Opinion: It’s really hard to support the Olympics

I have trouble with the Olympics at the best of times. Even though the Games have lots of documents with high-minded notions of world peace, fair play and friendship, the real-world effects of the Olympics can range from problematic to inhumane.

When the French aristocrat Pierre de Coubertin set about creating the modern Olympics in the late 1800s, he made them solely for amateur athletes, ostensibly for the purity of sport. But as Mark Johnson writes in his excellent book on the history of doping, Spitting in the Soup, the Olympic project was really about class warfare. Only the upper classes could afford to be amateurs participating in the Games. Professional sport was growing at the time, but it was practised and enjoyed by the working class. The Olympics were not open to anyone who ever used sport to get out of the factories or mines and make a better life.

Of course, pros were fully welcomed into the Games by 1988, but it’s not as if the Olympics suddenly became any more noble a project. For the 2016 Games in Rio, thousands of poor residents in and around the city were displaced. In some cases, people were moved so that construction of Olympic infrastructure could take place. In other instances, it was just so organizers could hide the poverty in the city. Bus routes were changed to make travel out of poor neighbourhoods more difficult. People lost their homes.

Recently, the winter Olympics (Sochi 2014, Beijing 2022) seem to be PR stunts by authoritarian governments.

Those are all “regular” issues I have with the Games. Amid the pandemic, there are a whole new set of ethical problems. In early January, the out-of-touch International Olympic Committee (IOC) member Dick Pound said athletes should have priority access to COVID-19 vaccines so that Tokyo 2020 could go ahead this summer. In March, the IOC made a deal with the Chinese Olympic committee to source vaccines for athletes taking part in the Tokyo Games. This deal brings with it concerns about vaccine diplomacy and nationalism. Japan’s own vaccination efforts have been going slowly. In May, a poll showed that more than 80 per cent of the country’s citizens opposed hosting the Games. Tokyo Olympics president Seiko Hashimoto said the events could proceed safely, even though Japan was entering its fourth wave. How are things as the Olympics are getting underway? There are now more than 100 COVID-19 cases related to the Games. Of course, there have been a cluster of other scandals.

And what of the athletes? What of the Canadian riders we cover here, in our magazine and on the podcast? Not only the riders, what of my colleagues at Canadian Running Magazine who are in Tokyo and who I’ve watched work so damn hard to get there? Despite all my misgivings about the Olympics, I have the utmost respect for the athletes who dedicate so much for a shot that comes every four years (pandemics notwithstanding). I also have great sympathy for the staff at Cycling Canada who’ve been navigating a logistical gong show as they try to support our riders. As the Olympics go ahead, in spite of all the good reasons why they shouldn’t, I wish the athletes all the best.