Davis and Smolkin are now Georgians

Now it's official: ice dancers Diana Davis and Gleb Smolkin will compete for the Georgian national team. Rumors that the couple will no longer represent Russia in international competitions have been around for a long time. For several years, skaters have been living and training in the United States, and they also completely missed the domestic championship in the 2022/2023 season.

The daughter of Eteri Tutberidze has Georgian citizenship, and Smolkin will probably also receive it. The couple may well qualify for a place in the national team at the European Championships 2024, where Georgia will be able to field two dance duets.

Davis and Smolkin are not the first to decide to change their Russian sports citizenship. We gathered a few more bright representatives who began to perform under a different flag. Most often, the change of sports citizenship was associated with the removal of Russian athletes from competitions.

Sardana Trofimova

Sport type: athletics

Country: Kyrgyzstan

Russian athletes have long been faced with the fact that they cannot compete in international competitions under their native flag. Trofimova is the absolute champion in the marathon, but she never made it to the Olympics - in 2016, our team was not allowed to go there in this sport. For the next Games, the quota of Russian athletes consisted of only ten people. The runner was not going to end her career - and changed her sports citizenship. In April, she participated in a marathon in Belgrade, where she ran the distance in 2 hours 32 minutes 25 seconds.

Mark Nikolaev

Sport type: swimming

Country: Australia

The Australian national team has always been considered one of the strongest in swimming in the world. Nikolaev, whose specialization is backstroke, did not achieve much success in Russia, but since 2017 he has been a member of the national team, the last time he played for it was in 2019 at the Universiade in Italy. In 2022, the athlete began training in Australia, where he finished second in the domestic championship at a distance of one hundred meters on his back.

Anastasia Simakova

Sport type: rhythmic gymnastics

Country: Germany

The two-time world champion among juniors went to Germany to treat her leg. Irina Viner, the coach of the national rhythmic gymnastics team, thought so. But everything turned out to be much more prosaic: the young talent moved to a new country with her parents and had already begun to train there, and in February 2023 she received a German passport. However, she will be able to play for the new national team only in a year - not earlier than March 1, 2024.

Anna Prakaten

Sport type: Rowing

Country: Uzbekistan

For Prakateni, the change of sports citizenship was the second in the last six years. In 2017, the rower moved to Russia from Belarus, in 2019 she began to play for the national team. Under the Russian flag, Prakaten won the silver of the European Championship and took second place at the Tokyo Olympics. The last time single skaters won medals in rowing was back in 1980.

After the removal of Russian athletes from international competitions, Anna announced that she was ending her career. But then she changed her mind and began to collect documents for changing citizenship. Her transition to the national team of Uzbekistan was a loss for Russian rowing.