From Moscow 1980 to Beijing 2022, How did the Olympic boycott become a political weapon?

The United States, Canada, Britain and Australia decided to boycott the Beijing Winter Olympics next year diplomatically, in a decision that the host country considered a great offense to it. While this controversy brings to mind similar incidents in which the Olympics were boycotted to highlight political positions.

Because of China's record of human rights abuses, Washington has decided that it will boycott the Beijing Winter Olympics scheduled for next February. In a move followed by Canada, Britain and Australia. While French President Emmanuel Macron mocked it, considering it "insufficient".

The host government, the Chinese, considered the matter a great insult to its country, and threatened those countries to "pay the price dearly." While it is not the first time that sports tournaments have become an opportunity to record the political situation, and mutual diplomatic pressure between parties, a climate of tension floats over their relations. Indeed, the Olympics have always been an arena of competition during the Cold War.

West boycotts Beijing Olympics

On Monday, the United States announced a diplomatic boycott of the Winter Olympics to be held in Beijing in February. In a decision that she said comes after several months of trying to reach the most appropriate position towards China, which is accused of perpetrating genocide against Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang, northeastern China.

Britain, Australia and Canada followed the US decision, joining the boycott trenches. Canada, whose relations with China were turbulent due to the arrest of a senior executive of the giant Chinese technology company Huawei, and the subsequent detention of two Canadians there, before the three were released earlier this year. While there is talk of other countries, including Japan, that will join the boycott.

In its first response on Tuesday, China denounced what it called "ideological bias" and "malicious intentions" of the United States, adding that such a diplomatic boycott of the Winter Olympics may harm the dialogue and cooperation between the two countries in important areas. "The United States, Britain and Australia used the Olympic platform for political purposes," said Wang Wenbin, a spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, while Chinese media reported that politicians from those countries were not invited to attend the Games in the first place.

The World Olympic Federation expressed its satisfaction that the decision did not include the participation of athletes. "The presence of government officials and diplomats (at the Olympic Games) is a purely political decision of each government, and the IOC fully respects it within the framework of its political neutrality," an IOC spokesperson told AFP.

On the other hand, the French president downplayed the seriousness of the boycott decision, considering it a "trivial" measure. "We must be clear, either we do a complete boycott and do not send athletes, or we say we will link things up and do a full action, a useful step as always at the international level," Macron said during a press conference on Thursday. He added that with European partners and in coordination with the International Olympic Committee, "we will see what decision should be taken in the coming weeks."

The Olympics as an arena of political conflict

It is not the first time that the Olympic Games have been boycotted, while the first was in 1956, as the reasons for the boycott were many, but its decision was one; The absence of eight countries from the session. Egypt, Lebanon, Iraq and Cambodia boycotted the session in protest of the tripartite aggression that targeted Cairo. The Netherlands, Spain and Switzerland boycotted the Games in protest of the Soviet Union's invasion of Hungary. Taiwan was absent to attend China at that session.

Then the Olympic Games will become an arena in which global political struggle takes place and positions emerge. In 1972, a number of African countries boycotted the Summer Games because the International Olympic Committee withdrew the participation of Rhodesia (Zimbabwe before independence) in them, considering the matter as aligning with the supposedly political neutrality on the side of the occupation.

Meanwhile, and throughout those years, the Cold War was casting its shadows on the games that witnessed several rivalries for the same reasons between the countries of the capitalist western camp led by the United States and the communist eastern led by the Soviet Union. The most famous and boycotted was the 1980 Moscow Games, where 66 countries from the West and the Islamic world boycotted the Games in response to Moscow's invasion of Afghanistan. The Russians and their allies then responded by boycotting the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics.