Earlier this month, the American shot putter Raven Saunders crossed her arms above her head while receiving her silver medal on the Olympic podium. This simple and unobtrusive gesture, made in support of the world’s oppressed peoples, appeared to upset the International Olympics Committee, which expressly prohibits the use of its podia as platforms for protests or political statements. The IOC initiated an investigation into Saunders’s conduct; the troubled gymnast Simone Biles then weighed in on the shot putter’s side; and, following the news of Saunders’s mother’s death, the IOC suspended their investigation.

That same week, the IOC had to launch another investigation when Belarusian athlete Krystina Timanovskaya claimed that she had been summoned home after publicly criticizing a decision to enter her into a relay race. The following week, the Committee withdrew the credentials of two Belarusian coaches. Later, a German pentathlon coach was expelled for punching a horse.

At the same time, the Tokyo Olympics saw Russian sportspeople banned from competing as part of their national team, but gaining glory as representatives of the Russian Olympic Committee, wearing the colours of their flag and receiving their medals to the sound of Tchaikovsky’s first piano concerto rather than their own national anthem. Meanwhile, ideological controversies raged in relation to the inclusion in women’s weightlifting of transgender competitor Laurel Hubbard – a move some considered a progressive milestone and others thought the thin end of a gender-fluid wedge.

Regardless of what one may think of these issues, one thing seems clear: if the IOC thought they could keep politics out of the Tokyo Olympics, then they seemed to have badly misread the mood music of those Games, and indeed the political undercurrents which have permeated every Olympics, and pretty much every international sporting event ever. One might, for instance, recall in this context the Soviet boycott of the Los Angeles Olympics in 1984 or the American boycott of the Moscow Games in 1980. One might remember the Black September attack on the Munich Games in 1972, or the iconic images of African-American athlete Jesse Owens winning four track-and-field golds at the Third Reich’s Olympics in 1936. 

When during the Mexico City Games of 1968, two African-American athletes stood on their medallists’ podium and raised their fists in the black power salute, the IOC expelled them from the tournament. The IOC president at the time, Avery Brundage, had been notorious for his far-right sympathies. Three decades earlier, when, as American Olympic Committee president, Brundage had argued for the United States’ participation in the 1936 Games, and expressed overtly antisemitic views in doing so, he was not, as he supposed, ensuring the Olympic movement avoided politicization.

The very presence of a country at the Olympics tends to validate its claims to nationhood in the eyes of the watching world. East Timor was, for example, formally recognised by the United Nations in 2002; two years later, it sent two athletes to the Athens Games. South Sudan gained independence in 2011; five years later it sent three competitors to Rio. Both fledgling nations had tentatively fielded participants in previous tournaments as Independent Olympic Athletes. Despite its contentious relationship with the United Nations, Taiwan is allowed to compete in the Olympics as Chinese Taipei, but most certainly not under its preferred name – the ‘Republic of China’ – an explicit slight to the People’s Republic. In fact, in protest against Taiwan's involvement, China had stayed away from the Games until 1984. It topped the medal table in 2008 when it had the home advantage. Its return to the top of the table for the duration of most of this year's Games seemed to seal its ascent to global dominance. However, on the final day of the Tokyo tournament, the United States narrowly managed to edge China out of its lead, with 39 golds to the People’s Republic’s 38, underscoring the ongoing resilience of American hegemony. Since the Second World War, the games have, after all, always been won by a superpower. 

North Korea refused to compete in the Seoul Olympics in 1988 for obvious enough reasons; this year, it failed to send any athletes to the Tokyo Games for reasons that are perhaps less clear. The decision three years ago for North and South Korea to field a joint team at the Winter Games in PyeongChang was accompanied by significant diplomatic breakthroughs between the two nations. North Korea’s failure to attend the Tokyo tournament, pleading Covid concerns but more likely for reasons related to its long-held antagonism towards Japan, was seen as a setback in relations with that pariah state. Indeed, such was Pyongyang’s snub to this year’s Olympics that its state broadcaster didn’t air any footage from the Games until two days after the closing ceremony – and even then chose to screen only low resolution video of a women’s football match between Chile and the UK which had been played a few weeks earlier. 

In 1992 a dozen former Soviet republics competed and triumphed as the ‘Unified Team’. And in 2004, at a time of foreign occupation, both Iraq and Afghanistan sent teams to the Summer Games. There’s evidently something both very political and very geopolitical in all of this.

Related News

Hail, Hail the Green Brigade

News from Nowhere: Coming Home

The Olympics also assume significant political dimensions in their own host nations. In the years before London hosted the Games in 2012, grievances grew as to their cost to the national purse – although the British eventually came to display an uncharacteristically patriotic pride in the achievement. In August 2016, Brazilian police used tear gas to disperse protesters denouncing the $13 billion price tag of the Rio Games. More recently, in the months before Tokyo assumed its hosting duties, fears emerged as to how this major international event might exacerbate Japan’s domestic Covid-19 crisis. These highly vocal concerns were hardly unfounded: by the end of the Games, cases of infection in Tokyo had hit an unprecedented spike.

The political effects of the Olympics aren’t of course always negative. Despite its stated desire to remain apolitical, the IOC quite rightly allows athletes to compete under the banner of the Refugee Olympic Team in recognition of the plight of stateless asylum-seekers across the world. This is clearly a political act. Indeed, the Paralympic Games themselves – as a celebration of the extraordinary abilities of disabled athletes – of course represent an overwhelmingly positive global statement of social and political intent, and a massively important, influential and inspiring one at that.

Any attempt to keep politics out of sport is, of course, doomed to fail – as those rebel cricket teams discovered when they chose to breach international anti-apartheid boycotts and engage in lucrative tours of South Africa during the 1980s. Those reactionary voices in government and the media which have suggested that taking the knee should be banned from the openings of association football or American football matches fail to understand that the enormous cultural power of sports brings with it social relevance and responsibility, and therefore offers the possibility of beneficial real-world impacts far beyond the dreams of mere career politicians. That’s why, for example, in the UK such figures as Marcus Rashford (the footballer campaigning to alleviate child poverty) and Gary Lineker (the former footballer known for articulating his progressive views on social media) so often provoke the ire of those reactionary elements. It’s because they sometimes seem able to capture, articulate and sway public opinion rather more successfully than those politicians and news editors who’ve made it their profession to do so. 

Earlier this month, all twenty of England’s Premier League football clubs announced that they would continue to take the knee before matches as a symbol of their ‘unity against all forms of racism’ – even as the British police were arresting more perpetrators of online racist abuse against England’s soccer stars. Last year, British boxer Nicola Adams made the headlines outside the ring when it was announced that she would become the first contestant on the popular television show Strictly Come Dancing to dance in a same-sex pairing. On or off the field, high-profile sportspeople frequently act as socially influential role models, and this in itself has a fundamentally political impact. When earlier this month Marcus Rashford wrote an open letter to British health professionals asking them to urge disadvantaged families to claim government food vouchers, he once again demonstrated that he was perfectly attuned to the national zeitgeist and that he was still determined to invest his celebrity capital in promoting the common good.

There’s a theory that sports originally evolved out of military conflicts, as a safer and more sustainable way of resolving local tensions and rivalries. These days, though, we have a choice between stressing the tribalism or the camaraderie of such activities: either to exploit global sporting events for political purposes by promoting nationalistic zeal and international competition; or to use them to cultivate transnational friendship, solidarity and cooperation. The Cold War gave us the space race, perhaps history’s most extravagant spectator sport; but that nationalistic rivalry eventually developed into today’s scientific collaborations between the United States and Russia on the international space station. Sporting events can be used to highlight divisions between nations, but such organisations as the IOC would do well to learn that they can have their most positive impacts when individual sportspeople – stars like Raven Saunders, Marcus Rashford, Colin Kaepernick and Tommie Smith – have used their moments in the spotlight to protest against injustice and to foster the solidarity of shared ideals. 

Of course, there’s really no such thing as Olympian detachment. To prohibit political protest is to post a tacit vote in favour of the ideological status quo. But to acknowledge that sports form a crucial part of the cultural, social and political fabric of so many peoples’ lives may allow us to appreciate, harness and realize – a world away from memories of jeering, racist football fans – the transformative potential for our societies of such aspirational and truly internationalist endeavours.

In his speech at the closing ceremony of the Tokyo Games, IOC president Thomas Bach observed that the tournament had united billions of people in joy and inspiration, and that this should give the world ‘faith in the future’. The following day, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published a landmark report which put the entire planet on an emergency footing. Let us only hope that the progressive solidarity shown by some of our sportspeople can be adopted by our political leaders as we step up the struggle to avoid our species’ extinction.