Olympic diplomacy flops again
You have to question whether the Olympic movement have the right to get their feet wet dabbling in the murky waters of global politics. At first glance, the decision of the organisers of the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics, which officially ends in the early hours of tomorrow, to ignore the sharp division of the 38th parallel, the line delineating the ideological and economic division of Korea, by forcing the two nations to march into the stadium together and even share the personnel in the women’s ice hockey team.
The whole thrust of what officials dubbed the “Peace Games” has fallen short of catching on and, in balance, despite one official’s risible proposal that the Korean ice hockey women be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize – has been received by the empty sound of one hand clapping.
Sponsors have rightly become skittish about the initiative in the light of current world tensions over the North Korean regime under “Supreme Leader” Kim Jong-un, who matches US President Donald Trump in dreadful hairstyles and bombast – and the intended “peace” element languishing.
They should all have known better and stuck to knitting. Historical precedent should have indicated that they were setting themselves up to tip head first off a political ski jump.
In the mid-to-late 1950s, the two Germanies were arguing frantically for individual official membership of the Olympic movement, a move strongly opposed by Avery Brundage the iconoclastic American president of the International Olympic Committee.
Across divided Germany, there was little meeting of minds or ideologies, but at the 1960 Summer Games in Rome, Brundage insisted that both parts of the nation World War II had split asunder compete as one team.
At the opening ceremony, Italian President Giovanni Gronchi marvelled, much to Brundage’s delight, that the IOC had achieved German reunification. Little more than a year later, the Berlin Wall was thrown up overnight, in August 1961, signalling what must rate as an epic fail for attempted Olympic diplomacy.
In Pyeongchang, the attempt to be all things to all people has met a similar brick wall. Sport, widely seen as a catalyst for peace, fell into an abyss of political correctness approaching crass naivety.