It’s too late to cancel the Sochi Olympics. But it isn’t too late to make sure Sochi is the last incredibly stupid choice of location for a major international sports event.
I appreciate the notion that such events ought to float above the political messes of the regions where they happen to be held, that they bring us together as humans, nothing to kill or die for and no religion too, and so on.
No host government will ever see it that way, though. Governments use athletic events to legitimize themselves and their projects. If Smalltown, Ontario, hosts a regional hockey championship, the mayor will give a quote to the local paper about how this is the beginning of great things for Smalltown and thank heavens the local council had the foresight to approve those renovations to the hockey arena.
In the lead-up to the 2008 Summer Games in Beijing, defenders of that choice of location kept insisting that the Games had nothing to do with legitimizing the regime’s domestic or foreign policies. But they forgot to tell that to the regime.
One of the mascots was a Tibetan antelope, and dancers performed representations of Avolokitesvara, the bodhisattva of compassion, whom many Tibetans believe is embodied in the Dalai Lama. The political message was unmistakable: Tibet is part of China, culturally as well as politically.
At the same time, China cracked down on dissent within Tibet, where photographs of the exiled Dalai Lama are banned. The whole thing was a grand, expensive exercise in moving rugs over the bloodstains, facilitated by the Olympic movement.
The effects linger. As Chinese sociologist Sun Liping wrote recently: “The Olympics marked the beginning, it can be said, of the ascendance of the stability-preservation regime in China. Looking back now, it might be that the Olympics were something we did that we ought not to have done.”
Stability preservation is code for the opposite of political reform. The argument that the Olympics would somehow spur openness and democracy in China was naïve.
It was during the Beijing Games, in August 2008, that Russia went to war against Georgian forces in South Ossetia, in the Caucasus. This is the same troubled neighbourhood that contains Chechnya, homeland of Boston’s Tsarnaev brothers. Also in that neighbourhood: Sochi, the location of the 2014 Summer Olympic Games.
What could possibly go wrong?
“The Russians will use [the Boston bombing] as an excuse to up-ratchet security precautions, which were already going to be tight and ugly,” says Eric Morse, who used to work on Olympic issues for Canada’s external affairs department.
Morse also describes the Games as a “monument to Putin.”
So the Putin legacy and repression in the Caucasus are two things we’re legitimizing by holding the Games there. Then there’s Russia’s foreign policy, which is directly linked to its belligerence in the Caucasus.
Commenting about Russia’s continuing support for the Assad regime in Syria, Israeli peace and security analyst Yossi Alpher said: “The Russians find themselves in effect defending a regime that is behaving monstrously, and that’s untenable, but when you push them ‘why,’ you find they have a real problem with their own Islamists in Muslim areas of Russia. There’s been terrorist attacks and assassinations in recent years (originating from these areas) and when they look south toward the Arab world, they are very concerned that an Islamist victory in Syria would be exported north.”
So Russia’s Syria policy, which runs directly counter to Canada’s policy, is linked to Russia’s Caucasus policy.
Any government will use sports events to legitimize something. In Canada, it’s usually money spent on transit projects or harbour developments.
In some places, it’s human-rights violations. It’s time for the countries who participate in international sports events, and the organizations that pick the winning bids, to recognize that, and think hard about what they legitimize. Let’s stop pretending the Olympics are apolitical.
