San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
IOC favors rights-holders’ interests over athletes’ safety
When the Olympics are staged during normal times and in normal countries, athletes race to get there, beaming. The coming Olympics open in the midst of a relentless pandemic in a country with an abhorrent record on human rights and censorship. The athletes who will skate and slide and ski across your television screens from Beijing and its surroundings? Make no mistake: They’re being dragged there.
“Man, they’re nervous,” said Noah Hoffman, twice a U.S. Olympian as a cross country skier. “They’re not speaking to the media about anything related to human rights. They’re working through logistics of getting burner phones and rental computers. The only meetings they’ve had with their teams have been either about COVID or security. They haven’t had any team meetings about sport, which is kind of mind-boggling.”
Hoffman knows, because he now works with Global Athlete, a group that is pushing for a better balance of power between athletes and the people who use them for profit. Looking at you, International Olympic Committee.
The 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, now less than two weeks off, are perhaps the surest example yet that the IOC is an athletes-last organization. It is staging these Games in China — the second Olympics in that country in 15 years — despite China’s record of, among other atrocities, forced labor, torture and arbitrary detention against Uyghurs in the Xinjiang region in the country’s northwest. On that, the IOC is and has been silent for years.
Now, as the Games approach, it is either silent or passive on other fronts as well — the fact that a high-ranking member of the Beijing Organizing Committee said athletes could be punished for speaking out, the disappearance of Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai after she made allegations of sexual assault against a Communist Party official, the nearcertainty that China will use the app required for athletes and others to report their health status daily to infiltrate their phones and mine personal information.
This is a celebration of international sport meant to bring the world together, right?
“I think athletes are distracted and concerned while still trying to remain focused, based on the ones we’ve spoken to,” said Rob Koehler, the director general of Global Athlete. “And the IOC has really done nothing to minimize or relieve those concerns based on a lack of reaction, a lack of public statements to assure athletes will be fully protected . ... It reinforces what we’ve had concerns with for a long time: The IOC favors stakeholders and rights holders over athletes’ safety and well-being.”
Keep that in mind as the Games dance across your television screen. Without the athletes, there is no product. Yet the athletes are at the bottom of the IOC’S food chain. Global Athlete helped produce a study that reports the IOC generates $1.4 billion in revenue annually. A full 90 percent is distributed to either national Olympic committees around the globe or the international federations that oversee specific sports. Some 4.1 percent is funneled through those NOCS and IFS for athlete scholarships, grants and performance incentives. The revenue going directly to athletes: 0.5 percent.
Yet what are the athletes to do? Biathletes and bobsledders aren’t stars with pull. Even Alpine skiers’ and figure skaters’ opportunities to leverage their talent and discipline and diligence happen just once every four years. Whatever their misgivings about the host country or the organizing body, staying home isn’t an option.
“There is no choice for an athlete — especially in almost all winter sports — to not go to the Olympics,” said Hoffman, a member of the U.S. team in 2014 in Sochi and 2018 in Pyeongchang. “The Olympics define your career. I have a voice not because I’ve won two World Cups, not because I skied for 10 years, not because I won three national championships. It’s because I went to the Olympics, because I’m a two-time Olympian.”
So here we are with a joyless Games before the cauldron has even been lit. COVID is partly responsible, no doubt, because there’s little fun in daily testing and competing in front of sparse crowds consisting of what organizers called “selected” fans. But the IOC has heightened the dread by not supporting athletes’ rights to free speech, by not condemning China’s treatment of the people of Xinjiang, by trying to gloss over Peng’s status with what amounts to a shrug of the shoulders while human rights organizations believe she is still under house arrest or otherwise detained.
These Olympians therefore enter the Olympics with unprecedented apprehension. Hoffman said he heard just this week from an American athlete who’s usually outspoken on a variety of social issues. This athlete already had decided: Speaking out, in 2022 in Beijing, “is just not worth the risk.” That colors the entire experience.
“None of them are excited about going to China,” Hoffman said.
Which leaves the IOC exposed — again — as an organization that pursues finances first and finances last. Keep in mind that these Games are in Beijing because bids originally submitted by Oslo, Stockholm and Krakow were withdrawn because of a lack of public and political support in Norway, Sweden and Poland, respectively. That’s solid thinking by the people and leaders of those cities and countries, because hosting Olympics is almost invariably lousy for the people of the host city. It’s a shame, though, because think how differently the athletes might feel if the Olympic flame made its way into a chilly stadium in Oslo rather than Beijing. Take a photo of that moment with the phone you’ve had all year, not some burner you’ve been issued so your private missives aren’t screened.
When the Games begin, there will no doubt be performances that, in the moment, override the geopolitical backdrop of the entire affair. Even the IOC can’t fully suck away the thrills the Olympic athletes invariably deliver. But even for the athletes who produce those moments, keep in mind how long that elation might last. The defining part of this particular Olympic journey, as Koehler said: “Athletes are interested in getting in and getting out.”
That’s because of China, sure. But it’s also because of the IOC’S dismissal of athletes’ legitimate concerns about the safety of both their bodies and their personal information. The Olympics should be a festival of athletic achievement, but the people who run them aren’t interested in celebrating athletes so much as commodifying them for sponsors and broadcast rights-holders. Which means it doesn’t matter where they happen, nor who pays the price in the aftermath.