When Greece was preparing for the 2004 Olympics, they got behind schedule on construction and had to work around the clock to make sure there would be actual buildings for the athletes to compete in. That was on top of concerns that the city was unsafe and unclean. Boy, did they have it lucky.
China’s plans for the 2008 Olympics were dealt another blow this week by none other than the mastermind behind E.T. Steven Spielberg announced he was leaving his post as an artistic adviser for the Olympics because China wasn’t intervening in the Darfur genocide in Sudan. His move brought a Hollywood-sized spotlight to China’s relations with Darfur and could lead to more people stepping away from the games.
China is Sudan’s largest oil customer and has caught a lot of flack for not doing anything about the conflict in the country. China has consistently used their veto power to block U.N. resolutions to send peacekeepers to Darfur. Even though there has been some movement in the past few months, including Chinese President Hu Jintao asking the Sudanese government to accept U.N. peacekeepers, activists say China hasn’t done enough.
One of the biggest voices against China has been actress Mia Farrow, famous for starring in Rosemary’s Baby and getting dumped by Woody Allen for her adopted daughter. Farrow’s activism may have convinced Spielberg to leave the post. Her editorial in The Wall Street Journal last year asked if Spielberg wanted to go down in history as the next Leni Riefenstahl, the director infamous for generating Nazi propaganda, especially at the 1936 Olympics. Dignitaries like Desmond Tutu and Shirin Ebadi have also taken China to task.
Photo by nemetz33 on Flickr, licensed under Creative Commons.
This criticism has China nervous about the country’s reputation and its Olympics image. If the trend continues, though, they should be more worried about whether the games will even go off. Some are calling for a boycott of the Beijing games. Bill Richardson floated the idea during a Democratic debate over the summer. In France, presidential candidate François Bayrou also called for that country’s team to pull out of the games (he, like Richardson, left the presidential race).
And these boycott requests aren’t a new trend. The 2008 games have been scrutinized ever since its hosting was announced. There was concern about their human rights record. And their Communist regime. And their icy relations with other world powers. There were even objections over the Olympic torch route because it would go through Taiwan, touching on long-held diplomatic tensions.
The U.S. team likely won’t actually boycott the Olympics. Jimmy Carter still hasn’t heard the end of it after he had the U.S. team pull out of the 1980 Moscow Olympics. The world didn’t take the corresponding Soviet boycott of the 1984 Los Angeles games any better. With recent Olympics moving more towards diplomacy and unity, the U.S. would get equally lambasted for pulling out. Plus, it would totally ruin the games’ slogan: One World, One Voice.
Still, Spielberg’s pullout means that more dignitaries may follow suit, taking some of the glitter away from the games. It almost guarantees that politics will take center stage and overshadow the competition. That means bad news for viewers and even worse news for the U.S. competitors, including Northwestern wrestler Jake Herbert.
Still, on the bright side, the pullout leaves Spielberg more time to work on the new Indiana Jones movie.