Russia must be allowed to return to the ice hockey world championships, the Court of Arbitration for Sport ruled on Friday, overturning an exclusion in place since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
The ruling is a major win for Russia against efforts to bar it from international sports due to the war in Ukraine. Russian President Vladimir Putin is a noted hockey fan who has previously played exhibition games with former stars.
CAS overturned IIHF decisions which excluded Russia from events in the 2026-27 season including the men’s and women’s world championships. Russia also missed the Olympics tournaments this year.
Russia's return throws into uncertainty how the men's world championship will work next year in Germany, given that Ukraine has also qualified.
In a brief statement, CAS cited a lack of sufficient evidence to support the IIHF’s security concerns.
CAS said its ruling did not address issues such as whether Russia should be required to play without national symbols as a team of neutral athletes, as in some other Olympic sports, or other “organizational consequences.”
The IIHF expressed disappointment with the ruling and said it “maintains that its decisions were necessary to protect the safety and security of all participants and safeguard the integrity of its competitions."
“While the IIHF respects the authority of CAS and will act in accordance with its ruling, the outcome does not remove the concerns that informed its assessments.”
Russian Sports Minister Mikhail Degtyaryov wrote on the Telegram social media app that CAS “recognized the demands of the Russian Hockey Federation on key points as justified.”
The ruling is an immediate challenge for new IIHF President Franz Reindl, whose home country of Germany hosts the men's world championship next year.
The German hockey federation chairman Frank H. Lutz said on Friday that Germany remains opposed to letting Russia take part and that “allowing Russia in has significant security, political and financial consequences for us as hosts.”
It's not clear how Russia would fit back in, since the draw has already been made.
Adding an extra team would make for uneven groups and an even longer tournament to fit in more games.
Kicking out a qualified team to make way for Russia would risk a backlash, especially if that team is Ukraine. It was last to qualify for the men's worlds, ending a 20-year wait, and is ranked lowest among the 16 teams currently taking part.
The Ukrainian Hockey Federation did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The IIHF signaled “practical arrangements” would be decided after it has assessed the ruling.
The first tournament where Russia could return is the men's world junior championship in Edmonton and Red Deer, Canada, starting on Dec. 26.
Other events covered by the ruling are the women's world championship in Canada next year and under-18 world championships in 2027 in Minnesota and the Czech Republic.
In the history of the men’s worlds, Russia’s or the Soviet Union’s 27 titles are second only to Canada’s 28. Russia last won the gold medal in 2014. Russia's best result at the women's worlds is bronze.
Since 2022, Russia has organized exhibition games with developmental rosters, mostly against neighbors Belarus and Kazakhstan. The IIHF has also excluded Belarus, citing the same concerns as it did for Russia. There was no mention of Belarus in the CAS ruling on Friday.
Russia's next focus could be soccer, where its national teams and clubs remain excluded from major competitions.
The Russian soccer federation general secretary Maxim Mitrofanov said it should be “one rule for all” in comments reported by state news agency Tass.
FIFA and European governing body UEFA have barred Russian teams from World Cup qualifying and the Champions League since 2022, when FIFA told CAS that boycott threats by Russia's upcoming opponents risked making the World Cup “chaotic.”
FIFA allowed a Russia boys' team to play under its national flag in the inaugural Under-15 World Cup and Festival in Azerbaijan, which began last week and ends on Saturday.
See AP’s full sports coverage here
FILE - Russia players celebrate during the Ice Hockey World Championship group A match between the Russia and Sweden in Riga, Latvia, May 31, 2021. (AP Photo/Roman Koksarov, File)
WASHINGTON (AP) — One of the countless memorable lines that have tumbled out of the “Star Trek” universe over the years is this gem, originally from a 20th-century poet named Delmore Schwartz: “Time is the fire in which we burn.”
It was uttered as an existential warning to Capt. Jean-Luc Picard in the 1994 film “Star Trek Generations.” But it feels equally apt this week after a one-two punch of loss that is hitting hard for devotees of the epic, six-decade science fiction saga.
First, on Sunday, Walter Koenig, who played Ensign Pavel Chekov in the original series during the 1960s, died at age 90. Then, on Thursday, the cosmos lost Patrick Stewart, a Shakespearean actor who in 1987 began to inhabit Picard, the poetic face of that show's sequel, “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” and decades later the anchor of the darker streaming drama “Star Trek: Picard.”
For a fan base that has long signed on as acolytes of a brighter, more equitable future, recent days have given the present an unwelcome sting.
“What a heartbreaking week it has been,” said William Shatner, who played Capt. James T. Kirk in the original series from 1966 to 1969 and went on to star in six movie sequels. He is one of only two members of that long-ago cast still living; Leonard “Spock” Nimoy, his best friend on the show — and off and on in real life — died in 2015.
For all the characterizations of it as nerdy over the years — something many fans have come to accept cheerfully — “Star Trek” has long been at the vanguard of modern-day mythmaking. That has helped it seep into the culture in various ways, vacuuming up disciples as it goes.
The earliest space shuttle was christened “Enterprise” after the show's flagship after a mass letter-writing campaign persuaded President Gerald Ford to rename it, and the cast attended the ship's introduction. The handheld “communicators” from the show helped inspire early flip phones. Phrases like “Beam me up, Scotty,” “He's dead, Jim” and “Make it so” have infiltrated society ad nauseam. (The first one was never actually spoken verbatim on the show.)
Today, as the end of a decade-long streaming run of “new Trek” approaches and the franchise's longtime godfather, Paramount, rumbles into a new corporate era, Trek fans are legion and global and wondering what happens next.
They haunt online forums by the millions, discussing and arguing about themes, stories and minutiae — particularly “canon,” or how well the fictional universe adheres to or violates its own rules. Things can get contentious and aggressive for a fan base that has signed on for peaceful and utopian tomorrows.
This week, those same forums, now turned somber, are awash with tributes and laments — first for Koenig and now for Stewart. At the same time, the sense of mortality is palpable. “Bubble wrap George Takei and William Shatner ASAP,” one post on X said.
Fellow actors in the now-sizable cadre from various shows — and those behind the scenes, too — weighed in on the loss of two people who were, for them, legends.
“His Captain Jean-Luc Picard permanently expanded the universe of Star Trek without measure,” Akiva Goldsman, co-creator of “Star Trek: Picard,” said of Stewart.
Koenig was introduced in the show's second season for two key reasons. First, his character was a Russian in an era of U.S.-Soviet Cold War tension, part of creator Gene Roddenberry's effort to build a diverse cast that was groundbreaking for its era and featured, among others, a Japanese helmsman and a Bantu communications officer — not to mention the then-progressive presence of women in authority. Second, Koenig's Beatle-like looks, complete with mop-top, were calibrated to entice younger fans vibing at the time to the Monkees.
Koenig, oddly, was the first Chekov to exist but is not the first to die. His young counterpart in the lightly rebooted “Kelvin” universe series of “Star Trek” movies that began in 2009, the Soviet-born Anton Yelchin, was killed in 2016 when his car pinned him against a gate outside his Los Angeles home.
With Koenig's death, only two members of the original cast remain: Shatner and Takei, who played helmsman Hikaru Sulu. The two, who have had an occasionally prickly relationship across the decades, both remain active at ages 95 and 89 respectively. Shatner, a raconteur who has seemingly boundless energy, recently unveiled his latest project — front man for a heavy-metal band. Takei remains in the public eye on social media with his “Oh, Myyyy” content.
Takei and Koenig, who sat together on the Enterprise bridge as helmsman and navigator, were close in real life. On Monday, Takei said his “heart was heavy.”
“He was a writer, a teacher, a thoughtful man, and a loyal friend,” Takei said of Koenig. “Rest well, my dear friend. Keep navigating a steady course.”
Ever since the early 1980s, when Capt. Kirk said bitterly that “Galloping around the cosmos is a game for the young,” the “Star Trek” universe has embraced aging and mortality. It became a theme in many productions, perhaps most prominently from 2020 to 2023 in “Star Trek: Picard.”
Even so, the ethos of “Star Trek” has always been optimism and life. Even its darkest iterations, like “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine,” have been suffused with the notion that humanity — which has always, in the show's universe, meant far more than humans — would endure and thrive.
“Spock, you want to know something?” Kirk once said to his first officer. “Everybody's human.” Responded Spock, dryly: “I find that remark ... insulting.”
That exchange came in “Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country,” a 1991 end-of-the-Cold War political thriller that was the final film to feature the entire original cast. The story focused on the idea of the undiscovered country being the future, and the journey ended in the galactic equivalent of what John F. Kennedy once called “a hard and bitter peace.”
In truth, though, Shakespeare — whose work has infused not only the various incarnations of “Trek” but the careers of its two most prominent actors, Shatner and Stewart — meant something else when he coined the phrase. “The undiscover’d country, from whose bourn no traveller returns,” he writes in “Hamlet.” In short: death.
But with “Star Trek,” as with Shakespeare, the show must go on. That's exactly what Shatner, then at the ripe old age of 77, told this writer when they spent the day together in 2008: “None of us will be around forever,” he said, “but ‘Star Trek’ will.”
Ted Anthony, director of new storytelling and newsroom innovation at The Associated Press, has been watching “Star Trek” since he was 18 months old. His younger son's middle name is Kirk, which is not a coincidence.
FILE - Walter Koenig appears at the Creative Arts Emmy Awards in Los Angeles on Sept. 8, 2018. (Photo by Richard Shotwell/Invision/AP, File)
FILE - Patrick Stewart, cast member in the Paramount+ television series "Star Trek: Picard" poses for a portrait during the Winter Television Critics Association Press Tour in Pasadena, Calif., on Jan. 9, 2023. (Willy Sanjuan/Invision/AP, File)
FILE- Members of the "Star Trek" crew, from left, James Doohan, DeForest Kelley, Walter Koenig, William Shatner, George Takei, Leonard Nimoy, and Nichelle Nichols, toast the newest "Star Trek" film at Paramount Studios on Dec. 28, 1988. (AP Photo/Bob Galbraith, File)
