Avery Hammered

Thursday, December 31st, 2009 at 5:54 am

Avery Hammered

China recently demonstrated its willingness to brutally suppress budding of Tibetan sentiment. Angry protestors in Paris and elsewhere Then seized the occasion of the Olympic torch is passed to express their anger against the hosts for this year's Games. Some foreign dignitaries have acknowledged that they will not participate in certain events, and others have refused to confirm that they will travel to Beijing at all. The big B-word has been vocalized.

However, it is unlikely that a comprehensive boycott will come to pass, for two reasons. The first is that the fate of most economic powers is now more closely with China than they would make sure to admit of practical reasons that they tend to irritate a Chinese government which has made it clear that a boycott would be regarded as a national insult. The second is that more than three months remain before the opening of the Games. The human mind often maintains a very short timeframe, it is likely that the current uproar will soon come to pass. China, newly aware of the foreign attention, will defer further hammering of domestic political opponents until the closing ceremony.

But as the specter of a boycott has gone, what does effort Olympic boycott really? "One of the fundamental principles of the Olympic Games is that politics is not plays no role whatsoever in them. "These are the words of Avery Brundage, then chairman of the U.S. Olympic Committee in 1936. Brundage and American political leaders of the time sent American athletes to compete in Munich in the game as host Hitler's rising Nazi Germany. The black American sprinter Jesse Owens claimed four gold medals; Hitler refused to shake his hand or present medals to him on the stand. It was the first day of the Olympic stadium as the arena of high politics.

Athletics has since on several occasions used the Olympics for the articulation of political messages (or in 1972, again in Munich, as a phase of political action; of capture of eleven Israeli athletes by Palestinian gunmen reached an ending only with their dead after a failed rescue attempt). The first comprehensive boycott of the Olympic Games came shortly after.

Most people think first of the US-led boycott of the 1980 Moscow Games, when confronted with the notion of Olympic boycott. But the truth is that the first mass-scale politically motivated absences came at the previous 1976 games in Montreal. In the same year, a group of twenty-eight African nations refused to participate in protest at New Zealand's presence. South Africa had been banned from the Olympics since 1964 because of its apartheid regime of institutionalized racism, and these countries were angry over the previous year's South African tour of New Zealand's 'All Blacks' rugby union. Iraq and Guyana too joined the boycott, when the IOC refused to bar New Zealand from participating. Also in 1976, the IOC refused to allow Taiwan to participate under the name "Republic China ", so that only the People's Republic of China (Beijing) to bear this name. Taiwan would only compete again in 1984 under a new flag and the name" Chinese Taipei ".

After the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, issued U.S. President Jimmy Carter an ultimatum that the U.S. would boycott the Moscow games in 1980, if the Soviet troops did not withdraw in February of that year. When Soviet troops remained, the boycott was joined by Japan, West Germany, Canada, China and sixty others. United Kingdom, France and Greece were sympathetic boycott but allowed their athletes to participate of their own volition if they so wished. Italy's government also supported the boycott. They of athletes who were members of the military corps did not compete.

In 1984, the USSR responded by refusing to participate in the Los Angeles games, citing "chauvinistic feelings and an anti-Soviet hysteria whipped up in the U.S.. "USSR was joined by thirteen of its allies, while post-revolution Iran also joined, so it is the only nation to boycott both the 1980 and 1984 games.

In any gathering of international delegations, sporting or otherwise, political tensions are bound to run high. My favorite story comes from the 1956 Melbourne Olympics, when Hungary and the Soviet Union engaged in a passionate water polo match Soviet tanks rumbled into Budapest. Water was that the story goes, dyed red to match output. Melbourne also saw the first ever Olympic boycott, the Netherlands, Spain and Switzerland refused to participate because of the events in Hungary, while Cambodia, Egypt, Iraq and Lebanon boycotted because of the Suez crisis.

For better or worse, the Olympics have been the playground in high politics. But it is a great policy, which remains very symbolic. Should any major powers eventually choose to boycott Beijing, it would serve only to show their unwillingness and inability to push for real change to China's abominable human rights.

About the Author:

Jackson Kern is a contributing editor to the Alternative Channel Blog. The Alternative Channel is a website dedicated to giving non-profit organizations concerned with sustainable development, environmentalism, and humanitarian issues an online forum for their video content. You can learn more at http://www.alternativechannel.tv.

Article Source: ArticlesBase.com - Boycotting Beijing: a History of Politics at the Olympic Games

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