Protests and Change in the Olympics

Protests and Change in the Olympics

Over the past several months the international community, well beyond sport, has found itself compelled to address what the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has long established as its Rule  50.

Rule 50 of the IOC’s Charter states that “No kind of demonstration or political, religious or racial propaganda is permitted in any Olympic sites, venues or other areas.”

The foregoing Rule has its origins in the concept of the Olympic Truce of the Olympic Games of antiquity – Ancient Greece when participating states agreed to put aside their conflicts to allow their citizens to participate in the spectacular display of physical competition.

While the founders of the modern Olympics sought to link their initiative to those of the organisers of the Ancient Olympics, it took several years before the concept of an Olympic Truce could be broadly acknowledged by the United Nations. However, one would be decidedly hard-pressed to find evidence that the Olympic Truce persuaded any countries engaged in a war to cease the conflict in which it was engaged for the duration of any edition of the Olympic Games.

In 1916, the Olympic Games, due to be celebrated in Berlin, Germany, was cancelled because of the first world war.

When the Games were held in Antwerp, Belgium, four years later, Austria, Bulgaria, Germany, Hungary and Turkey, were not allowed to participate because they had been defeated in the first world war.

The Olympics of 1940 and 1944 were cancelled because the second world war was in full swing.

The aforementioned showed that international political conflict was far more important to global society than the Olympic Truce’s impact on warring nations.

Somehow, since its inception, much has been debated about the IOC and its role in society. Sport is integral to society. The IOC itself was spawned out of a combination of initiatives around the world at the time, which addressed a role for sport in modern society.

While Pierre de Coubertin has been credited with founding the modern Olympics, antecedents are to be found in Robert Dover’s Cotswold Olimpick of 1612, L’Olympiade de la Republique of Paris, France (1796), William Penny Brookes’ Much Wenlock Games (1850), and the  Zappan Games (1859). Brookes was credited with having invited de Coubertin to attend his Much Wenlock Games in 1890.

The IOC was formed in 1894 and the first edition of the modern Olympics held in 1896.

Interestingly, the wealthy personages that established the modern version of the Games thought it best that it be essentially an exclusive grouping that should forever lead the organisation rather than allow it to be open to the broader democratic theoretical constructs that were taking root in societies all across the world.

To this day, the IOC is made up of a majority of invited personages who determine the course of the history of the Olympic Games and the Olympic Movement that has come to be associated with them.

Contradictions

Importantly, some scholars argue that the idea of declaring the Olympic Games exempt from protest was conceptualised by the IOC under the American president of the organisation, Avery Brundage. It was he who brought to the fore the concept of enacting legislation forbidding political demonstrations of any sort at the Games. This was eventually enshrined in the Olympic Charter and mushroomed into what is today, Rule 50.

The members of the IOC, custodians of both the Games and the Olympic Movement, have been able to maintain effective control of all aspects of both institutions since 1896. Changes to the institutions have, more often than not, been as much in response to political protestations as to scandals.

There was of course the battle of the sexes that eventually led the IOC to capitulate to the growing protestations of women for equal rights. After many years, the Olympics eventually opened to engaging female participants, mimicking broader global society bowing under pressure from feminists everywhere. As with all social institutions, the IOC and its major product, the Olympic Games, eventually finds it necessary to accommodate the changes taking place around them.

The sporting debacle that became known as the Salt Lake City Scandal, revealed the soft underbelly on the exclusive club that was the IOC. Evidence unearthed revealed that several IOC members were engaged in activities tantamount to accepting favours of one sort or another in exchange for their vote in support of Salt Lake City’s bid to host the Winter Olympics.

Embarrassed and ashamed, the IOC called upon a high-powered Commission led by former US Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, to lead what may best be ostensibly described as ‘the process of change’.

The ‘democratisation’ of the IOC gave rise to making avenues for the inclusion of voices from athletes and National Olympic Committees and other components of society but left the main feature of individuals being essentially in control of the institution.

In the mix, Rule 50 has been systematically strengthened rather than relaxed.

Even as the IOC sought to ‘control’ the conduct of athletes and other participants at the Olympics via Rule 50, the same organization has allowed for some very strange activities under its banner.

Up until the selection of Sydney as host of the Olympic Games of 2000, the IOC did not have in place the mechanisms to stem the tide of ‘arrangements’ that allowed bidding cities to curry favour with IOC members to garner votes.

The Kitsap Sun edition dated 23 January 1999 featured an AP Report out of Lausanne, Switzerland that read in part, “The night before Sydney was awarded the 2000 Summer Games, the Australian Olympic chief sat down to dinner with two African IOC members in the swank Riviera resort of Monte Carlo.

During the course of the evening, he offered his two guests $70,000 in inducements to vote for Sydney, which defeated Beijing by two votes the next morning.

Details of that 1993 encounter were disclosed Friday, the latest and one of the most dramatic elements of the rapidly growing Olympic corruption scandal that threatens the IOC’s leadership and the stability of the 2000 and 2002 games.

The article continued, “The perception will be quite damaging to Sydney,” said Kevan Gosper, Australia’s senior IOC executive board member. “It’s a very serious revelation. I think a lot of people will be destabilized.”

Australian newspapers reported that John Coates, president of the Australian Olympic Committee and a leader of the 2000 Sydney bid, said he offered $35,000 each to the national Olympic committees of Kenya and Uganda.

The offers were made to IOC members Charles Mukora of Kenya and Maj. Gen. Francis Nyangweso of Uganda on Sept. 22, 1993, the night before the vote, according to Coates.

“I thought it was necessary for us to show our commitment to those NOCs with a view to winning those votes,” Coates told Saturday’s Sydney Morning Herald. “My view was it might encourage them to consider their votes for Sydney.”

Sydney won 45-43 in the secret balloting in Monaco.

At a news conference in Sydney Saturday (Friday night EST), Coates confirmed the payment plan but again said the money was intended to help finance sports in Kenya and Uganda rather than a bribe. He said he pledged the money because he felt Sydney’s chances were “slipping away.”

Coates is now an IOC Vice President and heads the IOC’s Coordination Commission for the Tokyo2020 Olympics.

Changing society

The IOC’s Athletes Commission has come out in favour of the retention of Rule 50. Part of its seeming justification reads, “When an individual makes their grievances, however legitimate, more important than the feelings of their competitors and the competition itself, the unity and harmony as well as the celebration of sport and human accomplishment are diminished.”

Clearly, some issues have not been adequately addressed in respect of the foregoing comment.

We are living in a world where, in the 21^st century, when we would otherwise consider ourselves the most advanced of civilisations, we are being dragged back into the darkest recesses of discrimination of all sorts.

Systemic racism is but only one form of discrimination that threatens contemporary civilisation with its destruction. If this was limited to only one society, however advanced, it could have been possible to ignore its consequences, even though that would still be wrong.

Instead, systemic racism is rearing its ugly head in every part of the world today and in all aspects of society. This is what makes it so debilitating and horrifying. We failed to acknowledge its resurgence as a behemoth, right before our eyes because we did not wish to see it for what it is.

Today, women are still the object of the worst types of abuse. Ethnic genocide is still in fashion and continues to be promoted in several nations. Some nations openly decimate segments of their populations merely for holding a different perspective on governance and liberty.

Interestingly when the IOC was asked by many international groups to stay its hand on awarding Beijing the Olympics of 2008 because of human rights abuses, nothing happened. In seeming defiance of mounting evidence, the IOC is returning to Beijing for the Winter version of the Olympics in 2022.

Meanwhile globally, outside of the IOC’s athletes commission, an ever-increasing number of athletes of different sports have taken a knee or an appropriate stance determined by their consciences, at major competitions, and have engendered appropriate actions by sports administrators, business leaders and wealthy people of influence, to effect major changes to the status quo.

Still, some organisations choose to influence athletes to allow themselves to be corralled into accepting directives as to where and when they should protest.

The idea of protest is often associated with the element of surprise, avoidance of anticipation of precisely what to expect and when. Tommie Smith and John Carlos chose the 200m victory podium at the Olympics of Mexico City, 1968, to each raise his clenched, black-gloved fist. For that, they lost their medals and banned for life. The Australian who separated them in the event, claiming the silver medal, Peter George Norman, understanding the ‘cause’ espoused by the American athletes, accepted and wore on his uniform on the same podium, a badge of the Olympic Project for Human Rights, in support. He knew and understood the sad plight faced by the native population of his native Australia. For that, he was banned for life by his Olympic bosses.

For the Olympic Movement, bribing IOC members was not at the time banned and no one was banned for life for accepting bribes for votes, but athletes, taking a clear stand for justice, had the global ignominy of literally being de-frocked, humiliated and chastised.

One is left to ponder, where was the IOC’s voice for the native American sports icon, Jim Thorpe, or Jesse Owens or Cassius Clay, all victims of systemic racism.

While international athletes ponder what to do about protests at the Olympic Games, many in different societies across the same world in which we live, are daily victims of discrimination of one sort or another.

Whither sport and society.