The Olympics lost their innocence

Text Jonathan Crane, DW Sports

In the photos, the twins are grinning from ear to ear, their Olympic gold medals dangling from their necks. They are standing on a podium alongside other star athletes from their country. But the Russian gymnasts Dina and Arina Averina are not appearing at a medal ceremony. The letter “Z” — a Russian military symbol — embroidered on their tracksuits is the giveaway. This is a pro-war rally, hosted by Russian President Vladimir Putin, at Moscow’s Luzhniki Stadium.

Little more than a month earlier, Putin was one of the few world leaders who had attended the opening ceremony of the Beijing Winter Olympics. Many had chosen to stay away in protest of China’s human rights record. Putin, though, would have heard the words of Thomas Bach, the president of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), in person: “Give peace a chance.”

The message fell on deaf ears. Four days after the Beijing Games ended, Russia invaded Ukraine.

IOC looks the other way

Putin has long been accused of using sport to burnish his own image and project Russia’s strength on the international stage. So desperate is the desire to succeed that he was prepared to sabotage his own country’s Winter Olympics, in Sochi in 2014, with an elaborate doping scheme that continues to cast a shadow over world sport, even today.

Despite branding the doping scheme a “fundamental attack on the integrity of sport,” the IOC appeared unwilling to rock the boat, ignoring calls to kick out Russian athletes from the Olympics and other major international events. Only now, in the face of Putin’s aggression in Ukraine, has the IOC decided to act, pushing sports federations to ban Russians and Belarusians from their competitions.

But in many ways, Russia’s invasion and the shockwaves it has sent through sport is the culmination of a long series of events that have raised uncomfortable questions about the cosy relationship between sport and politics.

“Sports organizations were warned,” said Minky Worden, a director at Human Rights Watch. “They were warned over a period of two decades that partnering with very serious human rights abusers is a recipe for disaster, and that you have no successful Olympics where there are serious human rights abuses.”

A controversial decision

The decision in 2015 to award Beijing the Winter Olympics ― seven years after it hosted the 2008 Summer Games ― was controversial. For starters, the Chinese capital has very little natural snowfall, meaning it was entirely reliant on environmentally unfriendly artificial snow. And then there was the issue of human rights, the elephant in the room from the moment Bach opened the envelope to reveal the name of Beijing.

“That period coincides with some of the worst human rights abuses in China in the post-Tiananmen Square massacre period,” Worden said. “That includes the forced internment of as many as a million Ugyhurs, and severe repression including forced labour, torture and the unjust jailing of Uyghurs in Xinjiang.”

International Olympic Committee (IOC) President Thomas Bach makes remarks at the closing ceremony of the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympic Gamesat the National Stadium.

Unlike at the 2008 Games, when the IOC and others argued the Olympics would improve democracy in China, critics were under no illusions that this time around, they were dealing with a far more belligerent Beijing.

“The human rights situation in China is now much worse than in 2008,” said Teng Biao, a Chinese dissident who was forced to flee the country after being targeted by authorities. “In 2022, the Chinese government did not even pretend to be open to the world. It became more and more totalitarian and aggressive.”

Inside the Beijing bubble

The coronavirus pandemic provided Games organizers with an excuse, if they needed one, to put those of us who travelled to Beijing on a tight leash. Athletes, coaches and journalists like me were confined to a closed-off bubble, effectively a city within the city, and we could only travel between our accommodation and venues in special Olympic buses. Uniformed police, themselves monitored by cameras, guarded padlocked gates to the bustling metropolis beyond.

The Uyghur community in The Netherlands keeps demonstrating against the celebration of the Olympic Games in Beijing. In Amsterdam, on February5, 2022.

The sea of hazmat-suited workers that greeted us at the airport gave a clear indication of what was to come: Daily PCR tests and the requirement to track our temperatures in an app did little to ease concerns that Big Brother was watching. Indeed, a report shared with DW ahead of the Games by cyber security group Citizen Lab found the My 2022 app contained vulnerabilities that could lead to hacking.

Unable to roam freely around Beijing to conduct interviews, we were reliant on scheduled daily briefings for the chance to challenge our hosts. But as I and my Western media colleagues soon discovered, no sporting organization can filibuster like the IOC.

Big questions left unanswered

“All IOC and organizing committee press conferences are very, very stilted,” said Olympic historian Philip Barker. “The journalists never get a chance to ask more than one question, and there’s never a dialogue, a cut and thrust, a to and for. The whole way the press conference is set up militates towards the control that you saw in Beijing.”

The hour-long briefings were all too often eaten up by monologues and presentations from the stage, aided and abetted by softball queries from Chinese journalists. As a consequence, arguably more important questions went unasked or were left unanswered.

Whenever we tried to press the IOC on China’s human rights record, Bach and Co. kept falling back on the organization’s need to be politically neutral. “If we are getting in the middle of tensions, disputes and confrontations of the political powers, then we are putting the Games at risk,” said Bach, who never once publicly commented on the plight of the Uyghurs.

Yet the seeming hypocrisy of that stance was laid bare when Yan Jiarong, a Beijing 2022 spokeswoman, used her final daily briefing to dismiss human rights abuses in Xinjiang as “lies” and to insist that Taiwan is part of China. We couldn’t believe what we were hearing: It was an extraordinary outburst.

The journalists never get a chance to ask more than one question, and there’s never a dialogue.

“What I want to say, there is only one China in the world,” Yan opined, completely unprompted. The IOC response to her claims was muted to say the least, but of course, the show must go on.

“The IOC has clearly violated the Olympic Charter by keeping silent on atrocities committed by the CCP [Chinese Communist Party],” Teng said. “It became complicit in Beijing’s suppression of freedom. Being politically neutral between a dictatorship and the suppressed is the politics of supporting the dictator.”

Double standards in sport

The term sportswashing describes how sport is used to launder a reputation, to make the viewing public forget an uncomfortable truth. While the word’s usage may be relatively new, the concept is not. According to Barker, there were “notions of nationalism” from the earliest Olympic Games. “It seems to have been, if not ever present, in the background,” he said.

DW correspondent Jonathan Crane reports during the opening ceremony of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, February 4, 2022 in Beijing, China.Putin attended the Olympics as a guest of Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Perhaps the most infamous example in the Games’ modern history is the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, which took place at a time when Adolf Hitler was waging a campaign of persecution against Jewish people and other minorities in Germany. Barker says the so-called Nazi Olympics were probably the first example of sportswashing, as Hitler sought to normalize his brutal regime and promote its Aryan ideals.

“It was seen as part of the charm offensive, a coming out party for Nazi Germany,” Barker said. “The IOC doesn’t come out of it terribly well. [Former IOC president Avery] Brundage looked at Nazi Germany through blinkered eyes — ’Is the competition being run OK in the venues?’ — and not really caring about anything that was societal at all.”

It has taken a different war in Europe for the IOC to finally get off its apolitical fence. Cynics could be forgiven for wondering why some atrocities, such as those committed against the Uyghurs, are mostly ignored, while the invasion of a European nation is not.

All of which now begs the question: Can the idea that sport be kept separate from politics still be justified when for too long, dictators and authoritarian regimes have benefitted from its prestige?

HRW director Minky Worden, for her part, is clear what has to happen. She says the IOC must urgently adopt a human rights framework, and that there needs to be a serious reckoning with the legacy of the recent Olympics. Otherwise, she says, it may lead the IOC to think it can do it again. “That means we’re going to be looking at the Saudi Arabia Olympics,” Worden said. “It is absolutely the case that the world’s most serious human rights abuses are coming for its biggest events. The narrative from the IOC is that Olympism is a substitute for human rights, and it is not. Olympism itself, as the world has seen, is a way for the worst regimes to use the rules of the Olympics to silence critics, while also covering themselves in global glory.”