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As China Proves, Olympic Panel Can't Separate Sports and Politics
The International Olympic Committee tells us in its charter that it aims to "place sport at the service of the harmonious development of man, with a view to promoting a peaceful society concerned with the preservation of human dignity." Also, that "the practice of sport is a human right," and "any form of discrimination with regard to a country or a person on grounds of race, religion, politics, gender or otherwise is incompatible with belonging to the Olympic Movement." All beautiful ideas if one hasn't learned to trust the moral compass of the Olympic Committee about as much as that of a hedge fund manager.
This is the organization that thought it proper to let athletes carry on in 11 of 22 sports for eight hours in the 1972 Munich Games after learning that Palestinian terrorists had murdered two Israeli coaches and were holding nine more members of the Israeli team hostage (all nine were eventually murdered, and the games were finally suspended, but only for a day).
This is the organization that let Moscow go ahead with its games in 1980 as the Soviet army was massacring its way across Afghanistan (61 countries boycotted, including the United States).
This is the committee that, while having the good sense to ban South Africa from the games from 1964 to 1988 over South Africa's policy of apartheid, doesn't question Saudi Arabia's right to participate -- even though that kingdom's religious nuts ban women from all sports.
So it was natural that the Olympic Committee yielded in 2001 to China's bid for this year's summer Olympics. Toronto's oppressive cleanliness and Paris' dictatorial arrogance, the two cities also considered, couldn't compete with China's standard-issue repression. The committee's argument was that it was time to recognize China's modernization, and that as in Seoul in 1988 and Mexico City 20 years earlier, the games would crack the walls of authoritarianism and encourage liberalization.
It happened in South Korea and Mexico. It didn't happen in China, where the games have been China's excuse to stuff "reeducation camps" with prisoners held without trial, conduct massive internal deportations, crack down on dissidents and protesters (Tibetans, Muslims, Buddhists' Falun Gong sect), let loose roving bands of vigilantes wearing "Good luck Beijing" baseball caps with authority to silence troublemakers -- and fuel a rabid wave of nationalism, especially among the young, that belches more chauvinism than your average flag-waving Republican rally.
Bashing the Olympics should be an Olympic sport of its own. We'd all be gold medalists. In hypocrisy especially. I'll certainly be watching the games every day, avidly at that, though as much for the politics of it as for the sports. The problem with the games has never been the athletes. Not even the ones who dope themselves, the whole Olympic spectacle being a nationalistic doping orgy for the country that hosts it. The problem is the IOC's moronic belief that sport and politics can be separated -- by force and censorship if necessary.
In China, the IOC is condoning both tactics. Not only are sport and politics inseparable at the Olympics. The two together is what makes the Olympics compelling, letting us in on countries' dirty secrets (when our news-covering networks do their job, which is rare) as well as the endless run of athlete stories that break the most hardened hearts and most jaded souls.
I dare you not to have cried at the sight of Lopez Lomong, one of the "Lost Boys" of Sudan, carrying the American flag in the opening ceremonies. He was orphaned in the Sudanese civil war, made a child soldier, escaped to a refugee camp for 10 years, taken in by the United States as one of some 3,600 Lost Boys beginning in 1999 and sworn a citizen 13 months ago. He's on Team Darfur, which uses athletes' celebrity to heighten awareness of the genocide in Sudan's Darfur. On Friday, he led Team USA into the magnificent Olympic stadium, the so-called Bird's Nest. Stories like that at the Olympics could fill a stadium-sized library.
So can stories like the sight of President Bush in the Bird's Nest, paying tribute (because that's what it was) to his, to our, Chinese keepers: They've lent us the money that makes our extravagant consumerism possible. They also know that Bush can't lecture them -- not on illegal detentions, which, thanks to him, are now as American as they are Chinese. Not on torture: Dick Cheney gets the gold in waterboarding. Not on overstuffed prisons: We have a population four times smaller than China's but a prison population one-and-a-half times larger. Not on pollution: The United States still pollutes the planet more than China by far, even if it does so more sneakily. Not even on free speech: China's "free-speech zones," organized in a couple of distant Beijing parks, are an American import.
It's taken 104 years, but these are the Olympics where the United States makes even a country like China look good in comparison. The two belong together, with the IOC as their valet.
Tristam is a News-Journal editorial writer.
© 2008 News-Journal Corporation
11 Comments so far
Show AllI would never cheer any USA athlete on in this Olympics - under any circumstances. Already they have won several gold medals, but I will not cheer for any USA Olympian - for morality reasons. Perhaps this is politics at play, but I grow tired of USA and American society, believing they are better than every nation on Earth. I am tired of their attitude! Actually, I hope that China kicks USA a** at the men Gymnastics. Yesterday, the USA and Venezuela played in Men Volleyball and won - but I tell you, it was a good match. The USA worked for it! Today I hear that the USA is taking on Cuba in a sport. I am unable to remember the sport but one guess who I am cheering for...
I was disappointed to hear that Mugabe of Zimbabwe was not allowed to attend the Olympics but allowed George W. Bush to attend. Neutrality at work eh IOC? I was surprised at the opening ceremony when Iran entered the parade and I heard the crowd booing as well.
Sports are a distraction, and an extension of politics and propaganda. The Beijing spectacle rivals any world's fair with it's hyper-pomp and glittered spectacle.
Look, the American people outright ignored massacres during the Iraq siege, they have no clue about the crushing of bodies under the wheels of enterprise, here or there.
olympics, a nationalistic orgy (not only by the host country). different only in scale from a major league baseball game that starts with the hand on heart national anthem and a fly over of air force jets. not many other opportunities for these athletes to compete against elite competetion. there is a purity about the competition, but there is also the sad fact that success is measured by the defeat of another. all just building blocks that elevates mankind?
I havent watched one second of this Olympics and wont bother.
Not that i cared about any other--I watched a bit of the closing Australian Olympics and some of the last one only because it involved Greece and seemed the bets time to check it out.
Sports and commerce--just dont care.
If athletes collapse from Bejing's filthy environment or something else embarrassing happens, I may catch it on youtube.
Once its over China can go back to doing what it does best, abusing its citizens and its ecology(as well as sharks around the globe, elephants in Africa, etc).
Not the worst country on Earth but if it were an Olympic event, China would be competitive for the gold.
Not a bad article, but what's with reaching back to 1980 to find an example of a country being allowed to compete despite the fact that its "army was massacring its way across Afghanistan"? Lol.
Seems like a case of throwing in the obligatory communist-bashing remark--no matter how hard you have to stretch to make it relevant--that is required in all leftist writing these days.
I don't hope China beats the U.S.; I hope nations disappear as a way of dividing up humanity. In the meantime, I'd settle for a non-unipolar world, whether that power is China, or the U.S., or Britain, or Portugal, or Spain.
I've always thought the Olympics to be a joke, even when I was young and wasn't aware of the imperialist and nationalist bullshit behind it. At least now it's easier to get away from it.
Christ, aren't the nations of the world being pitted against each other enough as it is?
Oooh, our people can jump higher than yours.
Yeah, but ours can throw a heavy ball further.
But we run faster than you people do.
So what? We're stronger, and we'll kick your butts. It's in our genes.
What about us? You people can't swim like we do.
And half of these athletes look so unnatural. Look at some of these female gymnasts. They have shoulders like men, yet they still sound like they're eleven years old.
I guess all of these people competing see it as a way out of whatever hole they're in.
Hell, I suppose you could say that about all sports.
Are the millionaire NBA players taking part this year? Am I supposed to root for them?
Oh wait, beach volleyball's on. Let's all stare at Misty May's bum. In HD too! You know The Clown Prince of War Crimes is watchin'.
Maybe she'll like, be in Maxim and shit. Dood, check her aht.
*sigh* I'm so overcome with American pride. *sniff*
Whatever.
The USA and China are ideological twins, both running wide open throttle toward fascism. The Han Chinese are arrogantly pushing their culture on the regional ethnic minorities (Tibet, Xinjiang), labeling resistors as backward and ungrateful for the economic development. Sound familiar? Many people in this world do not want capitalist extremism and monoculture jammed down their throats.
The Olympics is a corporate event as much as a political one.
Almost everything about the games is business sponsored, right down to the minutiae such as
the buses which transport the athletes to their events and mobile phones.
"THOMAS CRAPPER & CO. LTD, Official suppliers of restroom porcelain for the 2008 Beijing Olympics"
For most athletes, the Olympics is the highest level of competition there is. It is sad that the reality of the Olympics so taints the Olympic Ideal.
I watch, and I cringe at the utter trash that I have to endure. But to see 41 year old Dara Torres bring her 4x100 meter freestyle relay team back from getting bumped off the podium, or Micheal Phelps smash the world and Olympic records in the the 400 meter individual medly, well, I guess I will just have to suffer through the Coke and Visa commercials.
I wish the real Olympics was pure, but its not. Bu the athletes are not to blame for that, and most of them probably wish the Games lived up to the ideal. I would bet most of them hate the corporate profiteering as much as any of us here.
At least watch the athletes do the beautiful, magnificent things they do, and try to forget, at least for a while, that we live in a world of cruelty, greed and war.
And why is it, exactly, that we should forget for even a while that we live in a world of cruelty, greed, and war. We never should forget this. We already are sufficiently complacent.
out of the loop -
Who said anything about being complacent? Not me. I just want to recommend appreciating something good about human beings, like their love of play. Or music, or art, or just how kind we can be to one another. Otherwise, what f*cking use is it to live at all?
When I am really down, as I usually am after reading stuff like this all day, I need to recharge myself somehow. So I go running with my old dog, or listen to a Beethoven string quartet, or watch my beautiful daughters play sports, and I think "maybe there is hope, after all."
I have plenty of despair already, thanks very much. I don't need more, I need less. Otherwise, why try to make things any better?
If I were to go down you road you point to, I might as well put a bullet through my head. And I am already dealing with the aftermath of a friend having done that. He may have shed this mortal coil, but his wife and child are stuck here.
And that is why we should forget for a little while that we live in a world of cruelty, greed and war.
Complacency? G.F.Y.