Tibet ensures boycott issue will run and run

AMERICA AT LARGE:SINCE YOU can hardly pick up the paper these days without reading the "b" word, it must be an Olympic year, writes George Kimball.

The operative word in this case is not "Balco" but "boycott". A few days after the European Union engaged in debate over the propriety of participating in the coming summer's Beijing Games, the speaker of the US House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, weighed in on Tuesday with her more modest proposal, to wit: that the American president should express his displeasure with China's human-rights policies by boycotting the opening ceremony in Beijing.

The response from the occupant of the oval office was swift and unequivocal. George W Bush said he had every intention of attending the Olympics, including the opening ceremony.

"The president views the Olympics as a sporting event and an important opportunity to support America's athletes," said White House spokesman Tony Fratto. "He has also made it very clear that the Olympics will shine a bright light on China regarding a variety of issues."

Those of my generation have already experienced three significant Olympic boycotts. In 1976, 22 African nations withdrew from the Montreal Olympics because New Zealand was allowed to compete, the All Blacks having toured South Africa earlier in the year in defiance of an international ban.

Four years later, 64 other nations joined the US in boycotting the Moscow Games in protest over the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. (Somewhat ironically, our loyalties at the time lay with the brave Taliban "freedom fighters" who opposed the dirty commies.) The Russians retaliated by refusing to participate in the 1984 Olympiad in Los Angeles. They were joined by 13 Eastern Bloc allies, as well as Cuba.

The People's Republic of China, it should probably be noted, boycotted every Olympics between 1956 and 1976 because Taiwan was allowed to participate.

Now, obviously, in each of the aforementioned instances, somebody felt they had a statement worth making, at least symbolically. But a review of the Games over the 20th century is even more instructive for the Olympics that weren't boycotted.

Munich in 1972 comes to mind. After the massacre of 11 Israeli athletes and coaches, human decency argued that the nations of the world should have just packed up and gone home, but IOC president Avery Brundage declared "the games must go on", and they did.

The only hint of American dissent came not in response to the terrorism, but when our basketball team, declaring that they had been robbed by the referees, boycotted the medal ceremony.

And, in 1968, in a circumstance that has its parallel with today's situation in China and Tibet, government forces slaughtered more than 250 pro-democracy demonstrators on the streets of Mexico City 10 days before the Olympics there. Once again the IOC washed its hands of the matter, declaring the killings "an internal matter".

The US had no official response to the extermination of Mexican citizenry, but when sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos staged their "black power" protest on the medal stand, they were expelled in disgrace by the USOC.

Can't you almost hear echoes of Avery Brundage when you hear today's Chinese media blaming their current domestic turmoil on "the loyal running dogs of the Dalai Lama clique"?

But with the rumble of dissent over the coming games growing louder by the day, it is probably worth noting here that if ever an Olympics deserved to be boycotted, it was the 1936 Berlin Games, when it was plainly apparent long before the event that the Olympiad had been carefully orchestrated to function as a veritable monument to Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany.

And the United States came much closer to carrying out that boycott than might commonly be supposed today.

Although America boasted a large and influential Jewish population, the leader of the movement to spurn Hitler's Games was not a Jew but an Irish-American judge named Jeremiah T Mahoney, who was at the time the president of the US Amateur Athletic Association.

"There is no room for discrimination on grounds of race, colour or creed in the Olympics," said Mahoney. "I personally do not see why we should compete."

Mahoney's position was shared not only by the Jewish lobby, but by influential columnists Westbrook Pegler and Heywood Broun, as well as New York mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, but opposed by Brundage, his chief rival within the AAU. When it came to crunch time, the boycott proposal lost, 58¼ votes to 55¾, and Mahoney resigned his presidency.

Then, as now, the arguments against Olympic boycotts were essentially twofold.

One was the Brundagian notion that the Olympics should be free of political considerations (although it has occurred to me more than once that this in itself is a political consideration), the other that it is unfair to punish individual athletes by denying them the right to participate on the biggest stage on earth.

It could reasonably be argued that had Judge Mahoney prevailed in 1936, Jesse Owens would never have been able to thumb his nose at Hitler by winning four gold medals in Berlin, but that doesn't excuse the cowardly decision (allegedly at the behest of Brundage) to avoid embarrassing Der Führer by dropping two Jewish runners from the American 4x100 metre relay team.

The US population includes an estimated million-and-a-half Buddhists. Approximately one-quarter of those are non-Asians, most of them new-agey followers of the Dalai Lama. What happens if one of these loyal running dogs makes our Olympic team and the Chinese don't like it? Just wondering.