FIS has cleared 15 cross-country skiers as neutral athletes. Bolshunov isn't one of them

Fifteen cross-country skiers with Russian or Belarusian passports are now cleared to race FIS competitions this winter as Individual Neutral Athletes (AIN). That is three times as many as in August. The latest FIS list, dated 16 October, has 13 Russian and two Belarusian cross-country athletes, plus eight cross-country coaches and support staff.

Aleksandr Bolshunov and Veronika Stepanova, both Olympic champions, are not on it.

Who is on the list

Already cleared before this season (5): Savelii Korostelev, Dariya Nepryaeva and Nikita Denisov (Russia), and Hanna Karaliova and Hanna Machakhina (Belarus). All five appeared on the FIS list dated 28 August, with approval dates between December 2025 and January 2026.

Added since the 2026/27 rules were set (10): Arina Kalicheva, Elizaveta Maslakova, Ekaterina Nikitina, Alina Pekletsova, Alena Plecheva, Dmitrii Puzanov, Andrei Sakharov, Ekaterina Shibekina, Kseniia Shorokhova and Sergey Volkov, all from Russia.

The newest names, Maslakova and Plecheva, were added in the 16 October update. Maslakova won the Russian 50 km classic mass start title in 2024/25, Sport-Express reported, and Plecheva has won a Russian Cup race. Pekletsova, who won last season’s overall Russian Cup, was cleared two days earlier.

The list only shows who has been approved. It says nothing about who has applied or why anyone is missing. The Russian outlet Sports24 reported this week that FIS had asked for additional documents on Bolshunov’s application. FIS has not confirmed that, and we treat it as unconfirmed.

What the numbers say

Only four of the 15 scored World Cup points in 2025/26, the season in which neutral athletes were readmitted from December after the Court of Arbitration for Sport ruled against FIS:

Positions from the final 2025/26 men’s and women’s World Cup standings.

The other eleven, including all ten new names, did not score a World Cup point last season.

What it means

This section is analysis.

Korostelev and Nepryaeva are the ones to watch. Both raced only part of last season and still finished inside the top 25. Korostelev is a distance skier: 541 of his 800 points came from distance races and only 52 from sprints. A full season gives both a better shot at the standings than they had last year, though that depends on form we can’t yet see.

The new names are a test of depth, not a threat at the top. Most of the ten added since September have little or no World Cup experience. Their results at home are strong, but Russian domestic racing has been isolated from international fields since 2022, so it’s hard to know how those results translate. The World Cup opener in Ruka on 27 November will be the first big comparison.

The missing names are the story to follow. Bolshunov won three Olympic golds in Beijing 2022 and is the biggest name in Russian cross-country. Whether FIS clears him will be the clearest signal of how strictly it applies the neutrality rules. We’ll report a decision when FIS publishes one.

Neutral athletes can only race individual events. The relays and team sprints on the World Cup and at the Falun World Championships remain closed to them. We covered the full rules in our explainer on the 2026/27 conditions.

Update, 18 October 2026: Russia will have six start places per race on the World Cup, but only five of the 13 cleared Russians currently have the FIS points to start. Our analysis.

Update, 21 October 2026: FIS updated the list on 20 October. The cross-country athletes are unchanged; cleared cross-country coaches and support staff rose from eight to 19. Sweden’s ski federation now wants the government to refuse the athletes visas for the Falun World Championships. Our report.

Update, 24 October 2026: The FIS list dated 23 October has 37 cross-country athletes, up from 15. Among the 22 new Russians is Natalia Terenteva, who won the 2021/22 World Cup as Natalia Nepryaeva. Bolshunov and Stepanova are still missing. Our analysis.

Update, 25 October 2026: Veronika Stepanova is missing from the list because she has not applied; Russia’s federation says she is still deciding whether to sign the neutrality declaration. Our report.

Update, 27 October 2026: Russia’s federation has named Bolshunov, Stepanova and six others for Ruka and Trondheim, on condition they are cleared. Five of the eight are not on the list, which was still the 23 October version on Tuesday morning. Our analysis.