Refugees strike blow for forgotten Olympic ideal

At least the Games are not a matter of life or death for athletes, writes Mark Reason.

OPINION: The Olympic Games, love them and hate them, the beautiful and the damned, wearing a tracksuit for the world with a red cross on the front and a swastika on the back.

Some are calling these Games the Apocalympics, with 2600 people allegedly killed by police since Rio won the bid in 2009. Some, like the 10 members of the refugee team, hope these days of joy will never end.

The International Olympic Committee, love them or loathe them, have finally done something good. They may have quite disgracefully hung Wada out to dry after declining to sanction Putin and Russia for systemic doping, but the idea of a refugee team is a glorious representation of the fellowship of the rings.

The refugee team consists of two Syrian swimmers, two Congolese judokas, an Ethiopian marathon runner and five runners from South Sudan. Each one makes a mockery of the hard road or ‘sacrifices’ that many athletes think they have travelled to get to the 2016 Olympics.

These men and women have literally swum across oceans, dodged bullets and staved off starvation to be at these Games.

Yusra Mardini is a swimmer from Syria. The roof of her swimming club back home was blown away by bombs. She fled her homeland in an overcrowded dinghy.

When the outboard motor packed in she jumped over the side and kicked her feet in the water for hour after hour to propel the craft to shore. She did not know she was training for Rio. Mardini just thought, ‘‘Maybe I’m going to die on the way. But I’m almost dead in my country’’.

James Chiengjiek, who qualified from the Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya along with four of his South Sudanese countrymen, spoke for the whole team when he said: ‘‘I think it is a good moment for all the refugees, not only people who are participating because as we all know, we are representing the millions of refugees all over the world and it is a chance to show the refugees also that they can do something.’’

Sometimes it is even possible to agree with Thomas Bach, the head of the IOC, when he says: ‘‘The ultimate goal of the refugee team is that we don’t need one any more.’’

However, it is hard to square humanitarian hope with the revolting corporate greed and bombast that is so much a part of these Games.

More refugees from South Sudan will be running than national representatives. But even the two athletes appearing under the flag should not both be there. The South Sudanese Athletics Federation selected one team, but the nation’s Olympic Committee chose another.

The problem poster child was a young woman called Margret Rumat Rumat Hassan. She was the centrepiece of a big Samsung ad bringing the country together behind the Games. The trouble was when the qualification period arrived, she was not the country’s quickest competitor.

Tong Chor Malek Deran, the secretary-general of South Sudan’s Olympic committee, told Australia’s ABC: ‘‘That’s correct. We choose her because already we have signed a contract with Samsung, that she is an Olympian. I repeat it. I repeat it: yes. And I strongly say yes. Because we had a contract already signed with Samsung. This [non selection] is a violation of our contract.’’

Samsung denied influencing selection or wanting to ‘‘complete her story,’’ as articulated by Deran. Hell, no. Samsung, ‘a worldwide Olympic partner’, and a company whose former chairman was convicted of tax evasion and breach of trust, is just ‘‘a proud sponsor of those who defy barriers’’.

Over the years there have been some great Olympic marketing campaigns. Westpac’s campaign around the mums of Aussie athletes trying out their son’s or daughter’s sports was funny. Proctor and Gamble’s 2012 advert, again aimed at ‘moms’, was as uplifting as this year’s imitation ad is feeble. John Hancock’s ad for the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano is a magnificent doco-drama.

But more often than not, we are just left with a feeling of nausea. A few weeks ago I was sitting in a London station looking at a Strongbow ad, official partner of the GB team don’t you know, that said, ‘‘Let’s own it’’.

‘‘Own ready, own steady, own loud, own proud, own cheers, own tears, own cold, own gold, let’s own it.’’

Own plunder, own chunder, own grommit, own vomit.

But it’s no better in New Zealand. ‘‘When you dare to start a new, When starting is the hardest thing to do.’’ We don’t need to go on, except to say that the combination of a bank and a broadcasting company bastardising Kipling is a pretty toxic advertising mix.

It shames New Zealand’s Olympic Committee that they have allowed Sky to both sponsor athletes and restrict the ability of other media organisations to report on these Games. Do they not see the multiple conflict of interests, which seem obvious to me? Do they not see that Sky’s demands threaten objective reporting of these Games, again obvious in my opinion.

Do they not see that Sky want to shut down objective reporting of these Games, as they have already tried to do. Do they not see that if one of Sky’s sponsored athletes tested positive for drugs, it would put Sky in a difficult position about how that story was told?

The Olympics have always been two-faced. But how sad that New Zealand now embraces both sides of the coin that it is putting into its pocket. Amnesty’s Brazil director, Atila Roque, says: ‘‘A shadow of death has set over Rio de Janeiro and it seems the authorities only care about how pretty the Olympic Park looks.’’

You know where Sky will be pointing their cameras.