In an initial list of sports announced on Saturday, the IOC approved 14 athletes from Russia and 11 from neutral Belarus to compete in the Paris Olympics.
An International Olympic Committee review panel examined five sports – excluding tennis, swimming and judo – to see whether athletes had expressed support for Russia's invasion of Ukraine or had ties to sports clubs with ties to the military or state security services.
Cycling, gymnastics, taekwondo, weightlifting and wrestling will be assessed first, with athlete lists for the other Olympic sports expected to be announced in the coming days.
Athletes approved on Saturday include Ivan Litvinovich of Belarus, the defending Olympic trampoline champion, and Russian cyclist Alexander Vlasov, who has three top 10 finishes in Grand Tours.
It is not yet clear how many Russian athletes will compete at the Olympics, which run from July 26 to August 11. The IOC has already barred Russian athletes from the opening ceremony's athletes' parade, scheduled to take place on a boat along the Seine.
In taekwondo, no athletes were recognised by the IOC. Three years ago in Tokyo, the Russian team, with its two athletes Vladislav Larin and Maxim Khramtsov, won two of the eight gold medals.
“In some sports, the number of eligible athletes may be lower than the number of places available,” the IOC said in a statement.
Russia and Belarus are banned from team sports at the Paris Olympics because of the war in Ukraine.
Individual athletes holding Russian and Belarusian passports are allowed to compete as neutrals in qualifying tournaments in most other sports and then apply to participate in the Olympics.
Ukrainian athletes, including Olympic medalists and President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, have called on the IOC and sports leaders to impose a blanket ban on all Russian athletes. Athletics complied, and soccer bodies FIFA and UEFA banned the Russian team from international competition within days of the invasion, which began in February 2022.
The two-stage review process to gain neutral status involves the sport's governing body, then an IOC panel, before an appeal can be made to the Court of Arbitration for Sport.
Further conditions imposed on the athletes included competing as Individual Neutral Athletes, known by their French acronym AIN, not flying the Russian flag and wearing uniforms other than the red, white and blue of Russia's national colours.
The Russian national anthem has also been banned, replaced with music commissioned by the IOC, and medals won by Russia should not be included in any tables.
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