We are so dumb here in the United States when it comes to the Olympics.
More precisely, perhaps, reactive instead of proactive.
And heavy-handed and myopic.
Or maybe, really, just dumb.
President Biden’s so-called “diplomatic boycott” of the Beijing 2022 Winter Games marks yet the latest example. In this instance, the president is focused on the approval of a domestic audience and certain Anglo allies. He has been egged on by the dual echo chambers of a political class and a pliant media, both largely based on the East Coast, that know next to nothing about the Olympics.
In all, he is playing it, in a word, dumb.
Not to mention: being hypocritical to the max.
Then-Vice President Biden at a 2015 Washington appearance at the Assn. of National Olympic Committees meeting. Behind: IOC president Thomas Bach and Olympic influence-broker Sheik Ahmad al-Fahad al-Sabah of Kuwait // Getty Images
By now, there have been dozens upon dozens of articles and commentaries about this so-called “boycott.” It’s not a boycott because the Chinese hadn’t formally invited any American officials. So no one can be boycotting anything to which they haven’t been invited, duh.
This may seem like a nuance but it’s not. In diplomacy and in the world of Olympics, protocol matters, and a lot.
Moreover, the press keeps proving that it seems entirely more interested in narrative than simple research and, you know, facts. Until you read this sentence: not one single piece, not one, has mentioned that then-Vice President Biden showed up in 2015 in Washington at the Assn. of National Olympic Committees soirée and called the Olympics “the single unifying principle in the world.”
He also said, “I will be the captain of the U.S. Olympic team.”
Oh, really?
What else to expect from a lazy press that, seriously, knows virtually nothing about the Olympics — and that’s being spoon-fed China-bashing from a U.S. government that now finds some element of that expedient?
Seb Coe, who ran the 2012 London Games and is now president of the world track and field federation, said a few days ago, and he is dead-on right, that this “boycott” is a “meaningless gesture” because no one is going to miss a minister here or there.
Seriously, no one cares — except to note that, again, it’s the Americans trying to leverage the Olympics for political advantage.
But what advantage?
Trying to spark a new Cold War with China?
When the United States and China have extensive trade ties? Look around. Is your cellphone and virtually everything in your car, house and life supplied and made entirely in America? Or in China?
When China is not, as it was in 2008 and Beijing was playing host to the Summer Games, marking its arrival on the world stage — but is now a confident player all its own in geopolitical politics?
When the Chinese, with the advantage of more than 3,000 years of history, are given to play the long game — while we, distracted by a 24/7 news cycle, elections every two and four years and non-stop discord amplified by the stupidity of cable news and social media, are intensely focused on crisis management and can’t see beyond the here and now?
Ten points here if the average American can remember the names of the two women who won gold in cross-country skiing at the PyeongChang 2018 Games. Hint: one is coming back for Beijing.
This “boycott” is somehow going to compel Americans, or anyone, to believe that democracy is better than an autocratic form of government? In what ways, precisely? Where is that link? You either believe it (let’s be clear: I do) or you don’t. But how does this achieve or advance that goal?
Listen to French president Emmanuel Macron on Thursday — note, Paris is the host of the 2024 Summer Games — when he said at a news conference, emphasizing that France would not be engaging in any symbolic gamesmanship, “We must not politicize [the Olympics]. As with all things on the international stage, I prefer to do things that have a useful effect.”
Recall Sochi 2014, when the Obama Administration, in a protest of the Russian so-called anti-gay laws, made a big show of sending gay athletes as part of the official American delegations, both to the opening and closing ceremonies.
What did that Obama showboating change? Billie Jean King’s trip to Russia for the closing ceremony changed what? Hard metrics show — what, exactly?
We would do so much better in the United States if we would understand how we are viewed in many if not most quarters in the Olympic movement.
Let’s start here: it’s not with great love or even appreciation for us or our way of life.
A story this week in Inside the Games, a British website that specializes in the day-to-day of the Olympic churn, recapped a story that first appeared in the LA Times about unnamed members of a Los Angeles police department detail, in Marseille to review security in advance of the 2024 Games, chasing a man believed — mistakenly — to have stolen a cellphone.
The Inside the Games story then shifted, in the final paragraphs of its piece, to note that the murder rate in LA is on course to be its highest in a decade.
As if that had anything to do with — what?
Because the underlying story had nothing to do with homicides in Marseille.
Answer: the perception shared by many in the Olympic scene that the United States is awash in firearms and thus essentially unsafe for anyone day or night.
Dear reader, the conclusion: Los Angeles is all but a war zone.
You laugh? Because your matcha chai latte on the beach is, like, mellow?
You don’t understand. Or you don’t want to.
Over the past 20 years, what country elected without question the two most despised presidents in perhaps all of American history?
What nation launched a war in Iraq? On flawed pretenses? Aided by a compliant press?
What country ran a torture program?
Prosecuted a 20-year war in Afghanistan? Then pulled out and left millions of Afghan girls and women to the ways of the Taliban?
Runs, still, a secret prison in Guantanamo?
And has the gall to preach to others, high-mindedly, about the rule of law — or assume moral authority about right and wrong?
As for our government and the IOC:
This column won’t even get into the 2017 White House meeting between the IOC president and the then-president of the United States over the Los Angeles bid for the Summer Games. It’s enough to say it was a — disaster.
Or the heavy security presence that attended Obama’s 2009 campaign visit to Copenhagen amid Chicago’s ill-fated bid for the 2016 Games, won by Rio.
Someone maybe ought to ask President Biden, while we’re at it, whether it’s true that, first, when he was vice president and representing the United States at the 2010 Vancouver Games if, first, there was a request for more than 80 — let’s say, oh, 83! — credentials for his traveling party and, second, no one from that delegation was no way going to wait in line — that’s for losers from other countries — and those credentials had to be ready for the big-time American government-types upon arrival.
At the 2010 Vancouver Games: then-Vice President Biden and snowboarder Shaun White // Getty Images
These ill-struck notes are bound to rebound onto the United States Olympic & Paralympic Committee and, yes, American athletes. Don’t think otherwise.
You might be inclined to think that because American sponsors supply a big chunk of financing that Olympic big-wigs might be more inclined to treat the USOPC more nicely than otherwise.
It works just the other way around.
With responsibility comes accountability. Yet the USOPC, particularly under board chair Susanne Lyons and chief executive Sarah Hirshland, can’t seem to understand this.
The USOPC has been something of a loose cannon in Olympic circles this past year, particularly over Rule 50, the guideline that details athlete expression.
The IOC went to great lengths to conduct a global athlete survey before the Tokyo Games — that’s called process — and then opted to keep athlete expresion the same on the podium. That is, no expression.
The USOPC, though, said, hey, American athletes, if you want to express yourselves, we’re not going to do anything about it.
This position may have played well domestically, and it was for sure cheered on nearly universally in the press. Different context, there’s that compliant media thing again.
Internationally, it was perceived as nothing less than an f-you.
Why? Again, the IOC had undertaken process to which all the other nations of the world had been solicited and some significant number had contributed. And the USOPC said, cool, well, we don’t care, we’re gonna play by our own rules.
This is rich because the USOPC itself has rules. For instance, all national governing body boards of directors must, per the USOPC, feature at least one-third “athlete representatives.” There are 50 such NGBs, Summer and Winter. What if one decided, screw it, we’ll just go with 20% athletes? Or 10%? And make a big deal of it publicly and rub it in the USOPC’s face? Just like the USOPC did to the IOC over Rule 50. How do you think the USOPC would react? Kindly?
So interesting that, amid the Tokyo Games, Bach essentially read Hirshland and Lyons the riot act over the way the USOPC handled Rule 50 and told them the USOPC was but one of 206 national Olympic committees in the world. No one and nobody special, so to speak.
Also so interesting that Hirshland and Lyons haven’t said a word publicly about that meeting. You wonder why. Or maybe not.
When the list of potential new IOC members was announced Thursday, were any Americans on it? Not hardly.
Absent a 2022-style miracle on ice or snow, the U.S. team that goes to Beijing is going to perform if not, like, awesome, then assuredly not gangbusters. The USOPC knows this. Medals-wise, Beijing 2022 is not shaping up to be Tokyo 2021.
And just in time for Congress — or, that is, a congressionally-designated committee — to take a whack at reforming the USOPC!
Which BTW may already be in violation of the Olympic Charter. But no need to go there because things are already too complicated with the IOC as it is, right?
Who has more fun?!
All of which is to say:
If the United Nations secretary-general, Antonio Guterres, can find a way to come to Beijing, which he announced Thursday was his plan, then the U.S. government could — should — have found a way to have finessed this situation.
In 1984, the Soviets were leading a boycott of the Los Angeles Games, reprisal for the 1980 American-led boycott of the Moscow Olympics. In 1984, fostered in significant measure by Peter Ueberroth, the People’s Republic of China made its first appearance at the Summer Games (after a symbolic presence at the 1952 Games) — having boycotted all the Games in-between over the presence of the entity that in Olympic circles goes by Chinese Taipei.
The first medal of the 1984 Games went to China’s Xu Haifeng, in the 50-meter air pistol event. And Li Ning won six medals in gymnastics — the same Li Ning who lit the cauldron in 2008.
Together, China and the United States have — at least, so far — enjoyed a long and rich Olympic history.
This 2022 “boycott” will, like the 2014 Sochi stunt, achieve absolutely nothing. Except to diminish Chinese respect for America and certain Americans. Keep in mind that the Chinese have a long institutional memory. And Los Angeles will again play host to the Summer Games in 2028.
We are so dumb.