It’s important to remember the true meaning of the Olympics: To make tons of money for sponsors and to give legitimacy to participating states no matter how they treat their citizens.
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It’s easy to be in favor of political actions for messages you like, but what if it is a right wing athlete showing a nazi salute, or something more modern along the same line? Maybe an Indian hindu nationalist.
I don’t think you should disqualify people, but a fine or being thrown out of the final festivites may be in order. That will at least limit actions to athletes who think their protest is really important and worth the punishment.
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Ban on hate symbols would in my opinion be the best way to prevent this.
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Like the UN, the Olympics are a great idea for a group of disparate-but-similar Liberal Democracies and actual amateurs. They haven’t been what they should be since mmmmmaybe the ancient Greeks?
It’s become corporate money, steroid experiments and fascist bragging rights, and it screws up any city that hosts it. If it went away, no one would actually miss anything. *
(* Amateur athletes – real amateurs — don’t need the Olympics to compete, and can just hold world finals with any nation who deserves to compete if someone needs their bragging rights that badly. )
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It tickles me how the spirit of the Modern Olympics is supposed to be, “It isn’t the winning, it is the taking part that counts”; while the Ancient Olympic ethos was, “If you don’t win, don’t bother coming home!”
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I think that means you care quite a lot but just not in a positive way.
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Way to use reverse psychology!
Now they are going to get flooded with them
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the NPR story i heard about this also mentioned that, ironically, the IOC ended up apologizing to Carlos and Smith and admitted that they (the IOC) were wrong about the whole incident in the first place.
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Nice in theory, but who gets to decide what is and isn’t a “hate symbol”? Do you trust the IOC to make a fair decision?
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It will also serve as a tribute to this scumbag:
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It will be interesting to see which athletes (if any) defy the ban.
Personally I’d love it if every medalist in every event took a knee or a fist. So 1/3 of the way through the olympics they suddenly ran out of athletes.
Obviously that’s not going to happen given that there’s an excellent chance it would torpedo careers and/or piss off the athlete’s sponsors.
Still, it would be entertaining to see.
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To be honest, I wouldn’t trust IOC in its current form to make a fair decision about anything, but with a less corrupt authority identifying and banning the more recognizable hate shouldn’t be a problem. There is no need to ban every symbol, just those that are obvious. Or maybe don’t ban anything at all and just let the social pressure do its job (for example if an athlete would do nazi salute, I’m sure their career would be ended in that moment due to public outrage).
Political gestures at Olympics are long tradition, it’d be a shame to have them all banned.
Even the rude (but hate-free) ones:
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But that was okay, cause it was anti-Soviet… /s
But seriously, yeah, this was a bad decision on the IOCs part, and I hope plenty of athletes, especially those with high profiles defy it.
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Or it would send them all to Nike:
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Based on what I know about the effect of hosting the Olympics on the cities that have done so, trying to keep your city from hosting is pretty positive.
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Indeed. Which is not a positive thing to care about, about the Olympics. Caring positively about one’s city, wishing to protect it from the Olympics is not caring about the Olympics in a positive way.
Here “political actions” include “disrespecting drug cheaters”.
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You mean like waving a Winnie-the-Pooh stuffed animal around amirite?
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So, the “ok” hand gesture: ok or not ok?
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From the perspective of nations that were brutally oppressed by soviets it was ok.
