In Tokyo and Beijing, many spectator stands remained empty during the pandemic. However, the Olympic organizers did not want to postpone the games again.
Foto: imago images/UPI Photo
“In Chinese we say: We improve through sport,” Xu Jichen explained to the international press over the weekend. “And we’re talking about three levels: excellence, respect and friendship.” By these standards, the Beijing Games have been a complete success so far, the man who is responsible for press relations on Beijing’s organizing committee seemed to conclude. “Beijing 2022” ensures international exchange and runs smoothly from an organizational point of view. And then there is the first class sport.
Not every analysis of these Olympic Games will come to the same conclusion. Outside of China, the exchange, which media outlets controlled by the Chinese Communist Party also conjure up, is seen more as a show of power by the up-and-coming state. As far as the smooth organization is concerned, incidents in which foreign journalists are prevented from doing their work on site, although the rules are already stricter than ever, stand out. And the first-class winter sports sometimes take place in a place that would not be the host without artificial snow. The Olympic Games have never been discussed as controversially as this time.
Whereby this sentence sounds familiar. Six months ago, when the Summer Games were only held in 2021 due to a delay caused by the pandemic, “Tokyo 2020+1” was the most controversial Olympic edition to date. In the midst of increased costs, a still low vaccination rate for people in Japan and safety rules that took any fun out of the sporting event, around 80 percent of the local population were against hosting it. But the Japanese government has repeatedly made it clear that it doesn’t care about public opinion.
So Tokyo experienced what was probably the most depressing Olympic Games up to that point. Public broadcaster NHK broadcast a cheering program almost 24 hours a day, but the city’s residents followed the event just as people in New York or Cape Town did – only as a TV event. Practically every venue had to remain empty, and the large-scale cultural program planned in Japan’s capital – from LGBT education to public viewing – went on the back burner or was cancelled. This also applies to Japan’s long-awaited exchange with the world: tourists were not allowed to come, but the athletes, if they wanted to do their job, had to. Postponing it again was not up for discussion.
Even sports romantics had doubts as to whether the Olympics were still about sport. Because if the local people didn’t want the event because they didn’t get anything more than an expensive bill from it – then who, apart from the top athletes, was it there for? Sponsors had spent billions on the mega event, which they saw as an opportunity to present their brands worldwide, mainly because of the high ratings. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) needed the event because it doesn’t make any money anyway. And Japan’s organizers, who had long since committed themselves to this, hoped for a diffuse advertising effect for the country, which can also host a major event in a pandemic.
Critics say the organizers were never really interested in sport as a joy in play and physical activity, in the traditional sense. “In the run-up to the Tokyo Games, elite sports were promoted with a lot of money so that Japan could win medals and thus international prestige,” says Atsuhisa Yamamoto, a sports professor at Seijo University in Tokyo. “But popular sport, which distracts people from everyday life and keeps them healthy, receives practically no public support.”
In his book Post sport no jidai (The Post Sport Era), Yamamoto argues how elite sport has recently become increasingly decoupled from that of the general public. “Our idea of sport, which is based on a healthy and natural body, is in crisis,” he writes. Especially when today’s elite athletes are supposed to serve as role models. They have long been artificially enhanced beings, be it through doping, data analysis or expensive equipment and tough training regimes.
But critical observers also see the story of understanding and peace through sport as a myth. And she was from the start. Pierre de Coubertin, father of the modern Olympic Games, saw major sports tournaments as an opportunity to discipline the French population and possibly steel them for the next war. In his article he also wrote: “Sport can play a spiritual and effective role in colonization.” Thus, more than a century ago, the much-cited internationalism of sport was also about nationalism.
The attempts by Beijing’s organizers to use the current games as a demonstration of China’s power are therefore not peculiar to China. And the fact that the organizers of major sporting events are only superficially concerned with sport is only particularly evident in places where human rights are violated. Finally, on closer inspection, Beijing’s assertion that there are now 300 million winter sports enthusiasts in China reveals itself to be a propaganda game with statistics.
When the next summer games in Paris take place in 2024, the criticism is unlikely to be over just because France is a democracy. A discussion about the colonial origins of Olympia could break out there. Especially when Thomas Bach still emphasizes that the Olympics would bring the world together.
