In advance of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, NBA Hall of Fame center Yao Ming told reporters that tennis professional Peng Shuai was in “
pretty good condition
” after she had seemingly vanished from public view
following allegations of sexual assault
against a former high-ranking member of the Chinese Communist Party. Yao’s euphemistic summary could perhaps apply to the Winter Olympics as a whole, with several countries already announcing that they will
bar their government officials
from attending in response to widespread Chinese human rights violations and visiting athletes being
required to use a special and seemingly privacy-compromised app
to report their daily COVID-19 status and apprised that they need to understand that speech
is subject to aggressive censorship in China
. There’s also the ecosystem of a national wilderness reserve likely
facing long-term environmental damage
due to the importation of snow for various mountain events.
The Olympics has always been this way. Despite the best intentions of International Olympic Committee founder
Pierre de Coubertin
, who hoped that worldwide sporting competition among gentlemanly amateurs would lessen global tensions, the nascent Olympics couldn’t forestall World War I, and during the 1936 Summer Olympics, it served as the canvas on which Adolf Hitler could paint a vibrant picture of Germany’s rebirth (American sprinter Jesse Owens’s heroism aside, the Germans
won 101 medals
to the United States’s second-place haul of 56). To tweak a famous
Carl Von Clausewitz
quote, “Sport is the continuation of politics by other means.”
The Olympics would remain politicized all through the Cold War, serving not just as a proxy battlefield for the U.S. and the Soviet Union that culminated in the superpowers boycotting each other’s home-field games in 1980 and 1984, respectively, but also as a convenient vehicle for other political statements, such as the
1968 ban of apartheid-era South Africa
from Olympic participation. The Olympics represented a high-profile forum in which marginalized nations like East Germany and rising ones like China, which returned to Olympic competition at the 1980 Winter Olympics after three decades of absence, could assert their dominance through
state-run doping programs
that reeled in loads of medals and world championships. Sports historian and
Drug Games
author Thomas Hunt
offers compelling evidence that there existed numerous “links between Chinese sports officials and former GDR [East German] coaches” — evidence partially corroborated in former Chinese weightlifter
Ma Jianping’s book
Chinese Weightlifting
, which describes how Russian and East German coaches were essential to setting up systematic, state-run training in China during the 1980s.
The mighty Soviet Union,
which ran no less notorious a doping program
than East Germany’s, albeit with a heyday during the 1970s, when drug testing was somewhere between primitive and altogether nonexistent, avoided the fate that befell its smaller satellite, which endured the stripping of numerous medals after the extent of its doping program was uncovered. Rather, it was only as the Russian Federation, still powerful but less geopolitically significant than its Soviet predecessor, that the country received the IOC equivalent of the death penalty for its state-sanctioned doping practices.
Forty-three medals were stripped from Russia, and for the next two Olympic Games, its athletes will be required to compete under the designation of “Russian Olympic Committee
.”
Even so, the Court of Arbitration for Sport’s decision to allow Russia to compete in any form whatsoever is a reflection of the country’s continued importance on the international scene. That’s why the last version of the
Olympic Charter
made a full boycott of the Olympics, such as the U.S. boycott of the Moscow Games in 1980, punishable by suspension of the boycotting country’s national Olympic committee. For the sake of the viewing audience and the credibility of the IOC, the major players simply have to be there.
China understands this all too well. Winning a second Beijing Olympics, on the heels of the 2008 Summer Olympics also hosted there,
was a curious enough decision
, though par for the course with an IOC location-bidding process dominated by
bribery and cheating scandals
even more insidious and ferocious than the doping scandals that a previous generation of IOC administrators like
Avery Brundage
assiduously sought to ignore or overlook. China has never topped the overall medal count at any Winter Olympics, a feat usually achieved by Russia, Germany,
or all-time medal leader Norway
, but the host country can reap major rewards from a strong showing by its athletes combined with an even stronger showing bending both nature and public opinion to its will.
Success would set China in good stead as geopolitical tensions
have inched toward Cold War levels
. U.S. relations with both Russia and China have deteriorated considerably during the past two years, a fact that has drawn these two countries into tighter military relations with one another. And despite world opprobrium directed at China — several countries, including Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom, have announced their own diplomatic boycotts of the Winter Olympics — these countries
remain major trading partners of the Chinese
. As during the Olympics of the Cold War era, the athletes will have to show up and compete, regardless of the institutional barriers, national rivalries, or sport-specific tampering that might impede their performances. The Olympics resemble nothing so much as a family gathering that pulls together an increasingly hostile network of extended relatives who are required to make nice for a short period of time.
And what of the games themselves? Hockey, which many of us have enjoyed since the NHL began allowing its players to participate, will return to a competition among international players and amateurs due to the largest professional league’s
desire to limit future COVID-19 risk and make up lost games due to COVID-19-related postponements
. Skiing and skating will feature the usual array of interesting stories, which the national networks will promote ad nauseam to affix eyeballs to screens, while bobsled and speedskating will showcase
some of the most explosive fast-twitch athletes
on the planet who aren’t among the sprinters involved in the Summer Olympics. But expect the biggest story of all, the future of a world racked by pandemic fatigue and superpower tension, to overshadow everything else.
Oliver Bateman is a journalist, historian, and co-host of the What’s Left? podcast. Visit his website:
www.oliverbateman.com
.
