Written by It seems difficult in 2021 to separate sports from politics. Calls now are rising on both sides of the U.S. and Canadian border and across the Western nations to organize a boycott of or put pressure on the International Olympic Committee to force a move of the 2022 Winter Olympic Games, scheduled to be held in Beijing, starting in a mere eleven months.
The reasons for these calls vary. Some describe a potential genocide being carried out against Muslim Uighurs in far western China. Others speak of human rights abuses against Tibetan and Mongolian minorities. Still more, point to recent crackdowns on political dissent in Hong Kong or threats made to the sovereignty of Taiwan. Chinese aggression in the South China Sea is another cited reason. Collectively, nations of the Western Alliance and their allies in the Pacific are wary of more aggressive, less responsive China and there is a growing chorus of voices to make the 2022 Olympic Winter Games a moral and practical bargaining chip.
This would not be the first time that sport would be a substitute venue for global statecraft. In 1936, Hitler’s Germany used its hosting of both the Winter and Summer Games as a forum for advancing its notions of Aryan supremacy. Of course, supremacy in those Berlin Games belonged to African-American sprinter Jesse Owens, who captured four gold medals.
Throughout the Cold War era, international competitions between the Soviet Union and its satellite nations and the nations of the West took on a heightened significance as each victory on the track, court, ice, or mat, was heralded as symbolizing the superiority of the winning side.
At times, Soviet repression in its own sphere of influence produced famous opposing responses in sports. The 1956 Olympic Water Polo semifinal between the USSR and Hungary dubbed “blood in the pool,” because of the violence of the game, a Hungarian victory in response to the Soviet invasion of Hungary earlier that same year, and the 1969 World Ice Hockey title game where Czechoslovakia upset the Soviets that prompted riots in Prague and prompted an even stronger Soviet crackdown, standout. In 1980, U.S. President Jimmy Carter led a number of allied nations in a boycott of the 1980 Summer Games in Moscow in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan that winter. The Olympic movement itself was reeling until the extraordinary financial and commercial success of the 1984 Los Angeles Games saved the movement, despite a boycott by the Soviet Bloc in reciprocation for the 1980 boycott.
Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 international sports have become increasingly commercialized and more expressions of economic vigor rather than arenas for global diplomacy. But more recently Russia’s Vladimir Putin has returned to the old playbook of politicizing international sports and it has been speculated by some that Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election was a direct response to doping sanctions that have made Russia a pariah in the Olympic movement, an outcome that matters greatly to Putin, who came of age under that former Soviet system.
Now the possibility of pressuring China through the threat of a boycott is being raised again. The 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics were an ascendant China’s breathtaking coming out party to the world. Already a major economic player on the global stage China unveiled itself to the outside world with a marvelous Olympic Games. That’s why hopes were high, when the nation sought to build on that experience with Beijing becoming the first city to host both the Summer and Winter Games when it secured the 2022 Winter Games. The plans call for Beijing to reuse facilities left from 2008 and build significant infrastructure to connect its Capital with newly built resort communities that can be used for recreation into the next century. But today’s China is a more aggressive nation regionally and globally than in 2008.
Which brings us to the $40 billion dollar question, the estimated investment China is making to host, as to whether sport can be used as an effective substitute for diplomacy?
A recent Washington Post opinion piece by Charles Lane lays out the case for why nations that care about human rights or free speech should use the threat of boycott or boycott, itself, as diplomatic weapons to apply pressure to aggressor nations. Lane, however, has been an opponent of the Olympic movement. Lane, in an effort to paint a balanced picture, quotes Canadian Dick Pound, the longtime vice president of the IOC, who indicates that such a gesture will have little effect on China and that no host will ever be pure enough if such a test is applied to host nations. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/if-the-west-boycotts-chinas-olympics-the-games-could-end-forever-fingers-crossed/2021/02/16/b1ffe1ec-7068-11eb-93be-c10813e358a2_story.html
This debate has been spinning through my mind since I read it two weeks ago. There is evidence that it is the athletes who pay the highest price if there is a boycott of the Olympic Games. Perhaps on balance, history demonstrates that more is achieved, or at least can be, in competing rather than in boycotting. But in 2021, less than one year from the scheduled opening ceremonies of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympic Games, the threat of boycott is a valid diplomatic tool and that the chorus asking for using that tool will only get louder.