After Tokyo

Oh, cripes, is Beijing 2022 coming soon?

The Beijing Winter Olympics are less than six months away, and in place of moving the Winter Games or postponing them until 2023 or 2024 (the centennial year of the Winter Olympics), some wags are suggesting a boycott of the Winter Games if they're held on schedule.  That reminds me of when right-wing columnist Cal Thomas immediately called for a boycott of the 2008 Summer Olympics as soon as they were awarded to Beijing.  

Thomas' sentiment was a knee-jerk reaction back in 2001, but it's a very understandable one now, and I don't need to tell you again the reasons why . . . though COVID remains a big reason.  But after the relatively successful staging  of the 2020 - no, 2021 - Tokyo Olympics these past two weeks, the main reasons for a boycott are likely to center around Chinese oppression of the Uighurs and their use of slave labor.  Not that COVID, which the Chinese government gave the rest of the world, isn't a concern.

So do I, as someone who thought it was a bad idea to award Beijing the 2022 Winter Games in the first place, think we should boycott the Games?  No, no, no, let the American team go.  Boycotts never work, as anyone remembers the 1980 Moscow Olympics boycott remembers.  It didn't get the Soviets to withdraw from Afghanistan, which was the reason of the boycott in the first place (and I'll have more on our own withdrawal from that country another time), and President Carter couldn't even get NATO allies other than Canada and West Germany to join him, though the British government wanted to but the British Olympic team did not, and so they went.  Ironically, members of the British Parliament are calling for a boycott of the 2022 Winter Games now.   Speed skater Eric Heiden, one of the stars of the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, New York, was against any boycott of any Olympiad.  He was right about boycotts in 1980, and he's right about them now.  This country has never boycotted a Winter Olympiad and we shouldn't start with this one. 

Political disputes never work out, but the Olympics usually do.  A lot of folks thought it was folly to award the Games of the XXIVth Olympiad - the 1988 Olympics - to Seoul, because it was the capital of South Korea, a country that had no diplomatic relations with the Communist bloc nations of eastern Europe and whose government was not considered the legitimate government of Korea by those same nations (they considered the so-called Democratic People's Republic in North Korea to be that), and was also a right-wing dictatorship.  There were calls to move the 1988 Games to avoid boycotts.  But everything worked out in the end.  The Communist countries of eastern Europe attended the 1988 Seoul Olympics, South Korea democratized as a result of holding the Games, and that Olympiad produced memorable moments, especially from Americans such as swimmer Matt Biondi and track runner Florence Griffith Joyner.

Not to mention this cutie-pie. 😊

I'll have more about her toward the end of the month. 😉

Andrew Cuomo?  Relax, I'll get to that . . ..;