Don't mix politics and Olympics
By Ferd Lewis
Advertiser Staff Columnist
In the wake of the reconnaissance plane incident and China's refusal so far to return the EP-3, there are those who want to sink Beijing's 2008 Summer Olympic bid in retribution.
"A price has to be paid," is the way some in Washington D. C. have put it in recent days.
Some in Congress seek a resolution opposing Beijing's bid. They want American members of the International Olympic Committee to cast ballots for the other contenders — Istanbul Osaka, Paris or Toronto — when a site is chosen July 13th.
Lost in the chest-pounding is that the Olympics are an international sporting event. One, that as its modern father, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, intended a century ago, is designed to help promote peace. And the plane incident is a bilateral issue that has nothing to do with sports.
If attempts to mix politics and the Olympics have shown anything, it is that using one to leverage the other is often a futile gesture as the Cold War boycotts illustrated.
And, if five decades of dealing with Communist regimes in China have taught us anything, it should be that the more they are ostracized the more they tend to pull back. And the more intransigent their leadership becomes.
That China is ruled by a repressive government with an abysmal human rights record is clear. But the best way to bring about change is by bringing this most populous of countries more into the international mainstream. Not by slamming the door and further stoking nationalistic paranoia of a land of 1.2 billion people.
As Wang Dan, a leader of the 1989 pro-democracy Tiananmen Square protests, who spent more than six years in prison, has argued, putting the Olympics in the Middle Kingdom's capital, "would accelerate China's opening to the rest of the world."
Hosting the Olympics doesn't come close to conferring sainthood. If human rights were the most important qualification for hosting the Games, a lot fewer medals would need to be minted.
For all the bluster that politicians in Washington might like to expend, to think the U. S. will determine who gets these Games is fanciful. Even though U. S. corporations underwrite a major portion of the games, America's ballot box influence in the IOC, where it has but four of the 126 votes, is limited.
But the biggest reason for Washington to stay out of the Olympic process is the separation of sport and politics.
After the bombs fell on the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, China's hardliners wanted to keep their women's soccer team home and boycott the 1999 World Cup in the U. S.
Instead, the leadership correctly drew a line between sports and politics. China made the trip and the two countries played a memorable overtime match.
The hope is that Washington will be wise enough to draw the same distinction and keep its hands off the Olympic process.
