In case you haven't noticed, no athletes from Russia are competing in the 2026 Winter Olympics, now being held jointly in Milano and Cortina d'Ampezzo, Italy, due to Russia's having "invaded" Ukraine (Belarus has also been blackballed because of its alliance with Russia).
However, Ukraine is being allowed to contest the Games — which is hardly fair, considering that not only did the Ukrainians enthusiastically collaborate with the Nazis during World War II, most notably in the infamous massacre at Babi Yar, where nearly 34,000 Jews were gunned down at the edge of a ravine during the last two days of September 1941 (the remainder of the conflict saw an additional 100,000 victims, mostly Jews but also Roma — The People Formerly Known As Gypsies — and political prisoners executed at the site; and to add insult to injury, in 1954 the then-Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic was allowed to annex Crimea, the Donets Basin, Luhansk, and Kharkiv as part of the Soviet "de-Stalinization" program, even though Joseph Stalin was Georgian, not Russian).
This has led to the current war between Russia and Ukraine, in which Russia is seeking to take back the stolen land (something similar happened in the 1990s, when Serbia sought closure for the nearly two million Serbs who were butchered by the Nazis and their Croatian, Bosnian Muslim, and Kosovar Albanian collaborators during that same conflict).
If nothing else, the ban of Russia from this winter's Olympics prevents Americans from rooting against the Russians therein, as they did throughout the Cold War, the climax of which came in the 1980 Winter Games at Lake Placid in upstate New York, which saw the U.S. hockey team pull off what was perhaps the biggest upset in Olympic history (Summer or Winter) when they shocked the Soviet Union en route to winning gold.
But that same year's Summer Olympics were marred by a boycott — when Team USA and many other teams from the West refused to participate in that year's Summer Games, which were held in Moscow, to protest the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (the top four placings in the medal standings, and six of the top seven, were taken by Communist Bloc nations), so that when the 1984 Summer Games were contested in Los Angeles, the Russians responded in kind, allowing Team USA to run away with the medal title; but two Communist countries — Romania and China — took second and fourth respectively, with West Germany third.
Another highlight of the Cold War rivalry occurred in the 1972 Summer Games in Munich, when Team USA lost 51-50 to the Soviets after a highly controversial ending to the gold medal game — in which the latter were given not one, or even two, but three chances to win it in the end after Doug Collins had scored with three seconds remaining to give the USA a 50-49 lead (but that year the murder of 11 Israeli athletes by Arab terrorists overshadowed everything else).
After the Russians indeed pulled off the shocking upset (the Americans had been 63-0 lifetime in Olympic men's basketball up to that point), Team USA "pulled a Carson Beck" by refusing to accept their silver medals (Beck of course refused to shake hands with Indiana's Fernando Mendoza after Beck's Hurricanes lost to Mendoza's Hoosiers 27-21 to decide college football's no-longer-mythical national championship in January).
Whether the Russia/Ukrainian War will end in time for the Russians to be allowed to participate in the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles (which also hosted the 1932 and 1984 Summer Games) is a matter upon which one can only speculate.
But if President Trump can pull off the art of the deal once more, maybe the Russians won't be playing with themselves two years from now, as that iconic poster that adorned the walls of many a dorm room said they did in 1980.
And perhaps mixed martial arts will be added to the roster of events by then — which would be totally awesome, especially if Russia is reinstated, as the Chechen and Dagestani fighters figure to dominate.
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