This year’s Olympic games were one for the books. The world watched, enamored, as Simone Biles won gold after gold, as Turkish Yusuf Dikec nonchalantly walked to the stand and fired bullseye after bullseye, as Australian Rachael Gunn did her best interpretation of a kangaroo interpreting the movement of a dying fish.
For a few weeks every other year, people worldwide cheer for their country regardless of everything they believe they’re doing wrong this year. It’s one of the few times I feel patriotism unmarred by atrocity and feel connected to even the most polar opposite people of my country through a shared sense of nationhood. One could easily extrapolate that as the Olympics is a time of domestic interconnection, it is also one of international peace. That seems not to be the case.
When French historian Baron Pierre de Coubertin founded the modern Olympics in 1894, he did so under the ideal of “promoting peace through sport.” In an effort to promise peace and the opportunity for interstate dialogue between state leaders, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has to make a promise of neutrality, what scholars call “amoral universalism.” A branch of global cosmopolitanism that claims nonpartisanship, amoral universalism has proven to be a difficult ideal to uphold.
The Olympics seem to be an inherently paradoxical event. How one promotes peace by pitting states against one another contradicts all initial reasoning. Founded on a paradox, the Olympics seem to naturally be filled with contradictions. Amoral universalism is a nearly impossible value to uphold when the event consists of inherently partisan states. It’s simply naive to assume that it’s possible to isolate this large sporting event from the conditions that shape each state and individual. The Olympics are a reflection of the geopolitics of the period they exist in. Inherently, they cannot exist separate from the world, and therefore cannot possibly claim to be amoral.
The IOC also unevenly enforces its own rules over neutrality. Russia has been banned from competing under its flag since 2017 when a large-scale doping scheme was uncovered. For three Olympics, Russian athletes have competed as Olympic Athletes from Russia (OAR) or the Russian Olympic Committee (ROC). That’s not even the most controversial part. The 2024 Paris Olympics, which just finished a few months ago, saw Russian and Belarusian athletes compete as Individual Neutral Nations and effectively banned from all team sports events as punishment for their actions in the Ukraine War. The IOC has been accused of violating its official doctrine of neutrality and amorality in punishing these nations while forgoing the atrocities in dozens of other state conflicts around the globe. If it so chose to, the IOC could punish China for its treatment of the Uyghur population, Israel for its bombardment of Palestine and Lebanon, or Afghanistan’s implementation of gender apartheid. Myanmar’s own athlete stated that the country should be expelled for its genocide of the Rohingya Muslim population. Instead of focusing on any other atrocity anyone with access to the internet can see, the IOC chooses to focus all its energy on one singular state. Though the IOC claims to be apolitical, they also claim in this way to be politically effective. To both assert neutrality and advocate global peace is a strange paradox.
Ideally, says Associate Professor at the University of Southern California Robert English, Russia and Belarus are essentially banned from the 2024 Olympics in an effort to add yet another sanction to pressure Russia into giving up the war on Ukraine. In reality, he writes, “it will have zero such effect and mainly serves to further alienate ordinary Russians from the West.” That’s not to say that the IOC should have not punished Russia and Belarus, or that the IOC should be kicking out all aggressive states, but simply to engage in dialogue around the IOC’s severely uneven enforcement of when to maintain neutrality and when to act as a global peacemaker. In this specific case, the IOC went so far as to announce that all athletes and support personnel who “actively support the [Ukraine] war” are banned from Olympic premises. They have claimed neutrality in dozens of other global conflicts. One cannot claim to be both apolitical and politically effective and expect not to be criticized for hypocrisy.
Though officially a neutral playing ground, the Olympics have always been used as a stage from which to showcase national strength. In the 2016 Rio Games, Kosovan athlete Majlinda Kemeldi took gold in women’s judo – the first Olympic medal Kosovo had ever won. Kosovo utilized this prestige to bolster its argument for admittance by the UN as an official country. Games held during the height of the Cold War were often depicted as a competition between communist and democratic states. The Olympics have a special weight in the international community, and despite claiming neutrality, are constantly used as a conduit for nationalist competition beyond that of individual competitors.
The IOC hasn’t always been the most politically sensitive, but the Olympics themselves have provided a transnational platform for politically active athletes to obtain global reach. By far the most famous example, two black American runners raised their fists in the symbol of black power amid the turmoil of the Civil Rights Movement. This year, Afghan breakdancer Manizha Talash, who competed with the Refugee Olympic Team, wore a cape reading “free Afghan women” during her qualifying round. The move got her global attention, but ultimately a disqualification from the Olympics for violating the Olympic rule prohibiting political, religious, and racial propaganda.
Even as a supposedly apolitical entity, the Olympics provide a beacon of hope to competitors escaping persecution. The event constitutes the only time some citizens of repressive governments have the chance to take a government-sanctioned trip outside national borders. Defectors are surprisingly common at the Olympics. The phenomenon reached its peak with the height of the Cold War, but is still seen in the modern day. The 2012 London Games saw twelve athletes and coaches from Cameroon, Sudan, and Ethiopia. The 2020 Tokyo Games saw one defector from Belarus and one from Uganda. The Olympics exist in the context of the time period they exist in. It is impossible to be truly apolitical.
The Olympics are much more than an international athletic competition. They are a stage. More than three billion people watch the Olympics biyearly. That’s a bigger audience than most of these people will ever have again. Regardless of the supposedly apolitical nature of the Olympics, they can truly be politically meaningful if wielded strategically. This is the way in which the Olympics are defined by geopolitics regardless of their claim to amoral universalism. As a concept, the Olympics are an inherently paradoxical event. Both apolitical and politically effective, amoral and an advocate, both a place of nonpartisanship and a stage for protest.
Featured Image Source: Visitor Lyons
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