In a recent award published by the Court of Arbitration for Sport, a panel overturned a three-year ban on Russian and Belarusian athletes in international skiing, finding that the International Ski and Snowboard Federation had failed to justify its decision. The award establishes that a federation voting by secret ballot on a rights-restricting decision may find itself unable to defend that outcome before a reviewing tribunal and reveals an unresolved structural gap between the Olympic and Paralympic movements arising from the absence of a neutral athlete framework at the International Paralympic Committee level.

For practitioners and federation lawyers, the practical lessons are immediate: nationality-based exclusions require documented, contemporaneous justification; the IOC's Individual Neutral Athlete framework now appears to be the benchmark for graduated measures; and governance procedures for rights-restricting decisions must produce a reviewable record.^[1]

Introduction

The Court of Arbitration for Sport’s award in CAS 2025/A/11915 Russian Ski Association et al. v. FIS^[2] provides a significant and timely sequel to the table tennis Russia ban decision^[3] examined in this article on LawInSport^[4]. Decided in December 2025, it confirms the evidentiary and proportionality framework first applied in the ETTU case, while adding two novel contributions to CAS jurisprudence on geopolitical sports sanctions:

1. The International Ski and Snowboard Federation (FIS) Council’s use of a secret ballot contributed to its inability to discharge the evidentiary burden once discrimination was established at first sight, creating a new governance accountability dimension.
2. The absence of an “Athletes with Individual Neutrality” (AIN) framework at International Paralympic Committee (IPC) level produced asymmetric relief for para-athletes compared to their Olympic counterparts, exposing, in the author’s view, a structural incoherence between the Olympic and Paralympic movements that the Panel was constrained to resolve by a binary judgment.

When the Court of Arbitration for Sport overturned the European Table Tennis Union's (ETTU) participation ban in the summer of 2024, it established a demanding but navigable framework for federations seeking to exclude Russian and Belarusian athletes: constitutional authority, a contemporary evidentiary record, consideration of alternatives and proportionate implementation. The question facing the FIS in October 2025 was whether, after three and a half years of conflict and with a fully operational AIN framework in place across the Olympic movement, it could still lawfully maintain a blanket ban on Russian and Belarusian participation.

This article examines the FIS Award against the background of the ETTU Award and the earlier FIFA and UEFA cases^[5], identifies what is genuinely new and draws the practical lessons for practitioners and federations.

Article Outline

• Factual and Procedural Context
• The Inherited Legal Framework: The European Table Tennis Case
• Political Neutrality as the Primary Legal Ground
• The Secret Ballot: Governance Accountability and the Evidential Deficit
• The Athletes with Individual Neutrality Framework: The Available Less Restrictive Alternative
• The Olympic/Paralympic Asymmetry: A New Institutional Fault Line
• Changed Circumstances: The Temporal Dimension of Emergency Measures
• Practical Implications for Sports Federations
  • Do not use secret ballots for rights-restricting decisions
  • Engage with available graduated alternatives
  • Maintain a contemporaneous and evolving evidential record
  • The Paralympic gap
  • The governance compliance dimension
• Conclusion