Where the balance sheet is being drawn and billed with the shower year: The Olympic Games also took place in 2021. In the summer, despite Corona, the world’s youth met in Tokyo, before there had been a debate: How should that work without fans? It was then possible, under the strictest hygienic conditions. And the pandemic in Japan didn’t get out of hand after that. Actually a prestige win for the International Olympic Committee (IOC). Only: Who else is concerned, at least in the West?
Even the opening ceremony, which was actually a crowd puller, had America’s lowest TV rate in 33 years. The games took place, but they quickly disappeared from the collective memory. Or would you remember many medalists here, apart from long jumper Mihambo and tennis player Zverev?
There will also be demonstrations against the Beijing Games on the occasion of International Human Rights Day on December 10th in Los Angeles.
(Photo: Damian Dovarganes/dpa)
There are more important things right now, the world is in a state of emergency. But the organizers of the great sport themselves helped discredit it. The Olympics used to be an emotional event, the characters that created tension and emotion became stars, from Ali to Almsick. In the meantime, the games are being disturbed by background noises that are no longer perceived by a more critical public as background noises, but for what they are: more significant than the theater in the stadiums.
An activist has to be detained in a Russian camp – because of a ridiculousness
When in Sochi in 2014, for example, an activist was sentenced to camp imprisonment for a ridiculous act in front of the IOC during the Games. Or if in Beijing in 2008 the IOC cannot even enforce that the Internet in the media center remains uncensored. Or if it turns the games in Pyeongchang into a platform on which the two Koreas are supposed to converge in 2018. Propaganda from Pyongyang and flag-waving cheerleaders included.
The IOC has so often and fundamentally allied itself with dictators and autocrats that one – not only as a journalist reporting on the Olympics – no longer just thinks about these entanglements. They have long been the focus of preoccupation with the games. A tipping point has been reached: Olympia is lost – overshadowed by profit-orientation, compliance, and historical oblivion of the officials. Similar to professional football, noticeable in the pandemic year 2021: The EM was a celebration for the Hungarian autocrat Victor Orbán: the hut was full in Budapest. The European Football Association Uefa can rely on Orbán – even if his policy mocks every tolerance campaign of this Uefa.
The initiatives for equality and peace are whitewash. In fact, every moral consideration is stifled by greed for profit, the year 2022 will drive this development further. In winter, the FIFA World Cup in Qatar, where thousands of guest workers died while building. It is already becoming apparent how the functionaries and their drummers will justify everything: haven’t the working conditions already improved? Qatar will be glossed over or lied to. As far as the Olympics are concerned, the Winter Games in Beijing, that is currently being tried. When IOC official Richard Pound was asked by Deutschlandfunk how he felt about games in a country that interned Uyghurs in camps, he claimed that he knew nothing about it. Well: If you didn’t notice, you didn’t notice that there was a moon in the sky. But Bach-era IOC propagandists are trying to disguise Beijing in 2022.
Beijing 2022 will be games between genocide and the smashing of democracy
The reality is: There will be games in a country that has been linked to genocide, which is destroying the culture of the Tibetans, which is destroying democracy in Hong Kong. That a tennis player can silence after she has rebelled against the state. The functionaries in the IOC stay out of the way, they have been tried and tested in silent complicity with apparatuses of power.
Predictions for 2022 are difficult, you can at least wish the world a better time. As far as the prestige and dignity of the sports business and its pullers are concerned, the balance sheet is as clear as the forecast: 2021 was devastating. 2022 will get worse.
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