SPECIAL COLLABORATION
Will the Beijing Games have their Colin Kaepernick? This is the question I ask myself after participating in a Raoul-Dandurand Chair webinar entitled The Olympic Games as a propaganda toolin which Jean-Luc Brassard participated, with whom I discussed for long minutes at random.
For those who have forgotten it, or who live under a rock, in 2016 the quarterback, when he was the leader of the San Francisco 49ers, decided to protest against racism in the United States by kneeling during the national anthem before his team’s matches. Although he is still a star player in the NFL and led his team to the Super Bowl a few years prior in 2013, he would not find himself on the team after becoming a free agent at the end of the season.
Several texts have already been written on his situation and on the hypocrisy of the NFL which claims to be fighting against social injustices, but which ignores the talent of a quarterback who peacefully protests. What is Kaepernick’s connection to the Olympics? How did a conversation with Jean-Luc Brassard make me think of the former 49ers quarterback?
If you follow the news, you know that the Olympic champion is very critical of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the decision to present the 2022 Games in a country where human rights are violated. As he said to Everybody talks about it“it’s the 2and time in history that the Games are presented in a country where there are concentration camps”. These words are heavy with meaning. The ethnic minority of the Uyghurs is indeed the victim of a genocide, no more and no less. Women are forcibly sterilized and members of this minority are tortured in “re-education” camps, in the words of Xi Jinping’s government.
Many observers wonder why sports bodies and governments around the world are not reacting more strongly to the horrors perpetrated by the Chinese government. Some also wonder why these Games were not boycotted by democratic countries. All this is without counting the treatment by the Chinese government of foreign nationals in retaliation against the policies of other countries. We need only think of the arbitrary imprisonment of Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig for almost three years. We don’t even mention the security risks for members of the media, athletes and other visitors, who risk being spied on by the government of the host country.
The pressure to protest and draw attention to the horrors committed by the Chinese government also falls on the athletes. Yet they are caught between the tree and the bark. Caught between their Olympic dream and justice. Between the moral duty to denounce and the danger of being punished by the IOC or worse, being persecuted by the authorities of China.
This is what makes me ask myself the question: who will be the equivalent of Colin Kaepernick for the 2022 Olympics? Traditionally, as Jean-Luc Brassard explains to me, the Winter Games have no unifying athletes, no great stars known internationally. Who is the Usan Bolt, Michael Phelps or Simone Biles of the Winter Games? What athlete could boycott the Beijing 2022 Games and create a shock wave, or who knows, a groundswell that would push others to do the same? It is in this context that I wonder who will be the Colin Kaepernick of the Games. Can we expect to see an athlete protest like the American quarterback and thus endanger his career in the name of justice and human decency?
It can be argued that athletes shouldn’t get involved in politics and that sport and politics don’t mix, yet history has shown us that sport and politics are intimately linked. Anyway, we are not even talking about politics here, but about elementary empathy in the face of injustice.
I don’t have answers to all these questions. I simply wonder about our link with Olympic sport and our partial and sometimes voluntary blindness. But mostly I wonder, how did we get here?
