With the Beijing 2022 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games fast approaching, headlines about the games have been dominated not by medal prospects or new events but by decidedly political matters.
Various governments, including the United States, have announced diplomatic boycotts of Beijing 2022, while human rights organizations have raised concerns about Chinese Community Party surveillance operations and the International Olympics Committee’s (IOC) decision to hold the Olympics in China again, despite evidence that the state is torturing and imprisoning hundreds of thousands of Muslims in Xinjiang province.
At a virtual SFS event on February 2, two days before the Beijing 2022 opening ceremony, Paralympian and alumna Aimee Mullins (SFS’98) and sports diplomacy expert and SFS Professor Victor D. Cha delved into these issues in a conversation that explored the pressure faced by athletes competing on the global stage, the factors that determine Olympics host city decisions and the power of sport to transcend even the thorniest of international disputes.
“How Can Politics Not Come Into It?”
After opening remarks from SFS alumnus and Georgetown track and field athlete Jack Van Scoter (SFS’20), moderator Marie Harf, SFS executive director of external relations, began the discussion by asking Mullins to share insights into her personal experience as an athlete representing the United States at the Paralympics.
“The promise of the Olympics, and the hope of the Olympic spirit [is] fostering shared common values. This is the whole premise that the IOC wants to promote, that sport is beyond politics,” she said. “Of course, we know that when you put on a uniform that is the flag of your country, how can politics not come into it?”
Drawing on her SFS education in philosophy and ethics encouraged Mullins to think more critically about her athletic career, she remarked, prompting her to consider more deeply the “romantic vision of competing for your country.”
In 2008, the Bush administration approached Mullins with a request to represent the United States in the opening ceremony of that year’s games, also held in Beijing. “Something in me just stuck,” she recalled. “At the time, with the war in Iraq, I did not feel that I could be the representative of the administration. Or that I wanted to be there in Beijing and shake some hands.”
She continued, “Now, I don’t know if that was right or wrong, it was just a genuine kind of crisis for me at the time.”
Current controversies surrounding Beijing 2022 weigh particularly heavily on athletes, she explained, creating a catch-22 in which they receive requests from human rights campaigners to protest the games despite an IOC ruling that prohibits them from making political statements.
“It’s not a position I envy for these athletes,” she commented.
Controversy and Competition
By drawing attention to political critiques of the Chinese state, governments’ diplomatic boycotts had compounded athletes’ anxieties, Mullins argued.
According to Cha, that was precisely what the Biden administration wanted to avoid.
“In a way, [President Biden] is actually depoliticizing the Olympics,” contended Cha. “[White House Press Secretary] Jen Psaki said, ‘we don’t want to contribute to the fanfare of the games.’ But, at the same time, they were serving to depoliticize that by removing that [diplomatic] aspect of the opening ceremony.”
With its emphasis on fair play, meritocracy and rules-based competition, sport is a “quintessentially liberal thing,” observed Cha, however “when that comes up against the surveillance of the Chinese state and all these sorts of things, this is when we really see politics and sports clashing.”
The Olympian context of international, amateur competition also contributes to the burden on athletes. “When the NBA goes to play in China, these are professional business people, they don’t get this pressure because they are not there representing their country,” he said.
A student in the audience, Sofie Rosenzweig (MSFS’22), asked if the panelists felt that sports governing bodies should shoulder more ethical responsibility and refuse to allow illiberal and authoritarian regimes to host major sporting events.
“Yes, the IOC should be more responsible about putting their athletes, support staff and everybody in a host country that has an illiberal government,” responded Mullins. Institutions such as the IOC have been inconsistent in their response to human rights violations, she said, drawing comparison between the widespread sporting boycott of apartheid South Africa and the fact that the IOC has twice awarded of Olympics hosting status to China in the last 15 years.
“I think there’s power to be leveraged there that they are not leveraging,” she remarked.
Hosting major events like the Olympics can have a liberalizing effect on authoritarian governments, replied Cha. However, he continued, “much to my disappointment, that was not the case in China!”
In 2017, the IOC announced a new Host City Contract — which will be first implemented at the 2024 Paris Games — that the body says will usher in better human rights, anti-corruption and sustainable development standards.
However, Cha remains unconvinced by the proposals.“I don’t want to sound cynical, but I think it is sort of a fig leaf, a sort of checking the box,” he said.
The Power of Spectacle
Despite the controversy surrounding the 2022 Winter Games, millions of people are expected to tune in to the opening ceremony on February 4. The lucrative potential of the Olympics’ enormous platform is also a driving force behind hosting decisions, says Cha. Corporate sponsors are keen to move into the rapidly growing consumer market in China, while the IOC is particularly interested in promoting winter sports to the country’s growing middle class.
“[The IOC] could have done it in Austria again and it would have been great, but you’re not expanding the market by doing that,” he said. “They are operating according to the laws of economics. I don’t know what you can do about that.”
Ultimately, Cha believes that the spectacle of astonishing athletic performance promised by the games will eclipse the ethical concerns of many institutions and most fans. “The performance of the athletes is too powerful a story that people can’t help but get sucked into what the Olympics are,” he remarked.
For Mullins, an athlete who has carried the physical, mental and political pressure of international competition, the Winter Games can be a transcendent experience. “The winter games are a joy and a release because I don’t do any of those sports,” she said. “I can genuinely be a spectator and watch.”