Broken games: China is sport-washing its abuse with the Olympics
Who doesn’t love the Olympics and Paralympics – the races, the stars, the sweat and tears, the achievements and disappointments. It’s human drama at its best. When Usain Bolt races, it feels like time stands still. When Hannah Cockroft – the wheelchair racing star known as “Hurricane Hannah” – zips around the track, it makes us feel as if humans can do anything. The games are truly the apotheosis of human endeavor.
They are also, now, the pinnacle of mankind’s worst attributes – greed, corruption, tyranny, and sexual exploitation. Bribery scandals are almost as predictable as the Opening Ceremony. Carlos Nuzman, the then head of the Brazilian Olympic Committee, was arrested amid claims he was the central figure in the bribery scandal which saw Rio awarded the Olympic Games. Before him South Korean Kim Un-Yong, a vice-President of the International Olympic Committee, was sentenced to 2 and a half years in jail on corruption charges. The list goes on.
Worse still, the Olympics have now associated themselves with several authoritarian regimes with systems of governance out of sync with the ideals of the games. In spite of this, the Olympic Committee resolutely looks away.
At the latest games in Tokyo, the Belarusian sprinter Krystsina Tsimanouskaya voiced fears for her safety after she refused an order to fly home early from the Olympics for criticizing her coaches. She was eventually helped to defect. The ordeal, however, reveals the Committee’s embarrassment over the bad publicity was their priority, rather than the rightful shame about the inevitable consequence of its acceptance of authoritarian states like Belarus.
The latest example is of Chinese tennis player Peng Shuai who was silenced by the Chinese authorities after she was sexually abused by a senior Chinese Communist Party official. The Women’s Tennis Association took bold action and suspended its activities in China until the allegations were independently investigated. Meanwhile, the IOC has enabled a cover-up to protect the planned Winter Olympics in Beijing next year.
The predictable counter-argument goes: “Don’t politicise sports, just let the athletes for whom it matters so much compete.” But sports and politics have always been inextricably linked; they cannot be disentangled. Just as Adolf Hitler used the 1936 Berlin Olympics to showcase Nazi Germany, so China has used the Olympics to project itself onto the world stage.
China is using the Winter Olympics to sport-wash its despicable human rights record in Xinjiang and beyond combined with a media ban on independent reporting during the Games.
Countries like the United States have tried to walk a line between boycott and engagement. US President Biden announced a political boycott of the Beijing Olympics. This means that everything will go ahead exactly as before, but the sort of diplomatic talks that sometimes take place in the background of the games – which nobody knows about and which have produced no progress on any diplomatic issue ever – won’t involve US diplomats.
Clearly that’s an inadequate response.
There needs to be a more fundamental change. The Olympics are unreformable. They are too steeped in a culture of corruption and moral torpor, whether of athletes or citizens in participating countries.
That’s why there should be a new event, the Liberty Games, organised by the world’s democracies. An event to extol both human sporting achievement and ethical achievement. Let’s excite the next generation about what humans can do when they aren’t forced at gunpoint, worried for their children’s safety or committed to state-sponsored doping programmes. Let the Olympic Games carry on – as the preserve of doped-up athletes from authoritarian states who line the pockets of Olympic administrators.
The world of sports deserves better. The Liberty Games are the way ahead.