U.S. Olympians on Beijing Boycott: Letting Athletes Compete, Spreading Human Rights Issues in the Spotlight
With less than 10 months to go before the start of the Beijing Winter Olympics, Beijing has recently begun testing its venues in earnest. At the same time, international calls for a boycott of the Beijing Winter Olympics have increased rather than decreased. How do the athletes, who are an important part of the Olympic Games, feel about the calls to boycott Beijing? U.S. Winter Olympian Claire Egan told Voice of America that athletes should be allowed to compete, using the Olympics as an opportunity to put questions about human rights in China in the spotlight.
Biathlon (Biathlon) competitor Clare Egan, who represented Team USA at the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympics, currently serves as president of the International Biathlon Union (IBU) Athletes Committee. According to NBC, Egan became one of the first two Americans to qualify for the Beijing Olympic Winter Games in March and claimed the top spot in the official U.S. biathlon rankings for the second time in nearly three years.
In an interview with the Voice of America, Egan, 33, said she had qualified but had not yet decided whether to compete in the Beijing Winter Olympics. She said she would announce her decision in the next few weeks.
Egan: Human rights at center of Olympic charter, IOC needs to pressure host nations
Egan told Voice of America that she only started noticing the boycott a few weeks ago when she saw in the news that the State Department had expressed interest in discussing with allies the possibility of a joint boycott of the Beijing Winter Olympics. The State Department and the White House have since stated that they are not considering a boycott of the Beijing Winter Olympics.
“My general understanding is that the core demand behind these calls is to put political pressure on the Chinese Communist Party through a boycott of the Winter Olympics to make changes in its human rights record, especially those reported genocides and human rights abuses against the Uighurs,” Egan said.
Egan said human rights take center stage in the Olympic Charter, but it is the IOC’s responsibility to pressure host countries to ensure their compliance with the Olympic Charter, not the athletes of the United States or other countries.
Egan argued that the U.S. experience with the 1980 boycott of the Moscow Summer Olympics has shown that “using young athletes as political pawns neither works nor is it fair,” Egan told Voice of America, “There are many other mechanisms that can be used for the United States and any other country to advance values or certain policies, while avoiding forcing athletes to become political pawns.”
In the face of continued pressure from international human rights groups and politicians to boycott the Beijing Winter Olympics, IOC President Thomas Bach said the IOC could not solve “problems that not even the UN Security Council, the G7, or the G20 can solve. Bach insisted that the IOC should remain “politically neutral” and avoid politicizing the Olympics.
U.S. China expert Ben Lowsen, writing in The Diplomat last month, said no one is asking the IOC to solve problems, but rather to take notice and do what it can. In the article, he said, “Remaining silent helps the abusers, so sitting back and doing nothing is not an option. The world cannot expect the IOC to solve all problems, but the problem of genocide is too big to ignore.”
Egan is not convinced by this attitude of the IOC either.
“Ultimately, the IOC has a responsibility to award the right to host the Olympics to a country that abides by the Olympic Charter, and that’s the first point,” Egan said. Because bids for the Olympics are always made much earlier, she said, it is incumbent on the IOC to take a strong stance and pressure the host country to make changes if at some point the country that gets the right to host appears to be in violation of the U.N. International Bill of Human Rights and the Olympic Charter.
The IOC has a lot of power, so I would expect it to do that,” Egan told Voice of America. I don’t think it’s politicizing things by doing that, that’s their responsibility. They are the IOC and it’s their job to enforce the Olympic Charter.”
“The bottom line is that the IOC has a responsibility to make sure that when they award an event to a country that brings in billions of dollars in revenue and makes the host country and host community shine, they consider the political implications behind it. It’s absurd for the IOC to pretend that they should stay out of politics,” Egan said.
Diplomatic boycott of Beijing Winter Olympics is gaining support
Egan stressed that the IOC has a responsibility to ensure that the host country complies with the human rights demands of the Olympic Charter. In addition, she believes “there may be some room for a boycott by government officials.”
“There are usually important officials from governments who attend the Olympics, and if they are not present, that would be a strong signal,” Egan told Voice of America.
This “diplomatic boycott” through the refusal of government officials to attend is now being supported by a growing number of human rights groups and political figures.
In an article in The New York Times last month, Senator Mitt Romney, who helped organize the U.S. Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, said an economic and diplomatic boycott of the Beijing Winter Olympics would be the most effective way to “demonstrate our condemnation of China’s misdeeds in a way that hurts the Chinese Communist Party, not our athletes,” considering it was too late to change the Olympics’ location. “
According to a poll conducted last month by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, the U.S. public is split almost 50-50 on whether to boycott the Beijing Winter Olympics: half of Americans (49 percent) support a boycott, while nearly half (46 percent) oppose it.
But so far, the U.S. athlete community seems to be relatively unanimous on the issue of boycotting the Beijing Winter Olympics: boycotts don’t work and are unfair to athletes.
The impact of past boycotts on athletes
Last July, on the 40th anniversary of the U.S. boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow over the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, The Washington Post interviewed several U.S. athletes who lost their chance to win gold at the time because of the boycott decision.
“We were innocent victims… How could they bring us into this conflict? None of us could understand that at the time,” Carol Blazejowski, a U.S. professional women’s basketball player at the time, told The Washington Post.
“Don’t think we solved anything by boycotting the Olympics at the time,” Ron Galimore, the first African-American athlete in U.S. history to be named to the Olympic gymnastics national team, told The Washington Post.
The 1980 Winter Olympics at Placid Lake in New York State were anything but quiet. The Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union was still going on, and the Soviet Union had just invaded Afghanistan. The U.S. Olympic Committee announced in early February of that year that it was boycotting the Summer Olympics in Moscow a few months later. But that same month, the U.S. men’s national hockey team, a group of American college students, was to play the Soviet Union, which had won four straight men’s hockey Winter Olympics, at the Winter Olympics. The U.S. team surprisingly won the game, creating the “Miracle on Ice” that is still a household name in the United States today.
Mike Eruzione, the captain of the U.S. team that scored the winning goal in that game, wrote an article in USA Today in March against the U.S. boycott of the Winter Olympics. In the article, he recalled the U.S. boycott of the Moscow Summer Olympics and lamented that hundreds of U.S. athletes had missed out on their dream of winning Olympic gold after training for dozens of years.
“Remember, just as the U.S. team did not choose Lake Serenity to host the 1980 Winter Olympics, the athletes now training for next year’s Winter Games did not choose Beijing as the venue. Likewise, their counterparts at the 1980 Summer Olympics did not choose Moscow. But they had no say when the government pushed for a boycott,” Eruchione said in the article.
He argued that the U.S. should let its best athletes go forward in the same uniform to compete for gold and defeat China on Chinese soil.
“When my skates hit the ice, I know America is behind us,” Eruchione said in the USA Today article, “and every Olympian feels that pride, and that’s what makes the Olympics so special. It’s the only sporting event where our entire country supports the same jersey.”
Eruchione said the “Miracle on Ice” occurred when people commented that a group of amateur hockey players had defeated a government-backed professional Soviet hockey team. He thus singled out the fact that many U.S. athletes to this day train on their own, with their own resources and the support of their coaches. In contrast, athletes from other countries often train with government funding or even coercion.
“American athletes stand on the podium and win medals and victories not because the government demands it, but because an athlete desires to do so. That’s what the ‘Miracle on Ice’ means to me and many others,” Eruchione said, adding that it is the most meaningful message the United States can send to the world through the Olympic platform, “and I urge everyone to give today’s Olympians a chance to perform similar miracles. “
Egan: Using Olympics as an opportunity to put human rights in the spotlight
Egan, who is likely to participate in next year’s Winter Olympics, also sees the Olympics as a powerful platform for athletes to deliver their message to the world.
“Which do you think is more effective for athletes? Staying at home and denying the opportunity to use this most global stage to make a statement? Or to get on the world stage, put on your best performance and use the spotlight on yourself as a platform to promote an issue that matters to you, whether it’s a specific human rights issue or another issue,” Egan told Voice of America, “My advice is to attend the Olympics and give athletes the opportunity to make their voice, it’s more effective for the athletes.”
Egan recalled how she felt as a 20-year-old watching the 2008 Beijing Olympics opening ceremony, saying she was completely blown away by the unprecedented spectacle. She says she has no doubt the opening ceremony of the 2022 Winter Olympics will be a similarly exquisite spectacle.
“And the risk is that on the one hand there is a beautiful opening ceremony, a perfect sporting event and so on; and on the other hand, the human rights abuses that are reported against Uighurs are covered up. That’s the risk,” Egan told Voice of America, “so the important thing for everyone associated with the Olympics is that people shouldn’t ignore that other side, shouldn’t let the Olympic spectacle obscure that other side. We need to use the Olympics as an opportunity to put those things in the spotlight and try to make things better for those victims.”
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