The Paris Olympics Will Be Extra Charged With Politics — Just Like Always

PARIS — Military theorist Carl von Clausewitz said “war is nothing but a continuation of politics by other means.” In a similar way, sport is a continuation of war by other means.

Around the world, wars are currently taking place in Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan, the Sahel region, Yemen, Burma and beyond, each presenting their own statistics of death and destruction. In the meantime, athletes from the countries participating in these wars will be taking part in the Summer Olympics, which open in Paris on July 26.

There will be no truce during the Paris Games. The separation of sport and war, sport and politics, is impossible in today’s world, unless anyone really wanted to and tried to do it.

I personally noticed this close connection between sport and politics at the Sochi airport at the end of February 2014, the day after the Winter Olympics ended. Some television operators were moving straight to Crimea and waiting for flights to Kyiv to reach the hottest places on the peninsula on time. When the games ended, the first phases of Russia’s annexation of Crimea began.

Eight years later, at the opening ceremony of the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics, Russian President Vladimir Putin, in a private conversation, promised his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, to wait until the games ended to launch his invasion of Ukraine. Could sport and war, sport and politics, be even closer to one another?

Authorities are concerned with the influence of sport on their market and their citizens. They want to show that it is thanks to the government that the country is flourishing and people are living more prosperously — hence the sporting successes. And for the rest of the world — for the country to shine as a powerful, healthy, modern, with an aspirational society, even if, upon closer inspection, it turns out that it is not necessarily for gays, dissenters, women, blacks, whites, etc. If we buy good old English football clubs, we can’t be that bad, right?

So the owners of Premier League clubs are Saudis, Chinese, Emiratis, Thais and Pakistanis. Since we’re hosting the World Cup, we can’t be that bad. So Russia, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, etc. organize. If the Olympic circus is coming to my country, I can’t be bad. After all, bad countries don’t organize World Cups or Olympic Games.

For a good image and jealous glances, the Russians would double the transport of gas at dumping prices, the Saudis would extract oil against OPEC, the Israelis would give Pegasus to the Iranians, and the Chinese would give subsidies for American electrics and solar panels.

But why? Sports are much cheaper and yet so effective.

Ukrainian athletes

I know that sports are a kind of war in times of peace. But now also during the war.

Olympic sport was invented partly to improve, refine and ultimately replace military activity. It acted a bit like the Church: taking over pagan holy days into its calendar under new names.

The modern pentathlon, shooting, wrestling, boxing, fencing, etc. all have their origins in this very intention. No wonder words and meanings got mixed up. That editors of serious publications warn authors writing about sports not to use war terms, and authors writing about war not to reduce the seriousness of the situation with sports comparisons.

But in modern times, it is impossible to separate these two worlds also in the verbal sphere. I have often talked with athletes who used war terms because they found themselves at war in the stadium today.

High jumper Yaroslava Mahuchikh painted her nails yellow and blue, and won a gold medal.

On February 24, 2022, high jumper Yaroslava Mahuchikh, a medalist at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, was awakened by explosions in Dnipro. She jumped out of bed, called her parents and — after finding out what was happening — they decided to go together to a nearby village that seemed safer than the city. In the village with her family, she and others quickly developed a defense mechanism: hiding in the basement at the first sound of bullets.

Mahuchikh was one of the first to leave the invaded country to compete in the World Indoor Championships in Belgrade. Along with the trainer, her husband and their son, she drove for 72 hours to the border with Moldova. In Belgrade, she painted her nails yellow and blue, and won a gold medal.

According to the latest information from the Olympic Committee, 422 Ukrainian athletes have died in the war, and 345 sports facilities have been destroyed — 95 completely — in 45 places across Ukraine. These include the main tennis center in Irpin and the athletics hall in Mariupol.

Not a new history

But the history of politics in the Olympic Games is not a new one.

The first strictly political Olympic manifestation was the Games in Antwerp, Belgium, in 1920. They took place shortly after World War I and just after the Spanish flu pandemic, during which approximately 50 million people died around the world (in comparison, COVID-19 killed approximately 6.8 million). The countries defeated in the war (Austria, Germany, Bulgaria, Hungary and Turkey) were not invited to the Antwerp Games because they were then considered to have unleashed all this hell, at the time considered to be the height of barbarism.

Yet the real beginning of the relationship between politics and sport came in 1936, when the International Olympic Committee granted Germany the right to organize the games, even before Adolf Hitler took full power in the country. When the Nazis did, in 1933, several countries, including the United States (but not Poland) threatened a boycott, mainly under pressure from Jewish circles horrified by the repression of Jews in the Third Reich.

But there was no boycott. Journalists went and described the games a bit like we in Poland described Beijing 2008 or Sochi 2014: They talked about the sport undertaken by the regime with open arms, because it was already recognized as an ideal propaganda tool, one of a kind.

Also in 1936, the IOC entrusted the following Games to Imperial Japan. But the world was not interested in sports both in 1940, when they were to be held in Tokyo, and in 1944, when they were to be hosted by London, and the Games were cancelled. When they came back to life in 1948, Germany and Japan were again not invited because they had unleashed hell (and this time, historians had no doubts).

The first escape from the “Eastern Bloc” took place in London: Czechoslovakian gymnast Marie Provazniková remained in Great Britain after the 1948 Summer Olympics.

Countries boycott

It was only a matter of time before the boycotts came. The first was in Melbourne in 1956. The Chinese did not come because Taiwan took part. The Dutch, Swedes and Spaniards did not come because the IOC invited the USSR, whose army had just bloodily pacified the uprisings in Hungary. Egypt, Iraq and Lebanon boycotted the games because of the Suez crisis.

In 1960, Taiwan protested and the IOC, pressured by China, forced it to use the Portuguese name for the island, Formosa. In 1964, South Africa was expelled for apartheid, and this ostracism lasted for two decades.

African countries, fresh from throwing off colonialism, realized that the Olympics were great leverage. The 1976 Montreal Games were boycotted by 20 African countries due to the presence of New Zealand. Taiwan didn’t come either, it still didn’t want to be named Formosa.

Then the West boycotted Moscow. The East boycotted Los Angeles.

Then the West boycotted Moscow. The East boycotted Los Angeles. The Iron Curtain and the USSR collapsed — the major topic of discussion at Barcelona in 1992. Suddenly, there were many more countries. For example, in addition to Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia, the Commonwealth of Independent States is still dominated by Russians. The fencers of the golden saber team competed together: the Russian Stanisław Pozdniakow and the Ukrainian Vadym Huttsait. Today, they are mortal enemies, and front line politicians.

The status of “neutral athlete” was used for the first time: Yugoslavs, i.e. Serbs and Montenegrins, participating under UN and IOC sanctions.

Athletes protest

Then in 2008, Beijing wanted to show the world the image of an exemplary superpower where everything and everyone runs like clockwork — if only they turned off the West’s YouTube and Facebook.

In 2014, Putin, who allowed his colleagues to earn money while building the Sochi Olympics, also presented the world with beautiful images — and won a stack of medals thanks to pharmacological doping and fraud. Western leaders did not want to see this and did not come to the event.

But protests quickly ceased to be the domain of governments. Athletes got involved. Black Americans with Black Power in Mexico in 1968. Australian Aborigines at the 2000 Sydney Olympics. In 2008 in Beijing, Tibetans, Uyghurs and Sudanese from Darfur. Why the latter, someone will ask. China supported the regime that committed genocide there. The flag-bearer of the U.S. team was Lopez Lomong, a Sudanese-American and survivor of the Lost Boys of Sudan group.

And finally, terrorists also realized quite early that the Olympics were the perfect platform to spread fear. Then came Black September, the tragedy in Munich in 1972 and the famous words of the head of the IOC: “The show must go on”.

Room for romance

During the Paris Olympics, the world should be prepared for a lot. We live in a time when every potential participant in such an event — a fan, athlete, politician, activist or even terrorist – has the opportunity to reach a large group of people with their message — the smartest or the stupidest, the sincere or the deceitful.

Broadcasts? Yes. Social media? Ready. Audience? The largest in the world: several billion.

Several dozen Russians will go to the Olympics. In Russia, no one will punish them for participating in the competitions, although they will look askance (and some national federations immediately said that their athletes would not go to Paris). The Ukrainians will be scrutinizing each Russian before the IOC, to see if he has said or written something disqualifying: about Putin, about the war. Or maybe he was a member of the military CSKA or the Dynamo police? That would also disqualify him.

There is no room for romantic stories like the ones from the Paris Games in 1924.

The war in Gaza has also multiplied emotions. There will probably also be acts of personal protest. A large number of athletes from Muslim countries will boycott athletes from Israel. That is not new, but with the ongoing war in Gaza, there will be more people willing to isolate Israelis.

The arguments are serious. The Israeli state’s self-defense has exceeded the proportional level, the number of civilian casualties is still growing, millions of people are displaced. As Nathan Thrall, the Jerusalem-based American author of the brilliant book One Day in the Life of Abed Salama, asked bitterly in the podcast “Report on the State of the World”: Is there any definition of a democratic state in which millions of people from one ethnic group have been deprived of basic civil rights for over half a century?

Today, competitive sports are about big money and a technological and athletic arms race. There is no room for romantic stories like the ones from the first games in which the Polish team took part, exactly 100 years ago in Paris. Like the one about the sports shooter Marian Borzemski, who bought a pistol with his last francs an hour before the start of the competition. The film “Chariots of Fire” was made about the athletes in Paris in 1924, an ode to the era of innocence in sports. We miss it. And we want to see the bright side of modern sports again.