Should Canada Boycott Olympic Games?

Source: By JAMES DEACON, AOL Sports

Posted: 04/30/08 2:21PM

Filed Under: Columnists

Tibet is a long way from anywhere. It’s isolated high in the Himalayas in southeastern China — half of Mount Everest is in Tibet — and getting there is no mean feat. Not many outsiders visit the country, and 99 out of 100 people on the street likely wouldn’t be able to find it on a world map. (The same is true for Ottawa, but that’s another story.)

The Internet and cellular phones, however, connect the most isolated regions to the rest of the planet, and as a result we’ve been seeing images of violent confrontations between Chinese authorities and protesting Tibetan monks in their red robes that look uncomfortably like the horrors of the Tiananmen Square uprising in 1989.

Officials claim 10 protesters have been killed in the clashes; unofficial sources suggest the death toll is 10 times that number.

This has to do with sports because many countries have begun to exert diplomatic pressure on China, and the easiest leverage is threatening to boycott this summer’s Olympic Games. There will be pressure on the Canadian Olympic Committee to join that boycott if the Chinese government continues its vicious clampdown in Tibet, and some of that pressure will come from home: Prime Minister Stephen Harper already has issues with Chinese policies, and the federal government pays the majority of the amateur-sport bills.

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It’s a lot to ask that Olympic athletes care about the 2.7 million residents of Tibet, let alone join the boycott of this summer’s Olympic Games. For many competitors the Beijing Games are their once-in-a-lifetime opportunity — there’s still anger among older members of the sport community over the 1980 boycott that blocked their participation in the Moscow Summer Games. And athletes, because of the single-minded focus required to reach world-class levels in sport, tend not to be politically aware.

But there are always bigger issues than athletic aspirations. Human rights, for instance. Tibetan dissenters, including the former ruler, the Dalai Lama, have been jailed or forced into exile for more than a half century. Tibet was a self-governing country with its own culture and ethnicity until 1952, when it was violently annexed by Chairman Mao’s communist China.

Athlete advocates will say, rightly, that the rest of the world stood by and did practically nothing in the early ‘50s — Tibet was even farther away and harder to get to back then, and in the Cold War it possessed no real strategic value to the then superpowers.

But two wrongs don’t get anything right. And that was then. Now, with the conflict playing out on computers and TVs worldwide, it’s impossible to ignore, especially with the prospect of China hosting this summer’s Games. It was supposed to be China’s coming-out party, but at the moment there’s a stench surrounding the event, and it isn’t just the smog. The 2008 Games pose an ethical dilemma for every guest: it’s like being invited to the birthday party of someone who’s been convicted of beating their kids.

There’s a popular argument that politics should stay out of sports, and vice-versa, but politics ensured China would get the Games in the first place. Long-time International Olympic Committee czar Juan Antonio Samaranch steered the bid process and practically gift-wrapped the event for the Chinese. Samaranch had lofty ambitions: he believed the Olympics had the power to promote world peace, and suggested that hosting the Games would encourage the totalitarian Chinese regime, post-Tiananmen, to treat dissenters with greater respect. Of course, Samaranch also fancied himself a potential Nobel laureate.

A little farther back in Olympic history, Canada did try to separate politics from sport. We and other reluctant entrants, including a U.S. team led by Jesse Owens, went to the 1936 Summer Games in Berlin despite already-grave misgivings about the new German chancellor, Adolf Hitler. We all know how that worked out.

I feel badly for the athletes who lost their chance in 1980. Aside from the Afghans, they had the most to lose. The Games only come around every four years, and these kids train for years for the chance to compete at the highest level. “We don’t want to see the Games boycotted,” says Jasmine Northcott, executive director of the Ottawa-based advocacy group AthletesCan, “because we don’t want our athletes to miss out on their opportunities to compete in an Olympics.”

But giving the diplomatic finger to the Soviets was the right thing to do because what the Soviets did was horrifically wrong. Afghanistan has never recovered. On the plus side, historians say the Afghan invasion was one of the issues that accelerated the collapse of the Soviet empire and the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Canadian and American athletes in 1980 felt like pawns in a political game, in part because the Games still went on without the boycotting nations. Eastern Block competitors felt the same way when their countries boycotted the Los Angeles Games.

If the IOC wants to even the playing field and pursue its ambition to foster world peace, it should take the boycott decision away from individual countries. It should simply announce that what is happening in Tibet contravenes the spirit of the Olympics, not to mention its contract with the host nation, and that the Games will not go on unless China finds a respectful way of dealing with the dissident monks. The IOC could then move the Games to another site — it may take awhile to prepare, but Sydney is in the same vicinity and has up-to-date facilities left over from hosting in 2000.

Tibet’s people deserve whatever help the sports world can offer. Samaranch’s successor, Jacques Rogge, has the leverage; now’s the time to use it. A boycott would be a huge sacrifice for the athletes, but there are times when they, like the rest of us, have to draw a line when it comes to defending human rights. This is one of those times: the line’s there, and the Chinese have clearly crossed it.

Contact James Deacon at JamesDeaconCA@aol.com