When the Olympics enter the public consciousness, we like to think it should be for sports-related reasons, even if some of us hardly consider the likes of synchronized swimming and curling real sports. But the Beijing Games have made news for all the wrong reasons. When the International Olympic Committee (IOC) seven years ago awarded the 2008 “Celebration” to Beijing, the Economist, taking special note of the Communist regime’s deplorable human rights record, compared Beijing’s honor to the one Hitler received when he hosted the 1936 Games in Berlin.
More recently, the focus has been on the astonishing air pollution in the Chinese capital–not that the human rights record has improved. Then last week, the IOC made news with its decision, since reversed, to prevent the small contingent of Iraqi athletes from participating in the Games. The IOC locked its five-ringed door on the Iraqi team because of what it deemed undue political interference by Iraq’s National Olympic Committee. Oddly, the IOC never had any such qualms while Saddam Hus-sein’s certifiably insane son Uday ran Iraq’s Olympic program with an iron fist and a psychotic temper.
Among Uday’s innovative motivational techniques (memorably chronicled by David Rose in Vanity Fair) were killing a defeated Iraqi boxer and caning the feet of his soccer players when they disappointed him. And yet somehow Uday’s involvement in Iraq’s sports program never aroused the IOC’s ire. Indeed, the IOC’s indignation is highly selective. For instance, though its rules proclaim that “any form of discrimination . . . on grounds of race, religion, politics, gender or otherwise is incompatible with belonging to the Olympics movement,” the IOC never says boo to the all-male Saudi teams, which again this year have barred female athletes.
Unwholesome Olympics politics are more the rule than the exception. At Hitler’s 1936 Games, the head of the U.S. Olympic Committee, a fellow by the name of Avery Brundage, allegedly rejiggered the American 400-meter relay team at the eleventh hour to exclude the two Jews, Marty Glickman and Sam Stoller. While defenders of Brundage’s legacy dispute his involvement in such shenanigans, it’s indisputable that Brundage was a fan of his Berlin host. After the Games, he praised Hitler at a Madison Square Garden rally, and in 1938 a grateful German IOC official helped steer a contract for the new German embassy in Washington to Brundage’s construction firm (looming war caused the building to be postponed).
Naturally, Brundage went on to become president of the International Olympic Committee in 1951–a job he kept for the next two decades. In 1971, he still insisted that “the Berlin Games were the finest in modern history.”
Most people today remember Brundage for his sorry performance at the 1972 Munich Games. When Palestinian terrorists kidnapped and killed 11 members of the Israeli delegation, the Games were suspended for 24 hours, whereupon an apparently less than bereaved Brundage concluded the memorial service with a bizarrely inappropriate speech denouncing the commercialization of sports and comparing the exclusion of Rhodesian athletes from the Games to the murder of the Israelis.
Of course, no one suspects that the Olympic bureaucrats believe their own Utopian rubbish. While the Olympic Charter insists that athletes compete in the games rather than nations, the press of every nation organizes its coverage by the national medal count. And if the Olympic movement were serious about its pledge that “competitions are between athletes . . . and not between countries,” it would stop playing the victor’s national anthem to honor the winner of each event. Anyone who pays attention to the International Olympic Committee will learn that any relationship between its rhetoric and its actions is entirely coincidental. If the 2008 Games become a propaganda triumph for Beijing, it will be regrettable–and entirely in keeping with the true Olympic tradition.
In a perfect world, it would indeed be a swell thing if athletes from around the world could convene to compete with one another, unmolested by their political overlords, and to celebrate, even momentarily, humanity’s oneness. Then again, perhaps I’ve listened to one too many Barack Obama speeches.
After all, if a global celebration of sports divorced from the realities of global politics were achievable, should we even be shooting for such a thing? Too many people in the world have enough of a problem as it is distinguishing between the world’s moral cretins and its good guys. Is it really wise to indulge the fiction that there’s no distinction to be made between the civilized nations of the world and the uncivilized?
Besides, doesn’t the ritual ignoring of evil and the absurd pretense that all of the world’s governments are comparable properly belong in the bailiwick of the United Nations?
Dean Barnett is a WEEKLY STANDARD staff writer.
