Boycott Olympic Boycotts

As the 2004 Olympics near their end - the U.S. won the bronze medal against Lithuania in men's basketball, by the way - many are looking toward 2008 and the Summer Olympics to be held then in Beijing, China. (Note - for those who don't keep up with other countries - yes, George W. Bush, I'm talking about you! - Beijing is the city formerly known as Peking.) And a few folks are looking toward boycotting the Beijing Games.

As soon as Beijing was awarded the Games of the 29th Olympiad back in 2001, American religious conservatives immediately called for a boycott of the 2008 Olympics on the grounds that China represses religious freedom and uses slave labor to make many of the items for sale in U.S. stores. Economic conservatives, of course, couldn't be bothered to join them. Personally, I think we shouldn't boycott the Olympics - we should boycott boycotting.

Boycotting the Beijing Olympics won't solve anything. It will not sway the Chinese government to stop using slave labor and military prison camps to make the goods that flood our discount outlets. It seems to me that the best thing to do would be to boycott store chains like Wal-Mart, which buy these cheap goods to sell in their stores and use their clout to force manufacturers to drive down their labor costs and, thus, retail prices. The good news is that a boycott of the Olympics isn't likely to happen. The bad news, of course, is that a boycott of Wal-Mart isn't likely either.

Besides, Olympic boycotts never work. The most famous example is the U.S.-led boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics to protest the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which occurred seven months before the Games were to begin. President Jimmy Carter got the idea from African nations who boycotted the 1976 Games to protest the New Zealand rugby team's violation of a sports boycott against apartheid-era South Africa by going there to play. (That boycott didn't really work, as South Africa wouldn't dismantle apartheid itself until the early nineties.)  If the intention of the boycott was to force the Soviets out of Afghanistan, it was a bust - the U.S.S.R. pulled out of Afghanistan in 1989, nine years and three Soviet leaders later.

Carter couldn't even get a lot of major countries to support him. In the end, the only NATO countries to go along with the boycott were Canada, Norway, and West Germany. Among the other nations involved in the boycott (there were 62 in all) were countries like, ironically, China - who had recently invaded Vietnam and only joined the boycott to get back at their arch-rivals for dominance in the Communist world, the Soviet Union. (Er, wasn't the boycott intended to support the rights of sovereign states?) Another country in the boycott was . . . Iran. Never mind that Iran was under an Islamic fundamentalist government, was holding 52 of our citizens hostage at the time, and was wishing the weaver's answer on the rest of us Americans. Iran was a neighbor of Afghanistan, another Muslim country (both bordered the Soviet Union as well), and Iran thus joined the boycott in defense of Islam. Now, freedom of religion in the face of an atheistic invader was also part of Carter's rationale for the boycott as well, but did we really want a different enemy like Iran on our side? (Ironically, when the Taliban took over Afghanistan in 1996, even the Iranians were afraid of their interpretation of Islamic doctrine. So much for Afghan religious rights.) Carter's Olympic boycott coalition, in short, bore a slight resemblance to Bush's current "coalition of the willing" in the Iraq War.

Conspicuous in its refusal to join the Olympic boycott of 1980 was Great Britain. British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher supported the boycott, but the British Olympic Committee refused to go along with it, so the British team went to Moscow anyway. In fact, two of the biggest stars of those Games - runner Sebastian Coe, decathlete Daley Thompson - were Brits. But the fact the the British Olympic Committee defied Thatcher even as our Olympic committee knuckled under to Carter is telling. We were supposed to be fighting for democracy in the Cold War, and Carter was telling the U.S. Olympic Committee that our athletes weren't going ("Our team will not go. The decision has been made." - Carter) and that there was no way to appeal his decision. He was acting like the national governess, expecting the USOC to fall in line. The British Olympic Committee, meanwhile, stood up to Thatcher and said "Hell, no! We will go!" If we Americans weren't such sheep, we would have boycotted the boycott too. But no, our Olympic committee voted to blindly support the President.

No one seemed to even bother to ask our athletes what they thought.

One dissenting U.S. Olympic Committee member who opposed the boycott, though, warned that if we boycotted the Moscow Games, the Soviets would retaliate with a boycott of the Los Angeles Summer Olympics in 1984. Like most thinking Americans, he was ignored. But that's exactly what happened. And that led to an even greater unintended consequence - the U.S. team won practically everything (an exception, of course, being men's field hockey) in the 1984 Games, flag-waving nationalistic fever ran high as a result, and we Americans felt so good about our socially frayed, intellectually impoverished, financially bankrupt, and environmentally deteriorating nation, we re-elected Ronald Reagan President that November.

Olympic boycotts suck! :-(