There’s No Place Like Home: Refocusing Olympic Protest

[Better Believe It]

There’s No Place Like Home: Refocusing Olympic Protest
By Dave Zirin
ZNet
May 06, 2008

Canadian Olympic Committee president Dick Pound made crystal clear to the Canadian Olympians, "If it is so tough for you that you can't bear not to say anything, then stay at home." USA basketball and Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski said, "None of these athletes a responsibility to be political. They have the responsibility to represent their country." And IOC head Jacques Rogge has also said that "political factors" need to be kept away from the Games.

.... YET, while I support the right of any athlete to speak out and not be silenced by Olympic bureaucrats to make things pleasant for China's rulers, we should also look critically at what it is that people are protesting. It speaks to a far different set of concerns than those represented by Tommie Smith, John Carlos and the Olympic Project for Human Rights.

Smith and Carlos came to Mexico City to raise awareness about injustices happening in their own country. They wore no shoes on the stand to protest poverty in the United States. They wore beads to protest lynching in the United States. They wore gloves and raised them during the playing of the anthem to signify dissent against the way the African American Olympic athletes were treated. As they said in their founding statement, "Why should we run in Mexico City only to crawl home?"

Yet none of this 2008 crop of athletes is daring to say that maybe protest begins at home. They are raising concerns about China's policies in Tibet or Darfur, but not the U.S. wars in Iraq or Afghanistan. There are concerns about China's labor standards, but not the way their own sponsors, like Nike, exploit those standards. No wonder the head of the U.S. Olympic Committee, Chief Executive Jim Scherr, issued a surprisingly benign statement that athletes should "do what they want to do" but "shouldn't feel undue pressure to be a part of someone else's cause." But blaming China for the ills of the world ignores the stubborn fact that there is a reason the games are in Beijing. Western complicity in China's crimes isn't challenged by bashing China. It's only covered up.

Please read the entire article at:
http://zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/17559