A China syndrome to be avoided

So hands up if you know who Marty Glickman and Sam Stoller were. Answer later.

Soon the International Olympic Committee (IOC) are going to do precisely the wrong thing and award the Olympic Games of 2008 to China. Despite perfectly good bids from Toronto and Paris, they will do so because they are in thrall to their sponsors and the only sport in town for the next 20 years shall be that of taking a nation and turning it into a market.

It's a game with no rules and a game with its own language, where we talk about the "allowances" which must be made for a "fledgling democracy" and hope that by "bringing this wonderful celebration of the human spirit to China we will open up some minds as well as some markets".

And then, of course, Jesse Owens will be exhumed. Poor Jesse. Nobody else has ever had their 15 minutes of fame so wilfully misunderstood. If you were to take an IOC apologist and let him or her play their Jesse Owens spiel to a seven-year-old kid, the child would go to bed thinking it was a happy ever after story. No war in Europe. No racism in America. Well la-dee-da.

Sweet dreams. Owens was in favour of a boycott in 1936. Like a lot of things in his life, though, he was watery about it. He went anyway. It's true that Hitler didn't shake his hand. He didn't shake the hands of any of the German winners either.

Ah, the stories we tell. Another enduring myth of Owens' trip to Berlin concerns his relationship with the German long jumper Lutz Long. Those who apologise for the soiled hands of Olympism always point out that Long and Owens forged a friendship in the long jump pit and left the track arm in arm. Maybe so. But by the end of 1936 the President of the US hadn't shaken Jesse Owens' hand either and Owens was to be found in Havana, Cuba, racing against thoroughbred horses for cash. A few more years would find Lutz Long dead, killed fighting for Hitler.

As for the Games, Germany won 36 gold medals, America just 25 and Jesse Owens was the merest blip in the propaganda rout. Just before the Games, Max Schmeling beat Joe Louis in Madison Square Garden. He came back to Berlin and told the Germans how good they had it, with "one party, one union, everyone happy". The Games seemed to prove that to Germans. Jesse Owens going to Berlin did nothing but

Where to begin with the reasons for not giving China the laurel of world approval that is the Olympic Games? Political repression? Denial of labour rights? Suppression of religious groups? Institutionalised attacks on ethnic minorities? The detention of a five-year-old boy for a month earlier this year? A use of the death penalty that makes George W Bush look like a bleeding heart liberal (89 people killed in one day in April)? Use of torture so widespread and so imaginative that the stomach heaves to read accounts like that concerning agricultural worker Zhou Juanxiong, who was branded with soldering irons, had his genitals ripped off, was burned with cigarettes, beaten with clubs . . .

We can agree perhaps that Tiananmen Square was a long time ago (but only a slightly shorter time since Juan Antonio Samaranch cycled gaily across it while the Chinese were bidding for the 2000 Games), but in that period, no inquiry? No apology? No rights even to public mourning for the bereaved? No right to organise for them? No word on many of the people who disappeared into State detention that night? And now we want to put beach volleyball into the square.

Sport Intern, the little newsletter which usually tells you what the gods of Olympism are thinking, opined ominously last month that this was the chance for the IOC to show its independence, that Coca Cola and MacDonalds were already busy selling in China, etc, etc, and all reservations about the IOC getting in there could therefore be laid aside. The idea that these companies should be the moral compass for the behaviour of sportspeople is richly comic, but perhaps it's one whose time has come.

Perhaps sport has been made that morally threadbare by the drugs and the money it found after pimping itself to TV. Perhaps the spirit has been made that dark by the scandals radiating around those who run sport. Maybe there is no sense left in expecting a higher ethical standard therein. Maybe the lightness of spirit which marked the Sydney Games was a dying kick.

The IOC have a little time left in which to make up their mind. If doping is an offence to the dignity and morality of sport, so too is it morally grotesque to present the greatest sporting celebration we know against a backdrop of hideous repression.

Sport is an enhancement of life, the best of us. To use it so cynically is to abandon hope.

Oh. Glickman and Stoller. For his fourth medal, Owens and another athlete allowed themselves to be inserted into the American 4x100 relay team so that the only two Jews in the American squad, Marty Glickman and Sam Stoller, could be dropped to spare Hitler any embarrassment. They returned to America without competing. Glickman was an 18-year-old kid at the time. It took him 50 years to get over the hurt and the rage. Stoller, sadly, I know nothing about.