Fixing Olympia
By Khaled Diab
Finding an uncontroversial host for the Olympics is a tricky business.
The games need a permanent site on neutral territory.
August 2008
The Beijing Olympics promise to be one of the
most spectacular in the history of the games. But events on the political track
and field kicked off months ago, with China receiving heavy criticism for its human
rights record, democracy deficit and the Tibetan question. To add to
China’s problems, separatists
in Xinjiang, which neighbours Tibet but is little known in the wider world,
have even set off their own deadly fireworks.
While I am as outraged as others by the
regime’s heavy-handedness, similar accusations can and have been levelled at
previous hosts, and can easily be directed at future ones. In fact, numerous
Olympics have been boycotted since the games were revived in 1894.
The first time this occurred was in Melbourne
in 1956, where three European countries did not attend the games in protest
against the crushing of the Hungarian
Uprising, while several developing countries stayed away in protest against
the Suez
Crisis and the tripartite invasion of Egypt. Later boycotts included, in
1980 and 1984, the two superpowers of the Cold War refusing to attend each
other’s games.
The Olympics have also been used for shameless
propaganda. The most notable case was the 1936
games in Nazi Berlin. The silver lining was the sportsmanship exhibited by
German athlete Luz Long who helped the African-American athlete Jesse Owens to
win the long jump – a poignant gesture of subversion against Nazi race politics
and American racial segregation.
And the use of the Olympics as a platform for political
propaganda and protest is unlikely to stop in the future. The 2012 games will
be held in London, perhaps in a bid to overcome the damage to the UK’s
international reputation caused by its military misadventures. But just as
people demanded the boycotting of the Beijing Olympics because of Tibet, in the
next cycle, we are likely to hear calls for the boycotting of the London games
in protest against the illegal invasion of Iraq and its dire consequences.
So, what’s the answer?
Well, the Olympics cannot be entirely divorced
from politics since the Olympic ideal is itself political: it seeks to make of
sport an arena where countries can cast aside their political differences and
build understanding through friendly competition. On a side note, wouldn’t it
be great if we could revive one of the ancient Olympian ideals and make it
obligatory for all participating countries involved in a conflict to call a
truce for the length of the games?
In order to ensure that the gamers are a place
to forget political differences and not highlight them, I believe we need to
rethink radically the way in which the games are organised. Instead of hosting
it in a different country each time, I propose that we borrow from another
ancient Olympian tradition and hold the games at a permanent venue but one that
is on neutral international territory.
But finding an appropriate location would be
problematic. “It’ll be hard to decide where to put it, though,” Brian Whitaker
observed when I proposed the idea to him, suggesting perhaps Olympia in Greece.
That would certainly have a powerful symbolic advantage, but some of Greece’s
neighbours might have objections to this.
To avoid the political wrangling that would
inevitably arise in deciding where to locate a permanent Olympic venue, I would
propose that the International Olympic Committee invited interested countries
to bid a tiny part of their country which would be declared, rather like the UN
headquarters, neutral international territory.
The different candidate sites would be put up
for an international vote and the selected one would immediately become a
non-political international zone. In addition, an international fund would be
set up to construct a fully equipped Olympic city with all the necessary
sporting facilities and accommodation.
Not only would this depoliticise the Olympics,
it would also avoid the massive economic waste associated with the rotating
venues we currently have, since, after the initial investment, there would only
be maintenance costs.
This column appeared in The Guardian Unlimited’s Comment is Free section on 7
August 2008. Read the related
discussion.
ã2008 – Khaled Diab.
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