Olympics 2008 — Should We or Not????

The 2008 Olympics will be officially held in China from 08th August 2008 to 24th August 2008. While the Summer Olympics is an eagerly awaited event, this time around it has been marred with controversies. There has been several calls for boycott of Olympics. So what makes this Olympics games so controversial? Is this the first time that a boycott call has been made? . First, let us examine the history of Olympics

The History of Modern Olympics

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The original Olympic Games were first recorded in 776 BC in Olympia, Greece, and were celebrated until AD 393. Interest in reviving the Olympic Games proper was first shown by the Greek poet and newspaper editor Panagiotis Soutsos in his poem “Dialogue of the Dead” in 1833. Evangelos Zappas sponsored the first modern international Olympic Games in 1859. He paid for the refurbishment of the Panathinaiko Stadium for Games held there in 1870 and 1875. This was noted in newspapers and publications around the world including the London Review, which stated that “the Olympian Games, discontinued for centuries, have recently been revived! Here is strange news indeed … the classical games of antiquity were revived near Athens”.

The International Olympic Committee was founded in 1894 on the initiative of a French nobleman, Pierre Frédy, Baron de Coubertin. The first of the IOC’s Olympic Games were the 1896 Summer Olympics, held in Athens, Greece

History of Boycotts.

This is not the first time that the Olympic Games have run into rough weather. The games were boycotted in 1956 [Melbourne Olympics] for the first time by the Netherlands, Spain, and Switzerland, because of the repression of the Hungarian Uprising by the Soviet Union; additionally, Cambodia, Egypt, Iraq, and Lebanon, boycotted the games due to the Suez Crisis In 1972 and 1976, a large number of African countries threatened the IOC with a boycott, to force them to ban South Africa, Rhodesia, and New Zealand In 1980 and 1984, the Cold War opponents boycotted each other’s games. Sixty-five nations refused to compete at the Moscow Olympics in 1980 because of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, but 16 nations from Western Europe did compete at the Moscow Olympics. The boycott reduced the number of nations participating to only 81, the lowest number of nations to compete since 1956. The Soviet Union and 14 of its Eastern Bloc partners (except Romania) countered by skipping the Los Angeles Olympics in 1984, arguing the safety of their athletes could not be guaranteed there and “chauvinistic sentiments and an anti-Soviet hysteria are being whipped up in the United States”[Source Wikipedia]

Current Olympics have invited criticism due to China’s poor human rights records and the Tibet Issue.

This again brings us to an all important question:- Is boycotting an event the right way to draw public attention to an issue? Do we achieve anything significant by not participating? Can’t we achieve our goal [in this case drawing attention to Tibet] by participating rather than being a mute spectator???

An event such as Olympics has a wider audience. So logic says that if we voice our concerns by participating in the games, then we would have conveyed our message and ideologies to a wider audience. Secondly, each and every country has its own set of ideologies and interests. So an open boycott of the games would not be possible if it is not in the best interest of the country concerned.

The debate will continue. So it should be left to individuals to decide… on which side of the fence would they like to be?????????/

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