The torch relay and IOC's silence

The events of last weeks clearly show which will be the atmosphere around China and its Olympic Games in the four and half months up to August 8, when the Games will open. A campaign of unprecedented pressure on Beijing started, following Steven Spielberg’s withdrawal as an artistic consultant for the Games’ opening ceremony and the violent repression of the uprising in Tibet. Most recently, some Reporters without Borders activists briefly interrupted the Olympic flame lightning ceremony at Ancient Olympia, Greece. It is easy to imagine that other protests will disturb the journey of the Olympic torch, at least in its international route. Chinese authorities will certainly block any contestation on the Chinese part. British Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, David Miliband, already announced that his government will not stop protests during the torch’s stop in London, on April 6. Protests are also likely to happen as the flame will stop in Paris (April 7) and San Francisco (April 9). If so, the two last editions of the Olympic Games will have a great impact on this Olympic tradition. The journey of the flame of the Turin Winter Games in 2006 had already undergone systematic perturbations by political and social activists. Yet, the Turin Olympics didn’t raise any particular political problem, unlike those of Beijing. Prospective Olympic organizers would better be careful in planning torch relay routes. As another former British minister, Michael Portillo, pointed out in the Sunday Times,

the unprecedented grandiosity of the torch’s itinerary must have looked great on the drawing board. In practice, Beijing has secured a rolling programme of antiChinese protest circling the globe.

The Olympic torch relay was first introduced by Hitler’s collaborators for the 1936 Berlin Games. The Olympic symbol of the flame was then used to show Nazi power to a large part of Europe. The relay was adopted again after WWII. Before the advent of television, it was useful for the Olympic movement to pass through cities and countries. But today, bringing the Olympics among real people, outside their hyper-secured stadiums, is a bad idea.

One could wonder why the Olympic organizers still pay a fortune to organize an extravaganza whose main effect will be to cause headache to them. If the Olympic torch relay is a risky business, what is most surprising is the authorities’ reaction when it is disturbed. It looks like both the Chinese government and the IOC were not prepared to an event everyone could have foreseen. Moreover, the actions against the Olympic flame are just a metaphor for the pressures the Beijing Olympics currently undergo. The Chinese and the IOC react to protests and boycott threats by doing what they always did: the firsts didn’t change anything in their policies towards Sudan, Tibet, didn’t stop jailing dissidents and suffocating free circulation of information; the second continues supporting its anachronistic principle of separation of sports and politics. It maybe rescued the Olympic movement in the Cold War years, but nobody believes anymore to it.

Concerning the attitude of the Chinese rulers, I agree with those who claim that it is mainly due to their unskillfulness to deal with their own image outside their country, but also that this is not their main problem. Ruling 1.3 billions of Chinese is more important than listening Western activists’ and politicians’ grief. A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman defined the Olympic flame lightning action as “shameful and unpopular” when talking to foreign press; meanwhile, the Chinese newspapers and televisions employed such adjectives as “perfect” and “wonderful” to describe the ceremony.

The IOC position is more complicated. How to explain the passiveness of the Olympic authority in this matter? The words used by most commentators are “connivance” and “complicity”. But this is reductive. Like all other big international organizations, the IOC is slow in changing its habits. It almost led the city of Montreal to bankruptcy, before understanding that the Olympic needed to find autonomous sources of revenues; and it was only after Ben Johnson’s scandal that it decided to seriously fight against doping. On the other side, it is useful to take a step backwards, and to go back to the award of the Olympics to Beijing, in 2001. It was Juan Antonio Samaranch, the czar of Olympism at that time, who strongly wanted a Chinese Olympic Games as the final act of his presidency. He must have looked at it as the achievement of his twenty-year work for a new globalization of the Olympics, after the dark age of boycotts (Samaranch was appointed in 1980, in the middle of the Moscow Olympics crisis). It might be that his megalomania made him underestimate the risks of an Olympics in China; or maybe he was simply sincerely persuaded that the Olympics would have improved the situation in China, as it did for South Korea in 1988. He recently stated that assigning the Games to China was “less risky” than assigning them to the USSR in 1980. In 2001 Samaranch clearly favored Beijing’s bid, and many experts agree in emphasizing the weight of the president’s opinion in this matter. At one point, a rumor even circulated (dismissed by the IOC), that Samaranch had forced the evaluation commission to change its conclusions, in order to favor Beijing. In any case, the Beijing Olympics appear to be Samaranch’s last poisoned gift to his successor.

It is also interesting to recall the circumstances of the current president’s appointment. Jacques Rogge was elected three days after the Games were awarded to Beijing. During that IOC session, many newspapers wrote about a silent agreement between its members: the new president would not come from the continent to which the Games would have been awarded. (Rogge’s contenders were South Korea’s Kim Un-Yong and Canada’s Dick Pound). Rogge, which was Samaranch’s favorite candidate, was eventually elected, as Beijing was chosen as host for the 2008 Olympics. Of course, he had followed the IOC’s official line on China and Beijing. Yet, in 1993, when the Chinese capital first bid for the Olympics, the current IOC president had declared “I consider that the political situation in China is so unstable that we’d better ask them to wait” (quoted in A. Lunzenfichter, Athènes... Pékin (1896-2008). Choix épiques des villes olympiques). We don’t know if Rogge changed his mind in the following seven years. What we do know is that today the IOC’s official statements, as well as its silence, show its embarrassment. The Olympic leaders are today in a really uncomfortable position. They are forced to find a balance between the respect of their non-political tradition, the pressures of public opinion in the West and an embarrassing Olympic host they have to deal with. In last October, Rogge declared to the French newspaper Le Monde

we experience contestations, and we’ll experience them until the closing ceremony. I think it is normal, it is their right. There’s a worldwide event, and they take advantage of it to defend their causes, which are perfectly honorable and respectable.

The impression is that the IOC is currently trying not to displease anybody, and lets someone else do the dirty work of reminding China of its duties.