Let no one claim that boycotts in sport are useless. That’s a popular tale of the functionaries: that boycotts only affect innocent athletes, that politics should rather stay outside when it comes to sport – before completely apolitical sport makes itself at home with the dictator, pins medals on his lapel and strikes up deals while the Athletes are driven through the arena. But good. In truth, it’s more like this: boycotts work, sometimes even in the interests of the athletes.
For 20 hours, the International Paralympic Committee (IPC) clung to its stance that athletes from Russia and Belarus absolutely must participate in the Paralympic Games in Beijing – during which governments are trying to shoot a sovereign country off the world map. Andrew Parsons, the President of the IPC, hid behind paragraphs for 20 hours; told the world and the fainting delegation from Ukraine that while nations can be exiled collectively for anything, not for aggressive war.
Feels like a victim of higher powers: IPC President Andrew Parsons has to explain in Beijing on Thursday why Russian and Belarusian athletes are now not allowed to compete in the Paralympic Games after all.
(Foto: Peter Cziborra/Reuters)
20 hours later, the bluff collapsed: athletes, teams, entire para-committees had threatened not to compete in Beijing – suddenly the ban could be bent. Parsons himself escaped into the role of victim in a certain way: Political pressure and the “explosive” mood among many athletes would have forced the IPC to take the step, among other things.
It was often the athletes who ultimately shouldered the responsibility
Incidentally, these smokescreens distracted from two more fundamental things: On the one hand, the rules of the IPC might have allowed for an earlier exclusion. Second, it was – once again – athletes and grassroots officials who shouldered responsibility while their leaders apparently kept thinking of themselves (and their business partners).
A brief, highly incomplete flashback: It was the athletes who had to remind their superiors at Mount Olympus two years ago that the Olympic and Paralympic Games are rather dispensable in a rising pandemic. It was athletes like Canada’s Hayley Wickenheiser and Germany’s Max Hartung who were reprimanded for doing so, before a growing number of Olympic committees announced they would boycott the 2020 Tokyo date until it was called off. And it was also athletes who fought – with some success – for athletes to be allowed to protest in the arena for human rights; that they can advertise their sponsors more openly during the games; that their disciplines do not simply fall out of lucrative series of meetings without being asked. In this way, the athletes regained at least a little bit of influence over the performance in which they are the main actors.
Incidentally, all of this was mostly driven by those athletes who have organized themselves into independent structures; beyond associations that often select and promote their athletes’ spokespersons in a targeted manner. What this can lead to was shown again on Wednesday evening: Jitske Visser, the chairwoman of the athletes’ commission in the IPC, said something about the fact that sport should please come back into focus as a peacemaker – after her IPC just the countries the warmonger had not ruled out. How hollow it all sounded was shown by the message that was brewing over the next 20 hours: Standing together makes a lot possible. This applies to big politics as well as to small world sports.
