Paul Rouse: Time for Olympic Federation to answer a simple question on Russia...
HISTORY LESSON: Adolf Hitler watching the Olympic Games in Berlin with the Italian Crown Prince. Picture: Fox Photos/Getty Images
Here’s a straightforward question to ask: Do the members of the Executive Committee of the Olympic Federation of Ireland think that Russian athletes should be invited to compete at the Paris Olympics of 2024?
It is important to ask this question of them – and for its President or its Chief Executive Officer to answer it with clarity.
The context of the question is this: the International Olympic Committee has left the door ajar for the creation of a pathway by which some Russian athletes could compete in Paris under some sort of neutral flag.
When Ukraine threatened to boycott the Olympics if Russians were allowed to compete, Thomas Bach, president of the International Olympic Committee, wrote a letter to Ukraine’s National Olympic Committee criticising this threat.
He followed this, last week, by seeking refuge in ambiguity over the potential to include Russian athletes in the Paris Olympics, scheduled for 2024. The door remains unclosed.
Bach said: “With every Ukrainian athlete, we can, from a human point of view, understand their reactions, we share their suffering, that's why we're in full solidarity with them, this is why we are supporting them, whether they're in Ukraine or outside..”
But that sentence promising “full solidarity” cannot co-exist beside a failure to fulfil the expressed Ukrainian desire that Russians should be banned.
Bach went further, however. He justified the stance by saying that the vocation of the Olympic movement was as “a peace mission”. He continued: “History will show who is doing more for peace, the ones who try to keep lines open and communicate or the ones who want to isolate and divide.”
Bach continued by talking about the International Olympic Committee’s desire “to unify, not to contribute to more confrontation, more escalation”.
That Bach should make a claim “to history” to attempt to justify his manoeuvres is galling. The cant of the Olympic ideal runs through its past like the discharge of a sewer. It pretends to live outside politics, but all the while it does the opposite. It is a deeply political organisation and its capacity to accommodate itself to any and every regime is obvious.
The most obvious example is the Berlin Olympics of 1936 where the Olympic movement was the platform for the projection of German political power.
The Olympic movement ignored calls for the Berlin Games to be boycotted or to be taken from Germany. Instead, the men who dominated its governing committee walked in step with Adolf Hitler and his sports-centred propaganda mission.
If anyone wishes to see the scale of this endeavour, there is Leni Reifenstahl’s incredible film ‘Olympia’, which can be seen on YouTube.
It sits now as an extraordinary historical insight into the politics of the Olympic Games: as the camera cuts from athletes competing for medals to the sight of Hitler clapping and cheering German successes from the stands.
In those stands he sits by the leaders of the Olympic movement and you get a clear look at the political aspect of this ‘sporting’ occasion.
But this is not just a matter of a propagandic film made from inside the Nazi movement. In fact, the whole spectacle was transmitted across mainstream media in a way that promoted Naziism and Hitler.
Just have a look at British Pathé newsreel footage where the entwining of Naziism and Olympianism can be most easily observed.
Naturally, part of the commentary that accompanies this footage talks of the symbolism of “sending a message of peace to the world” and how Germany wished to send home its millions of visitors as its friends. The echoes of these words ring loudly today in the words of those who claim the inclusion of Russian athletes is inspired by notions of peace and unity.
For his part, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the modern Olympic Games, described Berlin as the best Olympics ever, and the fulfilment of his life’s work. He was clearly flattered by the way he was treated by Hitler’s regime before, during and after the Games.
In case anyone wishes to argue that this is before the horrors of Nazism were revealed, the first concentration camps had been established in 1933 (for homosexuals among others), book burnings had been organised, the Night of the Long Knives saw the murder of political opponents, there were forced sterilisations.
And, of course, there was abundant appalling evidence of brutal antisemitic violence and legislation, including the Nuremberg Race Laws of 1935 which had laid bare the intent of the Nazis.
More recently, the International Olympic Committee chose to identify with Putin. Indeed, it conducted itself as his plaything. It facilitated Putin’s desire to pursue Russian success in international competition as a matter of national prestige and to host major sporting events to present Russia as a modern, normal state.
The great example is the Sochi Winter Olympics of 2014, part of a massive propaganda drive by Putin. This was the most expensive Olympic Games staged in history – and that itself is quite the achievement.
But, most of all, it was the centrepiece of Putin’s project to project his own importance and deflect from the imperialist violence that has rested at the heart of his regime for two decades.
This deflection was the creation of a monstrous spectacle of pretence that there was nothing to see beyond the boundaries of true sporting contests; that sport and sports people were somehow entitled to choose to live in a world where Putinism did not matter or even really exist.
The familiar pleadings of “peace” and “unity” and “fellowship” were being aired and re-aired. As if by saying the words, over and over, you are somehow absolved of responsibility for your actions.
To be clear, by the time of Sochi 2014, that Putin was a murderous tyrant was not in doubt. The litany of the misdeeds of his regime was well-established. Journalists were being murdered (Anna Politkovskaya, a critic of rights abuses in Chechnya, 2006); opponents were poisoned by Russian spies (Alexander Litvinenko, 2006); he started a short, brutal war with Georgia (2008).
And buoyed by the spectacle of the Sochi Games, he then annexed Ukraine’s Crimea region (2014); that invasion began just days after the closing ceremony. Later that year he supported breakaway regions in eastern Ukraine, leaving 13,000 people dead in long-term rebellion (2014).
In the coming months, the weasel words will most likely continue. There will be attempts to manipulate and seek further refuge in ambiguity and to pretend that the Olympic movement is beyond politics. It never has been and it never will be. That is the truth of what history shows.
So what say the women and men who run the Olympic Federation of Ireland?
