Politics have always been part of the Olymics in the modern games.
Below is a brief history of the modern Olympic games. International
sports and politics go hand in hand. When a team is representing a
country - that country has a political stake. That's just the nature of
the beast. To think international sports are just about sports is a bit
naive.
One of the most controversial Olympics were the
Berlin Games of
1936. The IOC had voted in 1931 to hold these Games in Berlin, before
IOC
members could have known the Nazi movement would soon control the
country. When
it became known in the early 1930s that under the rule of the Nazis,
German
Jewish athletes were being barred from the 1936 German team, in
violation of
the Olympic Charter, many Americans demanded a boycott of the 1936
Games. The
boycott movement failed because Avery Brundage, head of the United
States Olympic
Committee (USOC) at the time, was convinced by German officials that
Jewish
athletes would be permitted to try out for the German team
There have been several boycotts of the Olympics
by various
countries. In 1956 the Egyptian, Lebanese, and Iraqi teams boycotted
the
Melbourne Games to protest the invasion of Egypt by the United Kingdom,
France,
and Israel that had occurred earlier that year. Major boycotts of the
Olympics
occurred in 1976, 1980, and 1984. In 1976 many African nations demanded
that
New Zealand be excluded from the Montréal Games because its rugby team
had
played against South Africa, then under the rule of supporters of
apartheid. When the IOC resisted the demands of the African countries
with the argument that rugby was not an Olympic sport, athletes from 28
African
nations were called home by their governments.
The issue in the 1980 boycott of the Moscow
Games was the
invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 by the USSR. American President Jimmy
Carter forced the USOC to refuse the invitation to attend the Moscow
Games. Once Carter acted to spoil the Moscow Games (62 nations did
boycott the Games),
it became clear that the USSR and its allies would retaliate with
another
boycott at the 1984 Games in Los Angeles. Although Romania did send a
team to
Los Angeles, 16 of the USSR’s other allies boycotted the Los Angeles
Games.
From the 1940s to the 1980s, the IOC also had to
deal with
the political problems caused by divided nations. One dilemma concerned
the
Chinese Olympic team, after the political division of China in 1949
into the
People's Republic of China on the mainland and the so-called Republic
of China
on the island of Taiwan. In 1952 the IOC decided to invite teams from
both the
mainland and Taiwan, but this decision led to decades of boycott by the
government of the People's Republic, which did not send a team to the
Olympics
until the Lake Placid Games in 1980.
Another political issue arose in 1949,
because of the formal political division of Germany that year into East
Germany
and West Germany. This division created the question of whether there
was to be
one German team or two. The IOC tried to solve this problem by
insisting on a
combined German team. Negotiations lasted several years, and this
solution was
first tested at the Melbourne Games in 1956; it lasted until the Munich
Games
in 1972, for which two teams were formed. There continued to be two
German
teams until 1992, by which time the countries had reunited. The IOC
also had to
cope with racial segregation in South Africa. The IOC voted in 1968 to
exclude
the South African team from Olympic competition in order to bring
pressure on
the government to give up its policy of apartheid. The South Africans
were not
readmitted until the Barcelona Games in 1992—by which time apartheid
had been
discontinued.
Violence has also occurred at the Olympic Games.
In the
midst of the 1972 Munich Games, the Olympic movement experienced its
most
tragic hour. A band of Palestinian terrorists made their way into the
Olympic
village,
murdered two members of the Israeli team, and took nine hostages. When
the IOC,
meeting in emergency session, learned that a gunfight had broken out
and that
all nine hostages were dead, along with five of the terrorists, the
Games were
suspended for a day.
There is plenty of historical precedent for the reasoning that going to the
1936 Berlin Olympics provided a tacit acceptance of Nazi policies as well
as being lulled into a false sense of security by the "gracious hosts" of
the games and may have contributed to Hiltler's boldness with respect to
his expansionist tendencies. <rest snipped>
I'd say that the idea that the Nazis would have been detered in the slightest by
a boycott of the Berlin Olympics is naive.
The Olympics are supposed to be non-political, a gathering of athletes from
nations throughout the world to compete free of hostilities no matter what
quarrels may be going on among nations. A beautiful ideal that cannot be
completely attained in practice, but most years the Olympics have come pretty
close. That's something the whole world can take pride in.
-- Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for
lunch
Democracy is two
wolves and a
lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb
contesting
the vote!
--Benjamin Franklin
