It is an exceedingly difficult choice. In three months’ time, the Winter Olympics will begin in Beijing. They will be the most politically contentious Games in decades. Fifty or so Australian athletes will join several thousand international competitors in the eye of the storm. Do they speak up, and face the spectre of backlash and sanctions? Or do they remain mute, and complicit in the sportswashing of a regime committing human rights atrocities?
Sport has always been political. Those who say otherwise have, at the very least, a poor grasp of history. Ever since the ancient Games began among Greek city states three millennia ago, the Olympics have been imbued with political meaning. On at least two occasions, the site of the ancient Games – at the Altis in Olympia – was invaded as states vied for the political influence that came with hosting the Olympics. Indeed at the 104th Olympiad, in 364BC, the invasion came midway through the final event of the pentathlon.
The same is true of the modern Olympics, albeit with less mid-event violence. The founder of the International Olympic Committee, Pierre de Coubertin, had an explicitly political purpose in mind when re-establishing the Games: to foster peace among nations by providing a space for international exchange. It may have been a noble aspiration, but it was a political one nonetheless. This vision turned sour when the Games were co-opted by Nazi Germany at the infamous 1936 Olympics in Berlin. During the Cold War, sport became another political battleground; an East German official once admitted: “Sport and politics cannot be separated any more than one can separate a gymnast from the bars, a swimmer from the water.”
“The Olympic Games are not about politics,” wrote current IOC president Thomas Bach last year. IOC vice-president and long-time Australian Olympic Committee chief John Coates recently ruled out any efforts to pressure China over human rights ahead of the Games. “We have no ability to go into a country and tell them what to do,” he said last month. Asked about ongoing human rights violations in China, Coates was insistent: “The situations that you have referred to – the humanitarian ones in China – is not within our remit.”
But nations do not spend billions of dollars on international sporting extravaganzas just because they like curling. China is credibly accused of committing crimes against humanity in its treatment of the Uyghur people. The Chinese regime has eroded civil rights and freedoms in Hong Kong and systematically discriminated against minority groups, including in Tibet. As Freedom House noted in its most recent report, “China’s authoritarian regime has become increasingly repressive in recent years”.
The Winter Olympics are a fig leaf to shroud these actions, a potent platform for soft power projection. China is not unique in using sport in this way – sportswashing has a long history (Russia has been a major proponent, hosting the 2014 Winter Olympics and 2018 World Cup, while in 2017 Turkmenistan, often labelled the North Korea of Central Asia, hosted the Asian Indoor Games). By lending its credibility to Russia, Turkmenistan and now China, the IOC cannot disclaim the political consequences – the mass detention of the Uyghur people is hardly outside its “remit”.
Even on issues firmly within its remit – such as press freedom, which is enshrined in the Olympic Charter – the IOC is found wanting. On Tuesday, the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China accused the local organising authorities of blocking access and harassing foreign journalists. Given the ongoing detention of a Chinese-Australian journalist, the rapid departure of the last remaining Australian correspondents last year and China’s explicit hostage-taking, Australian media intending to travel to Beijing in February will be facing significant risk.
Whenever I write about the intersection between sport and politics, I receive extensive criticism – it is probably the most fraught topic I cover. Disagreement takes two forms. There is frequent whataboutism – how can you criticise China, or Saudi Arabia, for sportswashing, given Australia’s own human rights failings? As one tweeter asked, should we boycott the Brisbane 2032 Games? But there is a qualitative difference between Australia’s well-documented human rights shortcomings – offshore detention of refugees, a failure to address Indigenous disadvantage – and the arbitrary detention of up to a million people on the basis of their ethnicity. Equally, calling out the latter does not mean excusing the former.
The other critique, most salient as the Winter Olympics loom, is why we should expect anything more than silence from our athletes. In the context of Formula One – a sport which holds races in a number of countries led by repressive regimes – one commenter offered: “Daniel [Ricciardo] is a driver, he is not a political/human rights expert.” Most Winter Olympians will have trained for years with a singular focus on the 2022 Games; many may quite reasonably wish to keep their head down and focus on the sport.
But athletes have long used their voice for good. Perhaps the most famous Olympics image in history, from the 1968 Games, saw Tommie Smith and John Carlos raise their fists on the podium; Australia’s Peter Norman wore an Olympic Project for Human Rights badge in solidarity. The global sporting movement’s Black Lives Matters advocacy is a more recent example, as is sporting support for climate action. Athletes may not necessarily be human rights experts. But they can read. And the evidence on human rights violations in China is extensive and damning.
All of which means that, in the months ahead, Australia’s Winter Olympians will be forced to make a difficult choice. It is an invidious position to be in – one forced upon them by the IOC, which in my view has abdicated moral responsibility. Speak up about human rights abuse in China, and the IOC’s silence and arguable complicity? Or stay silent and be accused of complicity themselves?”
