[Itse]

This story, which has been developing for months now, has had quite a few twists and turns which probably need a bit of explaining. (I already made an earlier thread about this, but I just feel like it's easier to make a new one.)

I'll add some links in a second post for those interested.

The extremely short version is that IIHF today officially announced they will not hold the 2021 World Championships in Minsk (Belarus).

The games were supposed to be a joint event held in Riga (Latvia) and Minsk. However after the 2020 presidential election in Belarus, were the current president/dictator Lukashenka (or Lukashenko, both are correct, don't ask me to explain that) essentially stole the election, the people of Belarus started a massive protest campaign against him which lasted for months, and is still going on to some extent, although after Lukashenka started responding with continuously increasing violence, mass arrests and torture of prisoners, the protests have mostly needed to take other forms than regular mass marches. The fight however is still very much going on.

Since this is related to a sports event, it's worth noting that atypically for Eastern Europe (and most countries really), and even more atypically for a dictatorship where sports has been under very close government supervision, numerous athletes and coaches have also taken part in the protest campaign in one way or the other, and some even quite locally prominent ones have also been arrested as a result. Other types of pressure has also been put on athletes, such as threatening their families and of course cutting them from government programs or getting them fired from their jobs.

For quite a while it seemed like a done deal that the games would be moved, but in a somewhat surprise move the current president of IIHF René Fasel (who really should at every turn be called a corrupt spineless weasel) recently visited Belarus to offer his strong support to Lukashenka and declared that the games will not be moved.

This obviously raised a lot of objections, two of which are most notable. One objector was the current IIHF vice president Kalervo Kummola (FIN), and another was Skoda, who many might recognize as probably the most prominent sponsor of the WC games. (To the point that they are sometimes jokingly called "Skoda Games").

Two days ago Skoda made an announcement that it will not be sponsoring ice hockey world championship games in Belarus. This of course decided it, and the announcement to not hold the games in Minsk was made today.

It's worth mentioning that the IIHF announcement is in itself an exercise in weaseling, as they cite "player and visitor safety" as the reason to not hold the games in Minsk, completely ignoring the actual reason people have been protesting against holding the games in Minsk, which is human rights issues.

Considering that this became quite clearly a power struggle between Kummola and Fasel, which Kummola seems to have won quite decisively, it's also likely that this also means Fasels 27 year long IIHF presidency is about to come to an end.

No other host city is announced at this point. It's currently unclear if the games will be moved completely, and it's also reported that IIHF is planning to make the games a bubble in the style of the NHL playoffs.

While the IIHF WC tournament isn't the biggest sports event in the world, the decision to move the games for essentially human rights reasons might have massive ripple effects in the sports world. As most sports fans would know, holding major international sports events in countries with massive human rights issues is a topic that goes back at least all the way back the Berlin Olympics. There's pretty substantial pressure for example to take the 2022 soccer World Cup away from Qatar because of human rights issues.

The previous stance of the sports community on this has traditionally been that "sports transcend politics". The decision to move the games is pretty close to unprecedented, but now that someone has already done it, it will make it that much harder to ignore this stuff in other cases.