Competing without a nation? Russian Individual Neutral Athletes and the reconstruction of national belonging in international sport

Neutrality has become one of international sport's principal techniques for reconciling the exclusion of Russian national teams with athletes’ claims to individual access. Focusing on Russian athletes required to compete as Authorised Neutral Athletes, Olympic Athletes from Russia and Individual Neutral Athletes after the state-sponsored doping scandal and Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, this article asks how enforced neutrality reshapes national belonging in international sport. Drawing on critical discourse analysis of International Olympic Committee (IOC), World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) and federation documents from 2015 to 2024, and on sociological theories of nationalism, identity, stigma and sport governance, we argue that neutrality does not remove nationality. Rather, it produces a marked form of conditional sporting citizenship in which Russian athletes are individuated, screened and symbolically de-nationalised while remaining legible through the very national category that the policy claims to suspend. The Russian case shows that neutral status reconstructs belonging through three linked moves: eligibility without representation, loyalty under suspicion and a shift from flag-based national pride to moralised forms of professional, Olympic and residual national identity.