It’s time for the athletes to shine in Sochi
Politics and greed too often eclipse the real stars
When considering these Olympics, it’s so easy to forget the Games. A record 221 Canadians will compete in Sochi, four years after Canada won more gold medals than anybody ever had at a Winter Games. Their stories are vast and fascinating and sometimes heartbreaking, and they will be there to do us proud. And they deserve to be seen.
We are sending 100 women, a record. Canada will have three sisters on its freestyle ski team, in the moguls — Justine, Chloe and Maxime Dufour-Lapointe, who were once two little sisters and a big one who tried moguls. Kaillie Humphries is a tattooed rocket bobsled. Erik Guay is a daredevil in the downhill. Freestyle skier Kaya Turski is coming back from knee surgery. And snowboard cross’s Maëlle Ricker had wrist surgery this week. Now she will try to conquer the world. The list keeps going, on and on.
We have medal hopes in freestyle skiing, downhill skiing, snowboarding, figure skating, curling, bobsled, luge, short-track speed skating, long-track speed skating, and of course, hockey. Stories will deserve to be written.
But the dirt of the Olympics is blotting out the sun for now, and may yet do so during the Games. The run-up to every Olympics is a swirling mess of worries and issues, but lord above, Sochi. Take the notion of protesting, which given Russia’s legislated persecution of its LGBT population could become a major issue at these Games. On Monday, there seemed to be a break in the weather.
“It is very clear, the Games cannot be used as a stage for political demonstrations however good the cause may be,” IOC president Thomas Bach told a conference call on Tuesday. “The IOC will take, if necessary, individual decisions based on individual cases. It is also clear, on the other hand, the athletes enjoy the freedom of speech so if in a press conference they wanted to make a political statement then they are absolutely free to do so.”
It was a remarkable concession for t he Inter- national Olympic Committee, whose ideal Olympics is so allergic to politics — overt politics, to be clear, since the Games are soaked in the other kinds — that the IOC has still never commemorated the 11 Israeli athletes who were taken hostage and killed by Palestinian terrorists in Munich at an Opening or Closing Ceremony, despite personal pleas from the families of the victims.
And then Dmitry Chernyshenko, the head of the Sochi Organizing Committee, protested, telling his own conference call on Wednesday, “(Bach) might have mentioned that there is a Rule 50 in the Olympic Charter which limits the expression of any propaganda during the Games. I don’t think they are allowed by the Charter to express those views that are not related to the sport at the press conference room.”
He also suggested athletes with something to say do so in the designated protest zones, which he called “Sochi speakers’ corner” and which are reported to be between 12 and 18 kilometres from the central Olympic zone. Real charmer, that Chernyshenko.
The Sochi Organizing Committee later issued a statement saying they were on board with the IOC, but also reiterated there should be no protests in press conferences. The conflict is clear and is a function of putting the Olympics in a country with repressive laws, even if these ones were passed after the Games were awarded.
And once again, the athletes are being put in a bad position, either way. When the Olympics were put in China there were significant human-rights concerns. Still athletes kept quiet.
Russia’s treatment of homosexuals will strike closer to home for many and the fact the IOC was forced to grant free speech at podiums over the objections of the hosts is a farcical flashpoint. The only good thing about it is the notion that, under Bach, relative freedom of speech could become a habit.
That, of course, is before Sochi redefines the traditional pre-Olympic worries. British security is calling an attack “very likely” and the travel advisories pile up by the door. If security overshadows the Games, it will probably be a very dark day.
Beyond that frightening possibility, the allegations of corruption are so vast they call into question the very notion of the Olympics. The estimates are that about $18 billion US of the $51-billion-US price tag was embezzled or redistributed.
The corruption was explored in a documentary broadcast by the CBC’s The Passionate Eye, in which the razing, expropriation and rebuilding of the Sochi region is depicted as just the gears of a great uncaring machine, come to build a monument to Vladimir Putin.
Activists are being barred from the Games, even as spectators; homosexual activists are being arrested or sued, the organizing committee has already said using WiFi means you will be comprehensively spied on, Russia’s pressure on Ukraine is pushing the nation into revolt, and Russia’s lone independent news channel has been dropped from the major broadcast providers under what is reported to be pressure from the Kremlin.
And under this mountain of garbage are the athletes, who are the ostensible point of all this. They didn’t get a vote in all this: It’s not their fault. They just go where the Olympics happen and try to conquer the world. They are simply playing a part in a project that won’t be worthy of what they will do.