Chris Selley: We can boycott Russian hockey without the IIHF’s help - National Post
Copy URL Facebook Linked In X (Twitter) Loading account options Sign In Manage Account Close account menu Sign Out Russian players react after losing to Canada during the 2021 IIHF World Junior Championship semifinals in Edmonton on Jan. 4, 2021. Russia has been largely banned from international hockey since 2022, due its invasion of Ukraine. (Codie McLachlan/Getty Images) By Chris Selley November 3, 2026 at 6:28 p.m. The International Ice Hockey Federation (IIHF) is in hot water because the Court of Arbitration for Sport, which is supposedly the “ultimate” adjudicator of international sporting competition, has overruled the federation’s ban on Russian teams playing in its sponsored tournaments and ordered their reinstatement for the 2026–27 season.
“Russia must be allowed to return to ice hockey’s international tournaments,” the Associated Press reported, under the headline “Russia is back in the ice hockey world championships.”
That may be overstating the case. The reality is less consequential. There are limits to the enforcement of the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS). It has no prison. And if it makes the wrong decision, or even the right one — this ruling is arguably a bit of both — there are no consequences for the CAS, either.
The CAS has ordered the IIHF to reinstate Russian teams in five upcoming competitions, including the World Junior Championship in Alberta, beginning Dec. 26.
But there are certain things no one in the hockey or sports world can just order to occur. You can’t, for example, force countries to hand out visas to Russian players. (Prime Minister Mark Carney said Tuesday that Russian players won’t be let in for the Canadian games.) You can’t order countries to show up to tournaments, or to bid to host them in the future, under circumstances they consider deplorable. The IIHF could try, I guess, but only by “fighting on Russia’s side.”
As it stands, the IIHF is facing various boycotts on taking the ice against Russian players, hosting Russian teams, or both, from Finland, Sweden, the Czech Republic, Norway, Latvia and Denmark, and I might have missed some. Without them, the IIHF doesn’t have much of a tournament. Where’s the hockeycrats’ leverage?
This is a dead-easy decision for hockey countries in general. It’s morally simple: There is no other hockey country besides Russia whose leader can fairly be called “butcher of Europe.” And the problem with the IIHF ruling from its own standpoint — and there’s a lesson here for politicians everywhere — is that its disciplinary team tried to get cute in its justification for banning Russian teams in the first place. And now it has blown up in its face.
The IIHF cited “safety” concerns, “security” concerns, “operational” concerns, that sort of nonsense. (Canadians are well used to hearing it in any number of contexts.) They really meant: “a madman has invaded a sovereign country, pitched two countries’ young men into a meat grinder, and is known for using sport for propaganda purposes — either to exalt in glory or to foment grievances.”
Letting Russia play will never be an apolitical act, even at the junior level. Vladimir Putin would dance a jig to have anything morale-boosting to offer his people, surely. The timidity looks ridiculous on the IIHF.
Politicians do this sort of thing fairly regularly, as I say. I recall former Ontario premier Dalton McGuinty signing a pledge never to raise taxes, then raising taxes, but pretending they weren’t taxes.
I recall the haunted look on then prime minister Justin Trudeau’s face when his entire progressive feminist bro facade melted down in a puddle of black shoe polish and tears.
I recall the disastrous 2011 attempt at a coalition government in Ottawa, which would have involved Stéphane Dion (who had already announced his resignation as Liberal leader) becoming prime minister. It was transparently an attempt to protect their per-vote subsidies, but the opposition leaders tried to sell us on Stephen Harper as intolerable, unthinkable, Canada’s ruination in the making. (How young we were.)
I recall Stephen Harper ditching his Senate abstentionism to appoint the most shameless Tory partisans he could find. One was Mike Duffy. The Ottawa steakhouse scene still hasn’t recovered from the fallout from the expenses scandal.
Whatever the pledge, whoever the politician, it’s fun to watch these strategies blow up in their creators’ smug faces. No matter what field you’re in, if you want to last, no strategy beats saying what you mean and meaning what you say.
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