Clouds around the Olympic Rings: The Opening of the Beijing Winter Games

The Olympic Winter Games opened in Beijing in the midst of gathering clouds. Whether these clouds are a prelude to coming storms or will merely block the metaphoric sunshine of global peace, understanding, and transformative competition that the Olympics hope, on their best day, to be remains to be seen. That this could go either way is consistent with the history of the modern Olympics.

The founders of the modern Olympic movement were mostly Victorian-era nobles who came together through a certain zealotry. At the core of the modern games is both an underlying jingoism and muscular Christianity. The man regarded as founder of the modern Olympic movement, Baron Pierre de Coubertin first embarked on this path, at least at first, because he believed the classical values of the ancient Olympics would toughen a French aristocracy that failed to stand up to their Germanic cousins in the Franco-Prussian War.

But as de Coubertin and his fellow early Olympic-believers watched what was possible in the Games, or at least theoretically possible, their cause became more utopian in its outlook. Olympism became a near religion, where peaceful competition would lead to global understanding, cooperation, and peace, if only we all tried hard enough. For a Europe, which had been at war in regular intervals since the end of Renaissance, the ancient Olympic Truce, the notion that the city-states of ancient Greece would for nearly 1200 years lay down their weapons to celebrate in peaceful competition at Olympia had great meaning.

Except that for the modern Olympics there has never been an Olympic Truce. World War I canceled the 1916 Games. World War II stopped the 1940 and 1944 Summer and Winter Olympics. In 1972, terrorism and violence came to the Olympics themselves.

The longest sustained period of an Olympic Peace came during the period from 1992 to 2012, as the Olympic Games moved into a kind commercial peace. The U.S. conducted military operations as part of a global war on terror for much of this period. A war for peace, perhaps, but still war.

The modern Olympics have more than once given a platform to authoritarian dictators and strongmen who wanted to co-op the attention of the Games and the innate display of superiority that athletics offers to pound their own chests. Hitler did this in 1936 in Garmisch and Berlin. Vladimir Putin, the one world leader for whom success in athletic arenas is a clear substitute for statecraft, tried to do this in Sochi with mixed results. The truth is, as much a believer as I am in the principles of the Olympic movement, there is a narrow tightrope to be walked between to the higher values of the movement and having the Games provide aggrandizement for leaders who are antithetical to those values.

Now China hosts the Winter Games in the same city as it hosted the 2008 Summer Games. Those 2008 Summer Games served as the coming out party of a modern and globally-connected China. But this China is a differently-postured one than the one that hosted the 2008 Games. The current backdrop of human rights abuses to the Uyghur communities- ethnically Turkic Muslims within China, crackdowns on civil rights in Hong Kong, and concerns about potential invasion of Taiwan, and a U.S. led diplomatic boycott, not to mention a two-year old global pandemic, have all combined to dampened enthusiasm, certainly in the U.S. for these Games, even among people who love the Olympics.

Can what happens on the snow and ice competitive surfaces help clear those clouds? Or will these Games be used to advance values that run contrary to those of the Olympic movement? We will know soon and if sports can positively affect culture.