Not all fun and games

Lofty words are always a hostage to fortune. The Olympic movement boasts that the Games “have always brought people together in peace...

Lofty words are always a hostage to fortune. The Olympic movement boasts that the Games “have always brought people together in peace to respect universal moral principles”. Yet history suggests otherwise. Boycotts marred the jamborees of 1956, 1976, 1980 and 1984. In 1968 two American sprinters gave a Black Power salute on the podium. The 1972 Games were blighted when Palestinian terrorists killed 11 Israeli athletes.

Now China, due to host the Games in August, is finding that its Olympic slogan — “One world, one dream” — also rests on hope more than fact. Steven Spielberg, an American film director, has quit as an artistic adviser for the opening and closing ceremonies: China, he said, must do more to stop the bloodshed in Darfur. On February 14th a group of Nobel laureates and athletes said the same in a letter to the Independent, a British daily.

Since Beijing won the right to stage the Games in 2001 China has known that it would have a hard time preventing critics of its human-rights abuses from spoiling the event… But to China’s surprise, its behaviour abroad, particularly in Sudan, has been the focus of Hollywood’s ire in the run-up to the Games.

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China has reacted angrily to what it calls attempts to “politicise” the Olympics. But recently it has been stung by the attempts of activists like Mia Farrow, an American actress, to portray the games as a “genocide Olympics” because of the killings in Sudan. China buys most of Sudan’s oil and sells it arms. This, say activists, makes it complicit in the state-orchestrated killing that has devastated Darfur…

Even as it rejects their “politicisation”, the Games are of huge political importance to China. The Olympiads of the 1970s and 1980s were an athletic projection of the cold war; now China’s leaders want to show off their country as a respected world power, no longer weighed down by memories of the killings of pro-democracy demonstrators in Beijing in 1989…

But activists may be hard to muzzle. What if one of the guests says something rude? The Olympic movement’s rules bar athletes from making political “demonstrations” at Olympic venues. But this week, after much criticism, the British Olympic Association said it was rethinking a decision to ask its team members to promise not to comment on sensitive issues during the games. Politics will intrude one way or another.

Excerpted from ‘High Hurdles’ in the Economist, February 14