Finn McRedmond: Fake snow cannot whitewash Winter Olympics

On Monday, the world watched as skiers launched themselves off a 60m-high ramp covered in artificial snow against the backdrop of a muddy, industrial wasteland replete with furnaces, chimney stacks and cooling towers. The location of this particular structure has become the perfect visual metaphor for 2022’s Beijing Winter Olympics.

Everything about the games has taken on an uncanny tenor, exposing a gaping chasm between the professed spirit of the event and its actuality. In the opening ceremony, Vladimir Putin looked on as the International Olympic Committee president, Thomas Bach, beseeched “all political authorities across the world” to observe their commitment to the so-called Olympic truce, and to “give peace a chance”.

It seemed as though Bach believed so strongly in the power of ice-skating that the world might forget, for a short moment, that Russia has looked poised to invade Ukraine at any moment.

The unavoidable truth is that politics and sport have long been inextricable enterprises

But in a room stocked full of elephants, Putin’s presence at the ceremony was a relatively small one. Bach and the IOC have made multiple attempts to ward off the moral implications of holding the games in China, leaning on the easy get-out clause that sport and politics operate in separate arenas. But such an insistence could not feel more at odds with reality as several nations mounted diplomatic boycotts of the event.

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The alleged mass detention, forced labour and torture of Uighur Muslims in the Xinjiang province has cast a horrifying shadow over an event organisers are desperately trying to promote as a vehicle for peace, tolerance and unity among nations. White House press secretary Jen Psaki cited the “ongoing genocide and crimes against humanity in Xinjiang” as the United State’s reason for its boycott. Boris Johnson has also said no officials of ministers from the United Kingdom would be in attendance.

The affirmation that the Olympic Games exist in a different realm from politics might be a convenient line of reasoning for the IOC to endorse. But no matter how much anyone wants that to be the case, the unavoidable truth is that politics and sport have long been inextricable enterprises.

Andrés Martinez, a research scholar at Arizona State University’s Global Sport Institute, points out in the LA Times that “Americans and Soviets fixated on the Olympics for decades as a proxy battlefield for the clash of our competing cold war political systems and ideologies”. The very existence of multiple diplomatic boycotts of the games alone ought to be evidence of the IOC’s flimsy attempts to deny reality.

And the superficial unsuitability of the occasion could not be better represented by the decision to host a winter sporting event in an area apparently entirely devoid of snowfall, requiring the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gasses to generate tonnes of man-made snow for its man-made slopes. And we cannot easily ignore the chaos induced by hosting a large-scale international event in a country with one of the strictest zero-Covid policies in the world.

When God Save the Queen was played before the England-Ireland rugby match in 2007, it was a pivotal moment in a long and ongoing process of historical reconciliation

The uncomfortable conclusion is that the ugly underbelly of this year’s games and its geopolitical context cannot be papered over with fake snow or renditions of John Lennon’s Imagine (somewhat of an Olympic tradition), no matter how many ersatz and artificial displays of international comity the organisers try to marshal.

It all stands in stark opposition to Tokyo’s Summer Olympics last year. Prematurely branded as the Games No One Wanted, they emerged a resounding success. The defining characteristics were its defiance in the face of the hostile circumstances imposed by coronavirus, communion after a year and a half of isolation, the warmth of cultural exchange embraced by competitors.

Perhaps this is all because the terrain was more-or-less suitable, the event was not boycotted on account of a litany of allegations of human rights abuses, and the organisers did not have to implore the world to ignore the political context underpinning the whole affair.

Of course, Beijing’s Winter Olympics is not alone in its awkward relationship between sport and politics. In December, the football World Cup will be held in Qatar, another regime apparently hoping to plaster over its chequered reputation with the all-healing, transcendental properties of sport.

But the problem remains: no matter how many hundreds of millions of pounds Qatar intends to spend on making a success of the tournament, football cannot recoup an international reputation lost to allegations of an unfree press and exploitation of migrant workers.

These large-scale events can be exercises in diplomacy and proof that nations can overcome seemingly insurmountable barriers

But sport can wield huge transformative power. When God Save the Queen was played at Croke Park before the England-Ireland rugby match in 2007, it was a pivotal moment in a long and ongoing process of historical reconciliation.

The point, however, was not that through the power of rugby we could eliminate the context and seismic significance of the occasion. Rather, it showed that a rugby match could be a vehicle to express how far we had both come.

These large-scale events can be exercises in diplomacy and proof that nations can overcome seemingly insurmountable barriers. But in Croke Park in 2007, no one pretended the match happened in a vacuum, devoid of all context. We should remember that no matter how much artificial snow China can generate, it does not get to whitewash the circumstances of these games.