Olympic Value

The Olympics are finally over. While they are supposed to be about the athletes and the competition, they really haven’t served either very well for a long time. With so much money at stake for athletes, the sportsmanship of the games has taken a back seat to the quest of victory at all costs. The science of cheating has become a huge industry while so call martial artists attack officials over disputed calls. Somewhere the games have lost their way.

Remember the controversy that was raised when Beijing was picked to host the 2008 games? China’s human rights record was brought to the forefront of the news. The Olympic torch relay was constantly threatened by protest all over the planet. The plight of Tibet was all the rage and for a minute there it seemed that the world was pulling together in such a way that real, positive change was just around the corner. It is amazing how much leverage can be called into play when so much money is at stake.

Once the athletes started arriving in Beijing, the media focus shifted to them. No longer was the decades old subjection of Tibet the issue of the day, now it was the air pollution over Beijing and the negative impact it was going to have on the competitors. With the world watching, China took extraordinary measures to improve the quality of air over the city.

The Olympics are over and thus so is the leverage they afforded the world to help those in need. The games may have lost a lot of their pertinence to amateur athletes, but they offer a huge opportunity to bring the world together in the spirit of true friendship. Perhaps the lessons learned from these games will go a long way to permanently improve the air quality in Beijing. Maybe the awareness of the plight of Tibetans is immutably etched on all our minds. These are real, tangible benefits that have come out these games.

Let us not forget that China publicly guaranteed that protest demonstrations would be allowed at the games as long as the protestors had submitted the proper application and gained approval. Out of seventy seven applicants, zero were approved. Several applicants disappeared after submitting their applications while two women, Wu Dianyuan, 79, and Wang Ziuying, 77, have been sentenced to a year of “re-education through labour” after they sought a permit to demonstrate in one of the official Olympic protest areas. It is important that we take care to keep the seventy seven protest applicants in our thoughts. I can only imagine the risk they took when they trusted the world’s eyes would protect them in a system where their personal rights and freedoms are never guaranteed.

“The first principal of nonviolent action is that of noncooperation with everything humiliating.”
- Cesar Chavez (1927-1993)