As China Proves, Olympic Panel Can’t Separate Sports and Politics

[babylonsister]

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/08/10/10916/

As China Proves, Olympic Panel Can’t Separate Sports and Politics
by Pierre Tristam

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Bashing the Olympics should be an Olympic sport of its own. We’d all be gold medalists. In hypocrisy especially. I’ll certainly be watching the games every day, avidly at that, though as much for the politics of it as for the sports. The problem with the games has never been the athletes. Not even the ones who dope themselves, the whole Olympic spectacle being a nationalistic doping orgy for the country that hosts it. The problem is the IOC’s moronic belief that sport and politics can be separated — by force and censorship if necessary.

In China, the IOC is condoning both tactics. Not only are sport and politics inseparable at the Olympics. The two together is what makes the Olympics compelling, letting us in on countries’ dirty secrets (when our news-covering networks do their job, which is rare) as well as the endless run of athlete stories that break the most hardened hearts and most jaded souls.

I dare you not to have cried at the sight of Lopez Lomong, one of the “Lost Boys” of Sudan, carrying the American flag in the opening ceremonies. He was orphaned in the Sudanese civil war, made a child soldier, escaped to a refugee camp for 10 years, taken in by the United States as one of some 3,600 Lost Boys beginning in 1999 and sworn a citizen 13 months ago. He’s on Team Darfur, which uses athletes’ celebrity to heighten awareness of the genocide in Sudan’s Darfur. On Friday, he led Team USA into the magnificent Olympic stadium, the so-called Bird’s Nest. Stories like that at the Olympics could fill a stadium-sized library.

So can stories like the sight of President Bush in the Bird’s Nest, paying tribute (because that’s what it was) to his, to our, Chinese keepers: They’ve lent us the money that makes our extravagant consumerism possible. They also know that Bush can’t lecture them — not on illegal detentions, which, thanks to him, are now as American as they are Chinese. Not on torture: Dick Cheney gets the gold in waterboarding. Not on overstuffed prisons: We have a population four times smaller than China’s but a prison population one-and-a-half times larger. Not on pollution: The United States still pollutes the planet more than China by far, even if it does so more sneakily. Not even on free speech: China’s “free-speech zones,” organized in a couple of distant Beijing parks, are an American import.

It’s taken 104 years, but these are the Olympics where the United States makes even a country like China look good in comparison. The two belong together, with the IOC as their valet.

[ben_meyers]

1. When haven't the Olympics been political?

Just to name a few, Hitler used the '38 games, the Islamic terrorists used the '72 games, Carter boycotted the '80 games, Russia the '84, it's always been tied to politics.

http://www.topendsports.com/events/summer/boycotts.htm

[pnorman]

2. The real politicizing of the Olympics began in 1936.

Here's the Wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1936_Summer_Olympics

Here's another link that goes into it a bit deeper: http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/olympics.html Take note of US's Avery Brundage.

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Deciding Whether To Boycott

Soon after Hitler took power in 1933, observers in the United States and other western democracies questioned the morality of supporting Olympic Games hosted by the Nazi regime. Responding to reports of the persecution of Jewish athletes in 1933, Avery Brundage, president of the American Olympic Committee, stated: “The very foundation of the modern Olympic revival will be undermined if individual countries are allowed to restrict participation by reason of class, creed, or race.” Brundage, like many others in the Olympics movement, initially considered moving the Games from Germany. After a brief and tightly managed inspection of German sports facilities in 1934, Brundage stated publicly that Jewish athletes were being treated fairly and that the Games should go on, as planned.

Debate over participation in the 1936 Olympics was greatest in the United States, which traditionally sent one of the largest teams to the Games. By the end of 1934, the lines on both sides were clearly drawn. Brundage opposed a boycott, arguing that politics had no place in sport. “The Olympic Games belong to the athletes and not to the politicians.” He wrote in the AOC's pamphlet Fair Play for American Athletes that American athletes should not become involved in “the present Jew-Nazi altercation.” As the Olympics controversy heated up in 1935, Brundage alleged the existence of a “Jewish-Communist conspiracy” to keep the United States out of the Games.
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pnorman