Sport has never been shy of controversy and the Olympic Games is no exception to this. The media have been widely covering the Olympic torch protests over China’s perceived abuses of human rights in Tibet in recent weeks. The protests have had an impact all over the world with every newspaper having a say.
But is the coverage helping to wake China up to international feeling and encouraging them to address the problems in Tibet or harming the athletes that will be competing in Beijing?
This question was asked by a Texan news website - http://www.baylor.edu/lariat/news.php?action=story&story=50684 - which found that the athletes undoubtedly suffer the effects of a negative image for the Olympics.
As the article states: “It’s like refusing to go to an art show because the gallery owner partakes in some shady deals with business partners. Sure, the owner will be short the money he put in for the show, but the artists are the ones who are truly affected.”
Of course, people will rightly argument that these issues cannot just be swept under the carpet, but the line needs to be drawn somewhere. There is a danger that if the media becomes too concentrated on the issue of Tibet then the great spectacle of the games will be damaged irreparably.
A recent article in the Miami Herald has said that the Olympics should not be boycotted because although they are being held in China they belong to the international community. Therefore, to make China the centre of everything to do with the games would be wrong.
This is a good point and should encourage sponsors – who are reportedly under pressure to pull their financial backing - and fans alike that the Olympics are ultimately a great sporting event. Although they can act as a highlighter for political misdemeanors, they should ultimately be an arena for the thousands of athletes to show off their skill and endurance.
Let’s hope that when the opening ceremony begins on August 8 that the sport pages and fans will be talking about the prospects of a great Olympics and can leave the politics to the politicians.
Of course Tibet is an important issue, but we are incredibly naive if we think that the Olympics is not a political animal.
Since the Second World War there has hardly been an Olympics that has been free from political issues. The most notable instances were during the Cold War, when the 1980 Moscow Games and those in Los Angeles four years later were boycotted by opposing sides (initially over the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan).
South Africa was excluded for a long period during apartheid and countries including Spain and Switzerland didn’t go to Melbourne in 1956.
And let’s not pretend that this problem lies in the dim-and-distant past, as the Atlanta Games of 1996 were hit by a bomb in the main Olympic park.
Add in black power salutes, the hostage-taking at Munich and of course Hitler’s Games, and it’s easy to see how the world stage offered by the Olympics prove an irresistable tool for those with political points to make.
It was ever thus, and will be so again in the future.
Comment by ianwaterhouse — May 12, 2008 @ 1:56 pm
I agree with the Miami Heralds view that the games should not be boycotted.
In my view sport and politics should never mix, but I accept that sometimes they will and often do (maybe governing bodies like the International Olympic Committee, could take a leaf from football’s governing body’s, FIFA, book and suspend member nations from international competition if their national government intervenes with the running of the committee.)
Back to the idea that we shouldn’t boycott the games – athletes have trained for years for this moment in their carreer and for their government to pull them out at the last minute is unfair.
Comment by cdpark — May 14, 2008 @ 3:11 pm
Chinese human right abuses have been a distant secret for far too long, and it is about time the global media set its sites on the mysterious regime.
Of course, pundits frequently argue that sport and politics should be kept separate, but that surely becomes a pretty remote consideration when you think how much could be achieved by using the games for public protest.
Many Tibetan students, labour activists and Tibetan nationalists have been arrested, tortured and “disappeared” by the current regime.
If we add to this the flooding of homes on the Yangtze river in the 1990s during the building of the Three Gorges Dam, and the murder and the widespread torture of members of the Fallon Gong religious sect, China has a very large catalogue of human rights abuses.
Indeed, the many past Olympic games protests, such as the Black Power salutes and the boycotting of apartheid South Africa, all helped to effect important political changes.
We need only think back to Mohammed Ali’s vociferous support for black rights to know just how much a sportsman can acheive.
It was an awful shame, then, that few used the 2000 Sydney Olympic games for political protest, and that most of the British press ignored the plight of the Australian Aborigines who lived in squalor close to the stadium.
They could, for example, have mentioned that life expectancy for aboriginals is around 20 years lower than white Australians, and that male suicide rates are among the highest for any of the world’s ethnicities.
They could also have shown that Cathy Freeman was far from a typical aboriginal athlete.
Countless exemplary black Australian sports people were segregated from white athletes and refused access to decent facilities. Some even died in poverty and despair.
John Howard’s government was, at the time, the only “Western” country to be branded racist by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, and continued to resist human rights reforms.
People – the majority – come above a sports event, particularly when their human rights have been violated.
It is our moral duty, then, to protest at the top of our voices, even if this does ruin the games for everybody else.
Comment by Owen Howell — May 14, 2008 @ 4:59 pm
Compressible says : I absolutely agree with this !
Comment by compressible — June 2, 2008 @ 8:01 pm