They don’t have to worry about a “good friend” in China when the 24th Winter Olympics begin in Beijing in ten weeks. Vladimir Putin – wait a minute, quickly look up his current job title – ah yes, Russia’s President has confirmed that he will be attending the winter party. The visit should demonstrate the “partnership between China and Russia”, China’s Foreign Ministry recently announced. You can use the opportunity in Beijing to reassure yourself with your good friend how to do it: to stage a festival of humanity as a controversial Olympic host. In 2014, before the Winter Games in Sochi, Russia brushed aside all controversial issues, from dealing with activists to freedom of the press. Putin later posed in the VIP boxes with heads of state and toasted champagne with Thomas Bach, the German President of the International Olympic Committee (IOC). Shortly thereafter, Russia invaded Crimea.
China has a negative record in terms of human rights
China’s record, as macabre as it sounds, is even worse, a negative Olympic record on human rights, if you will. There is the oppression in Tibet and Hong Kong, the alleged genocide of the Uyghurs; There has recently been the tennis player Peng Shuai, who accused one of the most powerful men in China of sexual violence – and of whom it is still not known whether she can move around and express herself in Beijing without pressure. In addition – what a creepy parallel to Sochi – China’s war rattle off Taiwan’s coasts. US President Joe Biden will likely soon announce that American officials will stay away from the Beijing Games, and other nations, including the Germans, will probably join in the wake of this diplomatic boycott. In the light of the enormous human rights problem, that is also the least that one can expect from politics.
Olympia always gives its host a stage for purposes beyond sport, and that dictators crudely use this to paint a nicely colored picture of their power is well documented. Whoever shows up in the gallery of the autocrat makes himself an accomplice of inhumanity. The argument, often chewed through by sportsmen and women, that you can influence the hosts on site in silence, between slalom running and normal hill jumping, is stale, Beijing is the best example. Around the 2008 Summer Games, many hoped that China could open up before the eyes of the world. So the world looked to the last and found: Everything is much worse than before.
It wasn’t the athletes who voted for Beijing. It was the IOC
Don’t we have to wrest the games from China completely? You can see that this question comes far too late; that no athlete who has been toiling for what may be the only moment on the Olympic stage for years voted for Beijing. That is what the IOC members did – and their vote could easily have been thwarted if the IOC had set down minimum human rights standards in its award catalog. But who cares when big business beckons with big market?
But it would also be too easy to cling to the argument that a boycott is too late now. Then, in the future, every host could invoke a temporal carte blanche. What if Beijing goes to war in the South China Sea tomorrow? But this dilemma could easily be avoided: if sport did not constantly make itself the servant of dictators and dollars.