The Olympics’ Toughest Act: Balancing Sports and Politics
The athletes had lost. Their time in Paris was over. And they were, in this moment of defeat by a team from a political rival, not even allowed the comfort of their homeland’s name and flag.
To be an Olympian from Taiwan is to not exist, at least not officially. To placate China, the island competes at the Games under the awkward designation of Chinese Taipei. The intrusion of politics into sports forces the island’s athletes to engage in the kind of rhetorical gymnastics that might trip up a champion tumbler, and which bring a particular sting when you are a table tennis player who has just been beaten by Team China.
“I’m only fighting for myself, through my own hard work,” said Taiwan’s Chen Szu-yu, substituting self for state on the Olympic stage.
Her teammate Chien Tung-chuan sidestepped the political discussion entirely, refraining from comment on Taiwan’s status at the Olympics.
“I cannot answer that question,” she said. “May I go?”
There is no arena more international than the Olympics. The United Nations General Assembly, that other grand global endeavor, excludes the territories, the itty-bitty islands and the not-quite nations that get to go to the Games. Puerto Rico, Palestine, Chinese Taipei — they all marched in the Olympic parade of nations, as did a refugee team whose 37 members were forcibly displaced from some of the very countries that competed alongside them in Paris.
But to accommodate such a diversity — North Korea and South Korea, Israel and Palestine, Armenia and Azerbaijan, China and Taiwan — the Olympic masterminds mandate that athletes should refrain from taking political stands. They imbue in a single sporting moment, the flight of a woman propelled by a springy pole or the revolution of a wheel in a velodrome, an inspirational expression of international unity. They romanticize an Olympic truce in which competitors lay down their weapons for the duration of the world’s greatest athletic contest.
But politics always interfere. At a badminton semifinal in which Taiwan was playing, security personnel confiscated a scarf with the word “Taiwan” on it. A pro-Taiwan fan had a poster in the shape of the island grabbed by another spectator. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Taiwan decried such “violent behavior,” calling it antithetical to the Olympic spirit. (Taiwan went on to win badminton gold in men’s doubles, defeating China.)
That Olympic spirit is supposed to float somehow in a bubble above the cut-and-thrust of global politics.
“We must be politically neutral but not apolitical,” Thomas Bach, the president of the International Olympic Committee, said last year. “We should not make the mistake to raise ourselves to referees of political disputes because we will be crushed by these political powers.”
Bach, a German lawyer by training, was speaking in defense of the I.O.C.’s decision to allow individual athletes from Russia and Belarus to participate in Paris, despite those nations’ roles in the invasion of Ukraine. The Russian and Belarusian teams had already been banned from competing as national entities.
That decision was based, the I.O.C. said, on Russia’s inclusion of parts of occupied Ukraine in its Olympic delegation, not simply on Moscow’s decision to invade another sovereign nation. Turning guns on civilians is not enough to get a national team thrown out of the Olympics, as proven by the presence in Paris of delegations from places like Afghanistan, Myanmar and Syria.
Those who disparaged Russians and Belarusians competing as so-called “individual neutral athletes” were hypocrites, suggested an I.O.C. statement posted online.
“It is deplorable that these governments do not address the question of double standards,” the statement said. “We have not seen a single comment from them about their attitude towards the participation of athletes whose countries are involved in the other 70 wars, armed conflicts and crises in the world.”
No Olympic truce held during the Paris Games. Russian missiles continued to hit Ukrainian targets. In Gaza on Saturday, more than 90 people were killed, according to Gazan health authorities, after an Israeli airstrike hit a school complex that Israel said was being used by Hamas.
It’s a fallacy, of course, that politics and sports exist in separate spheres, and even the I.O.C. admits it. How could they not be conjoined when the Games depend on nationhood as an organizing principle of competition? Patriotism is only a punch or a paddle away from jingoism.
Besides, the Olympics have long been a showcase for potent political expression: Jesse Owens sprinting and jumping to four golds in 1936 Berlin; gloved fists raised on the medals stand in 1968 Mexico City; the American-led boycott of the 1980 Games in Moscow because of the invasion of Afghanistan, and the Soviet bloc returning the slight by shunning the Los Angeles Games four years later.
Even the I.O.C.’s recognition of a refugee team, which first competed in 2016 in Rio de Janeiro, is itself a political statement. In Paris, about 40 percent of the team is from Iran, but it includes athletes from Afghanistan, Syria, Ethiopia, Venezuela and more.
On Aug. 8, Cindy Ngamba, a Cameroonian who resettled in Britain as a child, claimed the refugee team’s first-ever medal, a bronze in boxing. Her next battle will be to gain citizenship in Britain, where she has faced deportation threats.
“I’m just one of millions of refugees all around the world, one of billions of humans all around the world,” Ngamba said as she made her way through the boxing draw. “And I hope that I give them motivation.”
Sports loves an underdog story, the redemptive arc of a come-from-behind victory. Tiny Hong Kong, the territory that switched from British to Chinese rule more than a quarter century ago, won two fencing gold medals in Paris, more than Bangladesh, India and South Africa combined.
But those victories were quickly politicized. One of the fencers was regarded with sympathy by members of a crushed democratic movement in Hong Kong, the other viewed as supportive of the rulers in Beijing who have criminalized dissent through a restrictive national security law.
Lo Wai-fung is Hong Kong’s first Olympian in taekwondo, and on Thursday night he finished the competition in seventh place after losing to a Chinese fighter. He wanted to talk about sports, not politics.
“I’m part of a new up-and-coming generation,” he said. “It’s very important that everyone in Hong Kong has a chance to know more about taekwondo.”
In an earlier round, Lo defeated Yahya al Ghotany, a refugee from Syria. Both Lo and al Ghotany had served as their Olympic teams’ flag bearers.
In the Azraq refugee camp in Jordan, home to about 40,000 displaced Syrians, al Ghotany’s family and friends cheered on a homegrown son.
“It’s as if he told the refugees in the camp, ‘Nothing is impossible; here I am,’” said Ali Adel Asigmani, a university student who also grew up in the camp.
Being at the Paris Games was a gift, but one that depended on the interplay between global politics and physical prowess more than anyone likes to admit.
The Hong Kong team ended the Games with an impressive haul of four medals. Yet its Olympic presence depends on Beijing’s acquiescence, an approval that may be harder to maintain when China fully absorbs the territory politically in 2047.
For now, Hong Kong competes in the Olympics as “Hong Kong, China.”
“We are hopeful for the future of our Hong Kong Olympic team,” said Brian Stevenson, the territory’s Olympic chef de mission. “Sorry, I mean Hong Kong comma China.”
Amy Chang Chien contributed reporting from Taipei, and John Liu from Seoul.
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