Cross-country skiing: double world junior champion in Lygna
He has yet to take part in a single World Cup race, but his name is already at the heart of the Olympic winter. At the age of 22, Russian cross-country skiing prodigySaveliy Korostelev has just been awarded Neutral Individual Athlete (NIA) status, which opens the door to qualifying events for Milan/Cortina 2026.
Double world junior champion in Lygna in 2022 and multiple Russian champion, the young man has been touted as the ‘next big thing’ in Russian cross-country running for the past two winters. Once again this autumn, he dominated the national circuit, and even had the luxury of beating Alexander Bolshunov over 10km in Tyumen (Russia).
Along with eleven other sportsmen and women, Saveliy Korostelev appealed to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) against the FIS’s decision to bar him from taking part in the Olympic qualifiers. On 2 December, the CAS ruled in his favour on the essential point: Russians and Belarusians who can meet the neutrality criteria set by the IOC must be allowed to compete in FIS events in preparation for the Games. A panel subsequently selected 17 names – including his – to compete under a neutral banner, without flag or anthem.
In recent days, the independent Norwegian online media outlet Barents Observer pointed out that he had played for CSKA, a club linked to the Russian armed forces, a fact that could have affected his eligibility under the IOC’s criteria, which exclude athletes linked to the army or who have supported the war. The cross-country skier insists that he has never taken a position in favour of the conflict and repeats that he simply wants to “race against the best” and “dream of Olympic gold”, as the website Proxcskiing.com recently reported.
Saveliy Korostelev will now have to transform his status as a neutral athlete into a sporting ticket for Milan-Cortina, on a timetable that is still unclear.
Read also
- Russians Saveliy Korostelev and Dariya Nepryaeva obtain neutral individual athlete status
- Lygna: Saveliy Korostelev world junior champion in the individual classic
