Patrick Carlyon: Why our only choice is to boycott the Winter Olympic Games
The 2022 Beijing Winter Olympic Games are a crossroads moment in choosing who we are and what we believe in — and we shouldn’t take the easy option.
Patrick Carlyon
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Sport and politics do mix. To separate the two is like trying to extract sugar from cake mix, as Sir Donald Bradman found in 1971.
He was chairman of the Australian Cricket Board, and protests about South Africa’s apartheid regime were spilling on to rugby pitches.
He did not believe sportspeople should be political pawns. But he feared for the safety of cricketers during a coming tour of Australia by an all-white South Africa team.
So Sir Don asked around, as he later told journalist Roland Perry.
He corresponded with protesters. He sat down with South Africa’s prime minister John Vorster, who told him that blacks were intellectually inferior.
Sir Don was old-world, but also imbued with curiosity and integrity. He explored the issues with an open mind. That’s why he changed it.
Sir Don stands as the biggest statue of the game. But his legacy was bigger than sport. He cancelled the cricket tour, in what became an international statement about an inhumane regime.
Why tell this old story now? Because Australia has a chance to emulate Sir Don. Australia should lead the international campaign to boycott the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympic Games.
The nation has called out China since the spread of COVID-19 early last year.
The totalitarian regime, driven by fear and barbarism, has since bullied Australia and the world with scattergun bursts of absurdity and petulance. The Chinese response to COVID, and the international horror at its human rights abuses in Xinjiang, has revealed a wholesale disregard for decency and transparency.
China has naturally reacted poorly to suggestions of an Olympic boycott. Beijing’s hosting is a propaganda coup that brings to mind Hitler’s hosting of the 1936 Summer Games (where America’s Jesse Owens embarrassed the Nazis in the shadow of swastikas).
Calls to change the host city have faltered for the fear of ramifications of such a provocatively hostile act against China. The alternative is simpler. If the Games are to be in China, Australia should make a statement. We should say no.
China argues that politicising sport goes against the Olympic ideals. It has not pointed out that China has long politicised sport, as part of an international bribery-for-power campaign.
Take the West Indies. There, China stumped up tens of millions of dollars for cricket grounds, even though cricket is a foreign game to China.
China’s motivation had nothing to do with sport. Grenada and Dominica had been supporters of Taiwan’s independence struggle with China. After they got new stadiums, they changed their positions.
China has not listened as Western countries condemn its treatment of the Uighur people in Xinjiang. Canada has called it genocide. Disturbing stories grow of re-education camps, sterilisations and torture.
China denies the claims, but won’t let observers investigate the evidence on the ground.
Its latest effort featured an odd video at a strange press conference staged by Australia’s Chinese Embassy on Wednesday.
“Xinjiang is a wonderful land”, according to a video that included a woman who said her contraceptive IUD fitted well and another who said she had learnt right from wrong.
It seemed removed from unfettered accounts of other women at camps. They have spoken of four types of electric shock — “the chair, the glove, the helmet and anal rape with a stick”.
An Olympic boycott wouldn’t please everyone. There would be victims. It’s dreadfully unfair to punish athletes who have no personal influence in affairs elsewhere. This sentiment explains reluctance from some American authorities to buy into the boycott rhetoric.
American athletes missed out on the Moscow Olympics in 1980, as did hundreds from Eastern bloc countries in the retaliatory move for Los Angeles in 1984. Bradman, too, felt this burden, knowing his anti-apartheid stance cruelled the careers of South African cricketers, among them vocal opponents of their country’s regime.
World champion aerial skier Laura Peel is poised to win gold in Beijing. Other Australians would shine. Yet the fact of the Beijing Olympics matters more than the noble endeavours of the competitors.
The Games are another crossroads moment in choosing who we are and what we believe in. Our continued rebuffs to China’s hulking, as opposed to New Zealand’s expedience, stand as tiny monuments to our national identity.
We need not “show respect” to China, as New Zealand has urged, when China seeks to rewrite the international landscape with clumsy and sinister demands for obedience.
Our unflinching calls against the regime for its handling of COVID have hurt, especially exporters whose livelihoods have been jeopardised for reasons beyond their trade or products.
But what’s the choice?
To attend the Olympics is to tacitly bow to the terrorising of a people.
Sir Don set the example when he did not take the easy option 50 years ago. We should not now.
Patrick Carlyon is a Herald Sun columnist
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