Beijing might have seemed like the best option at the time.
The International Olympic Committee needed somewhere to stage its 2022 Winter Games after several European capitals withdrew from bidding, scared away by the risk of hosting and paying for a multibillion-dollar sports event. The only remaining suitors were Beijing and the little-known city of Almaty in Kazakhstan.
When IOC members convened in July 2015 to cast their votes, the Chinese capital prevailed by a slim majority.
“This is really a safe choice,” IOC president Thomas Bach said, predicting the winner could reliably “deliver on its promises.”
Seven years later, as the Feb. 4 opening ceremony draws near, Bach and his colleagues still are paying the price for selecting a host country with a reputation for human rights abuses. Their standard line — sports and politics live in separate worlds — has failed to quiet global condemnation from activists, human rights organizations and some athletes.
Though threats of a multinational boycott have abated, the U.S. government has led a string of democratic countries in declaring a lesser “diplomatic boycott,” meaning they will protest by refusing to send representatives to the competition.
“We will not be contributing to the fanfare of the Games,” White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said. Sen. Tom Cotton, an Arkansas Republican, went a step further in dubbing Beijing “the Genocide Games.”
The last thing these Olympics needed was another distraction.In the wake of last summer’s Tokyo Games, the IOC faces yet another competition with strict COVID-19 restrictions and fears of an outbreak among athletes and coaches from around the world. But concerns about the spread of the Omicron variant have taken a backseat to political strife.
China has attracted criticism for its treatment of Uyghurs, Kazakhs and other ethnic minorities, with reports of indoctrination camps and cultural erasure leading to claims of genocide. Crackdowns on pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong and aggressive policies directed at Tibet, Mongolia and Taiwan have drawn further censure.
This month, Tibetan students protested by chaining themselves to the Olympic rings outside the IOC’s headquarters in Lausanne, Switzerland.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi declared that allowing Beijing to serve as host city this winter “makes a mockery of the Olympic Charter, which states that the Games should seek to foster ‘respect for universal and ethical principles.’”
There is historical precedent for politics intruding on the Games. Three European nations withdrew from the 1956 Summer Olympics in response to the Soviet Union’s crushing of the Hungarian Revolution. In 1976, more than 20 African and Arab countries refused to participate in a protest related to South Africa’s apartheid policy.
More famously, the U.S. led a 65-nation boycott of the 1980 Moscow Games to protest the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan and the Soviets retaliated by skipping the 1984 Los Angeles Games.
The Biden administration settled on a less-severe diplomatic boycott because, Psaki said, “I don’t think that we felt it was the right step to penalize athletes who have been training and preparing for this moment.”
