The Russian head of the Sochi Olympics, Dmitry Chernyshenko, says he doesn't think athletes should be allowed to express their political views during their news conferences at the Games. His position appears to directly contradict International Olympic Committee President Thomas Bach, who said athletes were permitted to make political statements at press conferences.

The world is just a few days away from witnessing the start of the 2014 Winter Olympics. This year, the games will be held in the Russian summer resort of Sochi. Sochi, known as a longtime retreat for the Communist elite, will be hosting history’s most expensive Olympics, with a bill of $51 billion.

The 2014 Winter Olympic games begin in a little less than a month at the time of writing this article. They will be located in Sochi, Russia, which is a tiny Russian resort town on the Black Sea. Also this year, the 2014 World Cup kicks off this June. It will take place across Brazil in a multitude of cities across the country. Both of these events are significant because they are two of the largest (if not the largest) worldwide sport events.

Athletes will be allowed to make political statements in press conferences at the Winter Olympics but will be punished for doing so while competing or during Games ceremonies, Thomas Bach confirmed on Monday. The International Olympic Committee president vowed that no athlete would be denied “freedom of speech” whilst in Sochi, despite the Olympic Charter banning demonstrations or “political, religious or racial propaganda” in any Games areas.

There are at least a couple of documentary films on Pussy Riot, the art collective notorious for lip-synching a punk protest song in a Russian Orthodox cathedral. But Russian authorities had made it clear, as recently as a month ago, that they didn’t appreciate public attempts to screen such films.

He can still dunk like a butterfly, but in the personally tragic case of former basketball pro Dennis Rodman in North Korea, the embrace of Kim Jong Un and his policies sting like a bee. Rodman is only the most recent example of sports diplomacy gone awry. And with the Sochi Olympics a few weeks away, it is inevitable that a new cadre of unpredictable athlete diplomats will make it to center stage.

Last December, as the world celebrated Russia’s widely publicized release of dissident tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, two members of the punk band Pussy Riot and 29 Greenpeace activists, a court in the southern region of Krasnodar — where the Sochi Winter Olympics open next month — sentenced environmentalist Evgeny Vitishko to three years in a penal colony.