.” Russia duly gets said maximum of one (1) quota spot per gender. Choose wisely.

I have to discuss that possibility for the sake of #lawyering, but I personally find that scenario unrealistic. I find it far more likely that Russia is just one of a very small handful of NOCs that did not achieve a qualifying result during the 2024/2025 season, but that then do have athletes who dip under 300 points in Period 1 of this season. Let’s say that Russia sagely starts at least eight discrete athletes per gender in Period 1, while plucky Peru and New Zealand pop one good result each.

We are then governed by the language providing that the final ten quota spots per gender “will be assigned to all NOCs” that didn’t qualify last season but that did qualify this season (emphasis added). What if, in this example, Peru, New Zealand, and Russia are the only countries matching this scenario?

My original conclusion, candidly, was that Peru and New Zealand get one quota spot each, while Russia gets the final eight. My reasoning here relied heavily on the use of “all,” perhaps overmuch so.

But then I put this question to the best lawyer I know, Susan Orlansky.

(Biggest disclosure you can possibly think of here: Susan is my mother. But many, many attorneys in Anchorage who are not her son also think that she is the best lawyer they know, plus some attorneys in Seattle, so you should probably listen to her. Additionally or in the alternative, Chris Grover is, on information and belief, not an attorney, but he is literally the head coach of the U.S. Ski Team, and his take in a recent Andy Newell podcast was that Russia’s Olympic quota, if any, “would be one man and one woman.” I feel like Grover’s perspective is entitled to some deference.)

Here is Susan’s take:

“It’s pretty clear to me from the second to last bullet point in the D.3 section that, if exactly 10 nations qualify at least one athlete (in a gender category) in Period 1, each country will get exactly one quota spot in that gender — the spots are ‘assigned to ALL NOCs which were not able to achieve a quota’ last season —  regardless of how many athletes of that gender a country qualified, or whether one country has multiple athletes with better scores than all the other countries.

“It’s clear from the final bullet point that if more than 10 countries have a qualifying athlete for a gender, then the 10 quota spots are distributed one per country, starting with the countries with the best scoring athlete, but, again, if one country has two or 10 athletes with better scores than the qualifying athletes from other countries, that country only gets one quota spot: ‘the quota (max 1 per NOC) will be allocated . . . .’

“You are correct that the rules are not explicit about what happens if, for example, there are fewer than 10 countries who did not qualify last year but that qualify in Period 1, and among those qualifying countries, one or more countries has more than one qualifying athlete.

“I think the correct reading is still that no country gets more than one quota spot per gender. That is consistent with the logic in the two clear scenarios that the rules do describe — i.e., no NOC gets more than one — and is also, I think, the best way to make sense of the provision on what happens if any of the quotas are unused: they get reallocated among countries that did qualify last season.

“I am persuaded by the absence of any language explaining what would happen in this type of scenario: four countries that didn’t qualify last year qualify in Period 1, with a total of 12 qualifying athletes. If any country were entitled to more than one quota spot, there would need to be some system for divvying these up — for example, by relative ranking per athlete after each country gets one. The significant point for me is that the rule drafters didn’t think they had to deal with this scenario. I think that, if there are fewer than 10 qualifying countries, each gets one and the remaining spots are ‘unallocated.’”

Whew. Do you have any footnotes showing yet more research that you may have done into the legislative history of this language?

I do! Read on:

For anyone curious, this final-ten provision was not included in the comparable criteria document for the 2022 Winter Olympics (archived version here). That document was effectively identical to this 2026 edition vis-à-vis quotas one and two, but simply did not contain quota three. There were the same 148 spots per gender available for the races in Zhangjiakou, but a country had to have skied well in the preceding season in order to claim them, and the analysis ended there. This comparison is relevant to this article because it means we can’t look back to 2022 to see how the final ten quota spots were allocated then. Lawyers like precedent.

Finally, I can note that the final-ten catchall provision that I (and my mother) have been unpacking here was included in the initial version of the 2026 qualification document, which was first published in October 2023. I was admittedly suspicious about the possibility of this being a late addition, potentially with an eye to allowing Russia to compete even after being banned through the 2024/2025 season, but this does not seem to be the case.

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So Bolshunov vs. Klæbo is on then?

Again: probably not. Think back to the original article on neutral athlete qualification, which stated that an IOC committee will review athletes submitted by the Russian Ski Association and make the final determination on who qualifies. This committee will look to things like an athlete’s “public statements, including those made on social media; participation in pro-war demonstrations or events; and the displaying of any symbol supporting the war in Ukraine, for example, the ‘Z’ symbol.”

While the decisions of this committee are above my pay grade, I would have to assume that athletes like Alexander Bolshunov (appeared on-stage at a March 2022 pro-war rally wearing a “Z” on his coat) and Veronika Stepanova (said in April 2022, of the war in Ukraine, “We are on the right track and we will definitely win, just as we won the Olympics”) do not make the cut.

There is an interesting dynamic surrounding less cut-and-dried cases; one study suggested that over two-thirds of facially neutral Russian athletes competing in Paris 2024 had in fact violated the neutrality standards promulgated by the International Olympic Committee. Again, however, this determination is ultimately up to the “absolute discretion” of the IOC.

Wow, that was a lot of lawyering. I just want to know what happens next?

Fair, though it was important to me to show my work here. Plus massive shoutout to my mother for the assist on contract interpretation.

As discussed: FIS meets later this month, and is currently slated to make a decision on October 21. World Cup racing starts a little over a month later, with the 10km classic in Ruka on November 28 that Iivo Niskanen will probably win (unless Bolshunov does…). Cross-country skiing at the 2026 Winter Olympics kicks off in Lago di Tesero with the women’s skiathlon on February 7. Stay tuned.

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