At Konya, the contradiction was hard to miss.
The crowd was sparse, but within it there were still recognisable pockets of support for the AIN riders. That was welcome in one sense. Sport should not become a place where athletes are met only with silence or hostility. But it also sharpened the tension at the heart of the issue. When a cluster of riders arrives with familiar equipment, familiar staff, familiar coaching structures and a recognisable competitive culture around them, the phrase Individual Neutral Athlete can begin to feel more administrative than real.
That is the real problem facing track cycling's AIN model. On paper, the rules are clear enough. Following the IOC's post-Ukraine recommendations, the UCI created a route by which Russian and Belarusian athletes could apply for neutral status without flag, anthem or formal national-team participation, while also extending approval processes to support personnel. But elite sport does not live by legal framework alone. It also lives by whether competitors, officials and the public believe the framework describes what is actually happening.
And in track cycling, that remains unsettled.
This is not an argument for hostility towards individual athletes, nor for treating them as political proxies because of the passport they hold. But nor is it convincing to pretend people in track centre, in the pits, in the stands and watching from home cannot see the tension in front of them.
Because they can.
The first thing the sport has never properly explained is that there are really two histories sitting on top of one another here. The current AIN label in cycling belongs to the post-Ukraine era. It is the IOC and UCI’s answer to the question of whether Russian and Belarusian athletes can compete after the invasion, and under what restrictions. But the unease around Russian participation in international sport did not begin in 2023, and it did not begin with Ukraine. It was already there, burned into the consciousness of world sport by the Russian anti-doping scandal and the long collapse of trust around RUSADA.
WADA still lists RUSADA among non-compliant signatories, and in October 2023 WADA said RUSADA had formally disputed a further allegation of non-compliance, proposed consequences and reinstatement conditions, sending the matter to CAS.
That matters because confidence does not reset just because the terminology changes.
Cycling can say, correctly, that today’s AIN framework is a wartime eligibility mechanism rather than a replay of every older sanction model. But it cannot expect riders, journalists and supporters to forget the backdrop into which that mechanism has arrived. Russian participation in elite sport was already a trust issue before the first tank crossed the Ukrainian border. The war changed the moral and political stakes. It did not erase what came before.
And once that is understood, the next question becomes the one cycling still has not answered clearly enough.
How does anti-doping oversight work in practice when an AIN rider leaves a championship, goes home to Russia, and spends weeks or months there before the next major event?
This is where the conversation often goes wrong in two opposite ways. One side speaks as though those athletes are simply beyond reach the moment they return home. The other side hides behind the existence of a formal testing structure as though that alone settles every concern.
Neither is serious enough.
The formal system plainly exists. The ITA states that any athlete under an anti-doping organisation’s jurisdiction can be tested at any time, both in and out of competition. It also states that testing can be carried out by a national anti-doping organisation, an international federation, a major event organiser or WADA, and that those bodies can delegate the practical sample collection while retaining responsibility under the Code. Out-of-competition testing can take place at athlete accommodation, training venues and other declared locations.
But that is only the beginning of the issue, not the end of it.
Because once an AIN athlete is back in Russia, the practical question is unavoidable: who is actually doing the work on the ground? RUSADA’s own English-language guidance says athletes in a RUSADA testing pool or an international federation testing pool must provide whereabouts information. RUSADA also says it is entitled to arrange testing for athletes under its jurisdiction, and describes testing as something that can happen at any place and any time, including out of competition. In other words, this is not a neat picture in which Russia disappears from the anti-doping chain the moment an athlete is competing abroad as a neutral.
That does not mean samples are analysed in Russia. RUSADA states that samples are analysed only in WADA-accredited or WADA-approved laboratories. The unresolved question is broader than lab analysis: it is that collection, whereabouts and domestic testing operations can still involve a body WADA continues to class as non-compliant.
And that is exactly where the credibility problem begins.
Why The Anti-Doping Question Has Not Gone Away
The problem is not that no testing framework exists. It does. Athletes in testing pools can be tested in and out of competition, and whereabouts systems are designed to make that possible. The problem is that once neutral athletes return to Russia between events, part of the practical anti-doping landscape still involves RUSADA - an agency WADA continues to class as non-compliant. That does not prove wrongdoing by any individual athlete. It does explain why the issue remains one of credibility as much as procedure.
Because WADA also continues to treat RUSADA as non-compliant. So cycling is left in an awkward position. It can point to whereabouts rules, testing pools and anti-doping procedures. What it cannot explain away so easily is why those mechanisms should automatically produce confidence when part of the real-world anti-doping landscape still involves an agency that WADA itself does not currently regard as compliant.
That does not prove wrongdoing by any individual athlete. It does not mean every test is worthless. And it does not mean the entire anti-doping system stops at the Russian border. But it does create a fair and obvious question. If the sport wants everyone to accept AIN participation as credible, why has it not been more transparent about how out-of-competition oversight works in practice for riders who spend much of their time back in Russia? The issue is not whether a process exists. The issue is whether the process inspires belief.
And that gap shows itself most clearly in the word individual.
Because what has unsettled many people in the sport is not simply that Russian and Belarusian athletes are back in some form. It is that their presence can appear, to many eyes, less like the return of isolated individuals and more like the continuation of a familiar structure under a different label. Familiar race patterns. Familiar technical presentation. Familiar tactical habits. Familiar people in track centre. Familiar support in the stands. The UCI’s own publication of separate support-personnel status only reinforces why the category can look less atomised in practice than the wording suggests.
To say that is not to allege a rule breach. It is simply to describe the source of the unease.
If the model is truly individual neutrality, why does it so often feel so collective?
There is also a human side to that question which should not be lost. Athletes are not automatically political actors because of the passport they hold, and they should not be reduced to caricatures or treated as morally responsible for every failure of the state they come from. Many are serious competitors trying to preserve a sporting life in circumstances they did not create. The sport is better for the talent they bring to it, and that is especially true in the sprint events.
Which is exactly why the current model feels unsatisfactory.
Because if these athletes are to compete, and if the sport genuinely wants their participation to feel credible rather than merely permissible, then there is a fair argument that more should be asked of the system around them.
One practical reform would be to require neutral athletes to be based outside Russia for substantial parts of the season, or otherwise to submit to an independently administered out-of-competition testing arrangement that is clearly removed from any anti-doping structure WADA still regards as non-compliant. That would not be a judgement on the athlete. It would be a safeguard for the credibility of their participation.
In that sense, the point is not that neutral athletes do not deserve to be trusted. It is that the current framework does too little to give them that chance.
That matters because Russian athletes are not some abstract problem for track cycling to manage. Many are exceptional riders whose presence raises the standard of competition and adds something distinctive to the sport. They are wanted in that sense, and valued in that sense. The issue is not whether they belong in elite track cycling as human beings or competitors. The issue is whether the current model does enough to make their participation feel credible to everyone around them.
Russian track cycling, especially in sprinting, has long brought something distinctive to the discipline. Not merely speed, but tactical instinct. Patience. Cunning. A feel for the cat-and-mouse rhythm of sprint racing that often made Russian riders more dangerous than raw numbers alone would suggest. The sport is poorer when that texture disappears. That should be said plainly, because it is true.
The calendar has lost something as well. In March 2022, the UCI withdrew Russian and Belarusian events from the UCI International Calendar, including numerous Grand Prix in Moscow, Saint-Petersburg and Tula, while also requiring any authorised Russian or Belarusian athlete participation to be in a neutral capacity. That altered not only eligibility, but the geography of the sport itself.
So yes, there has been a sporting loss here. Rivalries have gone. Tactical variety has thinned. Parts of the sport’s old map have vanished.
But proportion matters.
The greatest cost in this story is borne not by athletes with interrupted careers, but by Ukrainians whose lives, homes and futures have been shattered or reshaped by war. The IOC’s statements on sanctions and neutral participation were framed around solidarity with Ukraine and the consequences of Russia and Belarus breaching the Olympic Truce. Any article that centres athlete inconvenience above that reality would be morally unserious.
But seriousness also means refusing caricature on the other side. An individual athlete is not identical to a government. Not every rider chooses the political system under which they came through. Sporting careers are short. Some riders are simply trying to preserve the work of a lifetime in circumstances they did not create.
That deserves empathy.
It just does not, by itself, settle the argument.
Because elite sport does not run on sympathy alone. It runs on confidence. And in this case confidence was damaged twice: first by the anti-doping scandal, then by the invasion of Ukraine and everything that followed. The current AIN framework addresses eligibility. It does not magically heal both of those ruptures.
That is why the category still feels uneasy.
Not because neutrality is impossible in theory. Not because every athlete under the banner is suspect. Not because the sport should ignore the human cost borne by individuals caught in politics. But because the model asks the public to accept individual neutrality while much of what they can see still feels structured, recognisable and unresolved.
Cycling, in other words, has rules for participation. What it still lacks is a convincing story about credibility.
Who is overseeing out-of-competition control in practice? How much rests on international structures, and how much still depends on Russian-territory systems involving a body WADA continues to class as non-compliant?
What reassurance has actually been given to rivals who are expected to accept the category at face value? At what point does a group of nominally independent riders begin to look, to everyone around them, like something more collective than the language allows?
Those are not hostile questions.
They are the questions the sport should have answered more clearly by now.
Because until it does, the contradiction will remain. Riders will arrive without a flag, without an anthem and without formal national-team status. Yet many watching will still feel they are seeing something far more familiar than the words Individual Neutral Athlete are supposed to suggest.
And that is the problem.
Neutral may be a valid status in regulation. But if it does not feel neutral in track centre, in the pits, in the crowd or in the minds of rivals, the burden is not on everyone else to stop noticing. The burden is on the sport to explain why they should believe what they are being asked to believe.
