Trading flags for medals: Inside the Olympic naturalisation market

It is now well known that countries sometimes behave like sports clubs, recruiting new citizens to boost their teams’ performances. In most cases, the athletes involved are people with strong ties to the country, who have been playing or training there for many years, and who could probably acquire citizenship in the normal way. This was the case of Majida Maayouf, a Moroccan athlete who has been living in Spain for 13 years. Logically, in June 2023 she acquired Spanish citizenship through naturalisation.

It is increasingly common, however, for the athlete to have no previous connection with the country. One example is Megan Gustafson, a professional basketball player from Wisconsin. She was naturalised Spanish at the same time as Maayouf, despite having never been to Spain. The Spanish Basketball Federation simply requested her naturalisation, reports Marca. Something similar happened with Lorenzo Brown, who was also naturalised by Spain ahead of the 2022 European Basketball Championship, despite never having played there before. Brown also played for Spain at the recent summer Olympics.

Most European countries have legislation that allows citizenship to be granted in recognition of achievements in sport, culture or science, or simply because it is in the country’s interest. The Globalcit project has a database of such laws and regulations, which Civio and its partners in the European Data Journalists Network used for their recent report on the issue.

Such naturalisations depend on the green light of the government in power. They are speedy in comparison to the usual residence requirements for obtaining citizenship, which in some countries (Spain, Austria and Italy, among others) can mean a wait of up to a decade. In practice, the formal residence requirements are only a minimum. Given the habitual slowness of officialdom across Europe, ordinary naturalisations rarely happen within the official time limits: the additional wait may be five years in Spain and six in Greece.

At least 27 athletes competed in the Paris Olympics for countries that had naturalised them for the purpose. One case was that of Russian volleyball player Ekaterina Antropova, who was naturalised by Italy in August 2023. Antropova arrived in Italy in 2018 as a minor with a residence permit and had been playing within the Italian Volleyball Federation. Another recent Italian Olympian is Ukrainian-born marathon runner Sofia Yaremchuk, who gained her papers in 2020 on grounds of sporting merit.

Cuban-born triple jumper Andy Diaz also represented Italy in Paris, winning a bronze medal. According to the Italian government’s statement, he was naturalised in early 2023 “on the proposal of the President of the Italian Olympic Committee, in view of his ‘excellent results in his sport’.” A similar story is that of Cuban athlete Jordan Díaz, who used a sporting event in Castellón as an opportunity to defect from the Cuban team and settle in Spain. His Spanish passport arrived in just eight months.

Fully 13 of Spain’s athletes at the 2024 Olympics had received citizenship by decree. Boxer Enmanuel Reyes Pla left Cuba in 2019 to try to join his family in La Coruña, Spain. He travelled to Russia and then to Austria, where he applied for asylum and was placed in a detention centre, reports Relevo. After a further month in German detention, he finally reached Spain and, in January 2020, was naturalised by decree. Ordinary asylum seekers would have to wait at least five years.

In Portugal, a debate has been sparked by athlete Nelson Évora’s remarks on the naturalisation of his teammate Pedro Pichardo. At issue is precisely this difference between athletes who acquire citizenship through traditional channels and those who do so by decree. Évora, from Ivory Coast, complained to Radio Observador that he had had to wait years to become Portuguese, whereas Pichardo, from Cuba, obtained his citizenship in just seven months on the basis of sporting merits. Pichardo was granted his passport in 2017, having defected from the Cuban delegation during an event in Stuttgart.

Other European countries have also taken shortcuts to get their hands on athletes. In 2023 Greece naturalised Thomas Walkup, an American-born basketball player who subsequently competed for Greece at the Paris Olympics. In 2017, Slovenia did the same for handball player Elizabeth Omoregie, who was born in Greece to Bulgarian and Nigerian parents.

In addition to Ekaterina Antropova, already mentioned, at least four other athletes naturalised by EU countries ahead of the Olympics were from Russia or Belarus, which were banned from the games by the IOC following the Ukraine invasion of 2022. Russia’s wrestler Dauren Kurugliev was naturalised by Greece and its gymnast Ekaterina Olegovna became Slovenian. Belarusian sprinter Kryssina Cimanouska applied for asylum at the Polish embassy in Tokyo during the 2021 Olympics, receiving her citizenship papers two years later. And the formerly Russian wrestler Ismail Musukaev competed in Hungarian colours in both Tokyo and Paris, finishing fifth on both occasions.

The Hungarian Olympic delegation in Paris included a number of such athletes, including two who acquired Hungarian citizenship just in time for the games. One of them is Filip Akilov, a Ukrainian-born boxer who fled to Hungary after the outbreak of the war and received his papers in summer 2023. The other is French water polo player Geraldine Mahieu (known as Zsuzsi in the pool). Having captained the French national team, she began competing in Hungary in 2017, took her citizenship oath after the 2021 Tokyo Olympics, and began playing for Hungary in 2022.

Original source: https://hvg.hu/eurologus/20240819_Az-olimpiai-honositasi-piac