The International Olympic Committee claims it does not like to mix sports with politics. It claims to be unpolitical. But what just happened proves that that’s not true. A Ukrainian athlete displayed faces of fellow athletes that were killed in the war in Ukraine. Other people were allowed symbols like that. He was not.
The idea that sports can be divorced from politics does not work. It has never worked, especially not with the Olympics. It’s a pretense.
We saw that when Ukrainian athletes wanted to say something, the mics suddenly dropped off. We had Russian athletes allowed to compete on an independent label from the country that is actually waging war, and the athlete from the victim country was blocked from showing the faces of his friends.
How is that allowed? How can the IOC then make a show of crocodile tears and pretend to just follow the rules? The athlete did follow the rules because other people were allowed what he did. It’s just that what he did, people knew why these people were killed.
How is that unpolitical?
This has happened time and again. Let’s just stop kidding ourselves. For dictatorships like Russia and China, back then East Germany—I’m very familiar with that too—sports was always politics. It was the only soft power that those dictatorships have. The other soft power, well, kind of hard soft power, was the space program. But otherwise, what else was there?
The athletic competitions were when those dictatorships could excel. Same as Nazi Germany back then. You do sports because that’s the only way you can somehow demonstrate that you produce capable young people who at least can move their bodies, but they’re not allowed to move their minds.
It’s offensive. It’s outrageous what is still allowed to happen. If you think sports isn’t political, look at the Super Bowl. Of course it’s political. It’s always political. Maybe not the small games, but even there, everything to do with human beings in society is political.
Just accept it, and then once you accept this, do the right kinds of politics that does not benefit the oppressor country and honor the sacrifices of the victim country. It’s not always clear-cut who that is, but in this case it is rather clear-cut to discriminate against Ukrainian athletes while allowing Russia to compete, to silence Ukraine’s desperate screams for justice.
Well, at least this way we all found out about it and it may have backfired now, but let this be a lesson. If people say this is not about politics, it is always about politics.
Ceterum censeo Ucrainam esse defendam. Слава Україні!
[This was originally posted to YouTube as a video. This post is a slightly abbreviated transcript, preserving the oral style of the video.]
Erratic Attempts 