One of the icons of the first half of the 20th Century was Jeese Owens, the great Black track and field athlete who traveled to Berlin and won four gold medals at the 1936 Olympics, spoiling Adolf Hitler’s desires to make the Nazi games into a showcase for his racial theories of Aryan supremacy.
Obviously Owens’ performance did not prevent World War II, but I think at least a lot of us would like to think that it sent some sort of message to the Germans who were at the Berlin Olympic Stadium or following the games in the German media. It certainly couldn’t have hurt.
But, importantly, for that iconic event to happen, the United States had to attend the 1936 Olympics, despite the fact that Hitler was obviously presenting the games as a Nazi pageant, and despite the fact that the world already knew quite a bit about Hitler’s dangerous ambitions and racial views in 1936. Indeed, both summer and winter Olympics were in Germany that year, and the US attended both events. There was no boycott. Nowadays, in contrast, a movement is gaining steam to have the US boycott the 2022 Winter Olympics in China. It is a terrible idea.
In 1980, President Jimmy Carter boycotted the summer games in Moscow because the Soviets had invaded Afghanistan. This failed spectacularly- the USSR ignored us, won a bunch of medals at the games, and stayed in Afghanistan for several years. (Ironically and sadly, the rebel forces Carter supported in Afghanistan eventually metastasized into Al Qaeda, which killed over 3,000 Americans on 9/11 and in other terrorist attacks in the 1990’s, showing that it’s hard to separate the world into “good guys” and “bad guys”.)
If the Carter action were simply ineffective, that would be bad enough. But it was far worse than that. Most of the sports of the Olympics do not have functioning, lucrative professional leagues. Accordingly, the athletes prepare for the Olympics out of love for their sport. They hope that maybe they can perform well on the world stage in that one moment every four years when the public pays some attention to their sport. And for most such athletes, they get one real chance; either they only get to go once or only one Olympic games occurs during the prime of their athletic career.
Accordingly, to announce, shortly before the Olympics (as Carter did), that the US is not going to participate completely screws over the athletes. It ruins their lives. It destroys their dreams. It takes away the thing that they have been pointing to all their lives. It is horribly injurious to them.
The thing is, it is kind of historical accident that governments have this sort of control over who goes to the Olympics. The Olympics were conceived in the late 19th Century at a time when there were only a very tiny number of international sports competitions and no international sports sanctioning bodies. Accordingly, to make a gigantic international sports festival work, the newly formed International Olympic Committee needed the support of national governments. They could determine eligible athletes, organize the teams, book travel, etc. Obviously this is not how international sports works now- while in some sense, the Ryder Cup needs some governmental permissions, the Ryder Cup golf tournament does not need to go to the European Union and have them select the team, book the travel, and organize Europe’s participation in the event. And accordingly, politicians don’t have any real power to prevent participation in the Ryder Cup. But they do with the Olympics, simply because of its age and the historical accident of how it was organized.
And to be clear- and I will not mince words here- these politicians themselves are ordinary people with no special talent in anything. They aren’t selected because of their particular skills or intelligence, or because they do something better than anyone else. So you essentially have a group of mediocre, untalented people, who have been given a power they don’t deserve, screwing around with the lives of talented people who have one chance to show off that talent to the world. The arrogance of politicians even considering an Olympic boycott, when seen in this light, is immense.
And we come back to “why?”. It is possible for concerted, long-term, multilateral actions to have some effects- the world, for instance, basically agreed about Apartheid era South Africa. They were excluded from the Olympics over several olympiads, although, importantly, their athletes were not- they were allowed to compete for other countries, and many did. And this came in the context of a much larger set of international sanctions that excluded South Africa from a whole bunch of different events and organizations. Perhaps this isolation played a role in the eventual end of Apartheid.
But notice how different that is from a national Olympic boycott. It is a long term push, it involves concerted action by much of the world, and it involves all sorts of events, not just the Olympics. It tries to protect the athletes by offering them alternatives to compete. And most importantly- and this will sound cynical but it is true- it is directed at a small, less powerful country that might conceivably be forced to buck to the pressure.
In any event, South Africa is the exception that proves the rule. Other boycotts have accomplished nothing. The US didn’t get the Soviets out of Afghanistan, as noted. The Soviets retaliated with a dumb boycott of their own of the Los Angeles Olympics in 1984; that didn’t do anything useful for the USSR, which disbanded seven years later. A number of African nations boycotted the 1976 Montreal Olympics- does anyone think that did them any good?
And as I said, with all these boycotts, the victims were the athletes. It is en vogue these days to say that “sports is always political” when justifying athlete protests or decisions to move the baseball All-Star Game. But even if there’s an unavoidable political element to sports, that doesn’t mean that any really stupid and self-destructive decision to politicize a sporting event is justified. If you are going to do something that pulls the rug out of some of America’s most talented people, people who have only one shot to do something in front of the entire world, you better be accomplishing some incredibly important political goal.
And that is not what is happening with the movement to boycott Beijing ‘22. Indeed, it’s pretty obvious that the reason we are talking about Olympic boycotts is because of America’s impotence, not its strength. China has become a rival superpower and strong economic and geopolitical competitor to the United States, and it has done so while maintaining a scarily repressive authoritarian regime. A lot of US policymakers hate that, but it’s long past the time when we could have actually done anything about it. (If you want to talk about Nixon’s opening of relations with China, or especially Clinton’s decision to grant them Most Favored Nation trading status or let them into the World Trade Organization, those were probably the inflection points when we might have demanded the democratization of China. Now they are far too powerful.) So, just like President Carter was not going to be able to go to war against the nuclear armed Soviets over Afghanistan, we aren’t going to engage militarily with the Chinese to save the Uyghurs or liberate Hong Kong. Like the fraternity upset about its probation status in “Animal House”, all we have are pointless symbolic options that prove nothing and hurt ourselves. Hence, the Olympic boycott proposals.
I should add I think one other thing is going on here, which is a tendency to see American foreign policy through the lens of virtue signaling. We don’t actually care about human rights in our foreign policy, of course- the fact that we continue an alliance with Saudi Arabia even after that country funded the 9/11 attacks (and we even protected members of the bin Laden family and censored the 9/11 commission report after the attacks to protect that country’s dictators) is a very good indication of that. But there is a real desire among segments of our foreign policy community that we at least pretend that we don’t do business with bad governments and favor good ones. Hence, we kicked Russia out of the G-8 for invading Crimea, even though at the end of the day Russia is a superpower with nuclear weapons which can do immense damage to our country if we actually stopped talking to Putin. There are constant proposals to form a “League of Democracies”, as if the world can actually accomplish multilateral cooperation while excluding China entirely. And, of course, there are more longstanding aspects of our foreign policy, like our unwillingness to fully recognize that the Communists legitimately run Cuba. The proposals for Olympic boycotts should be seen in the same light. People want to believe there’s some magic way our foreign policy can seem more virtuous by refusing to engage in acts that “legitimize” the Chinese regime. As if that will somehow cleanse our country’s ethical palate.
But that’s not how the world works. Governments are legitimate because they remain in power, not because the United States likes them or blesses them with our seal of approval. China is a powerful country which has the wherewithal to host Olympic Games, which are a complex undertaking. Recognizing that reality does not stain the United States. It simply provides our great athletes, who have worked for it all their lives, with a forum to compete with the world watching.