Southpaw 33: Dr. Amy Bass on the Tokyo Olympics, the Politics of Logistics, and What Constitutes Protest
An exclusive interview with Professor of Sports Studies Dr. Amy Bass.
Dear readers,
First off, Happy Mother’s Day to all the moms out there, and a special shoutout to Hilary and Jane, our most loyal readers.
This week, we’re taking a look at the upcoming Olympic Games. This year’s games are shaping up to be unlike any other, so we called up friend-of-the-newsletter Amy Bass, a professor of sports studies at Manhattanville College, to help us make sense of the political circumstances surrounding the competition.
You’ll find a lightly-edited transcript of our conversation with Professor Bass below. Happy reading!
-Calder and Ian
The Tokyo Olympics are on. Now what?
The 2020 Tokyo Olympics—yes, that’s still what they’re called—are in crisis. Postponed a year because of the coronavirus pandemic, the games are facing tough domestic opposition, and a growing number of star athletes have expressed concerns with the International Olympic Committee’s decision to go forward with the Games in the middle of a global health crisis. On top of the fallout of the pandemic, the IOC is facing criticism from athletes over its recent decision to continue to enforce Rule 50, which prohibits “demonstration or political, religious or racial propaganda . . . in any Olympic sites, venues or other areas.” Toss in the resignation of the president of Japan’s Olympic organizing committee in February following a sexist tirade, and you’ve got yourself the full Olympic Special.
The word “unprecedented” has gotten a lot of milage during the past year, but the circumstances surrounding the Olympics seem to be . . . well, unprecedented. To find out of if there’s any historical analogue for the crisis facing the upcoming Games, we spoke with Amy Bass, professor of sports studies at Manhattanville College and a frequent contributor to CNN Opinion. Professor Bass won an Emmy for her coverage of the 2012 London Games, and her 2004 book, “Not the Triumph but the Struggle: the 1968 Olympic Games and the Making of the Black Athlete,” explores how John Carlos and Tommie Smith’s Black Power salute at the 1968 Olympics triggered a paradigm shift in the way Americans think and talk about the politics of sports. Unfortunately, she’s also a graduate of Bates College, but the quality of her political and historical analyses allows us to overlook that fault—mostly.
The following transcript has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
Southpaw: We're hoping to dive down a bit today on the Olympics. Could you situate the current Olympics historically?
Professor Amy Bass: I think that one of the interesting things about Tokyo 2020, which we're still calling it, is that the pandemic has just enveloped everything. So, the politics that have been permeating U.S. sport—but also global sport and solidarity—just don’t seem to be really on the table for Tokyo right now. That will undoubtedly shift at some point. In recent years, there’s always been a theory of ‘there’s never been an Olympics like this one before.’ In Rio [2016], everyone was talking about the Zika virus, but in the end it was only the golfers who stayed home. So, looking at Tokyo, I never want to say ‘this is unprecedented.’ But there are reasons that Tokyo looks different, and most of them right now are logistics, they’re not political.
SP: Is it fair to say that the logistics are not political?
AB: Well, so this is where we can go deeper. Because the logistics of India sending an Olympic team right now, versus the logistics of the United States, versus the logistics of Japan itself are very different. These are the kind of things that I find fascinating. This is what I’ve been talking about in terms of COVID in sport—COVID didn't invent the problems and fractures that we're seeing, it has just put a spotlight on them. The Washington Post reported that Japan is tied with Myanmar [which is currently in the midst of a coup] in terms of vaccination rates. The Post just assumed that we would know what that means, and we do. But that says as much about Myanmar as it says about Japan, and global supply chains, and global solidarity—or lack thereof—when it comes to vaccine distribution. So, of course, the logistics of the Games are political. But they’re political in a way that COVID is shining a spotlight on. The virus is not creating these problems of infrastructure.
SP: The Olympics are an interesting test case, because they’re associated with both the spectacle of an international community coming together and the spectacle of intense national pride. And there do seem to be strange similarities between the global vaccine rollout and the Olympics.
AB: That’s just sports telling us everything that we need to know yet again. Think back to 16 or 17 months ago, when because of our leadership and our assumed superiority, we didn’t think it was coming here. It took the NBA shutting down for much of the United States to sit up and say ‘wait a minute’. We started to learn about how the virus spread thanks to a soccer game featuring the residents of Bergamo, Italy. The same can be true about the Olympics. When we’re looking at the upcoming Games, we’re asking, ‘what countries are going to be able to pull off [sending athletes safely]? What countries aren’t?’ Putting sports first can serve as an interesting test case. We saw that last summer, when we weren’t able to get our kids back in school, but we were able to get sports back. At first that seemed absurd to me. And then it didn’t, because I realized the government’s not putting money into [getting to work in person] like sports leagues are. So if Major League Baseball, for example, has the resources, they’re going to be the guinea pigs. The Olympics are going to reveal a lot about the global state of the pandemic, but on the biggest stage possible.
SP: Rule 50 of the Olympic Charter [which bans athletes from protesting or making political statements of any kind at the games] has been overshadowed by the logistical challenges of COVID. And maybe the focus on athlete protest right now is American—the rest of the world is perhaps not engaged in quite so intense a discussion about the rights of athletes to protest. But Rule 50 has garnered attention stateside, and the U.S. Olympic Committee (USOC) has slightly loosened their restrictions on political statements. So what do you think the International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) enforcement of Rule 50 will look like in practice, and what does it say about the relationship between the IOC and its member states when there’s such an open rift?
AB: The IOC is saying that Rule 50 protects the (farcical) notion of neutrality in sport, meaning political neutrality. So, the IOC hired a third party to survey its athletes and create the rules and framework for these Games. They surveyed 3,500 athletes over almost 200 nations, with at least one athlete from every sport, with a 50/50 gender balance, because the IOC still operates on a gender binary. They are claiming that 70% of the athletes who were involved in this research support Rule 50. The IOC is a very strategic—and I don’t say this with admiration—body, and so they’re going to increase some modes of expression in the Olympic Village, and talk about solidarity, unity, non-discrimination, and inclusion. But one of the things that came out of my research is that if you go back to the 1968 Games [when American sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their fists on the podium], the global athlete reaction did not see it as a human rights move. They saw it as American imperialism, that yet again, Americans were trying to take the center stage in a global moment. So that’s where the question of athlete protest and Black Lives Matter comes in. There was some global solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement last summer. But I think we're seeing 70% of these athletes that are part of this IOC research saying we don't want that. It's not about us.
The USOC and the Canadian Olympic Committee have both said ‘we’re super critical of Rule 50.’ But if there are no consequences to action, if it isn’t against the rules, it isn’t protest. If high school students say ‘we’re going to walk out to advocate for gun control,’ and the principal says ‘we agree with you and won’t mark you absent,’ it isn’t protest. The power of protest is that there’s consequences. You need to be breaking a rule. When Jay-Z brought the ‘I Can’t Breathe’ shirts into the Barclays Center for players to wear after the murder of Eric Garner, that was breaking the rules. It’s fine if the [NBA] commissioner says ‘we understand,’ but that’s not what the commissioner said when that happened. He said, ‘we understand, but you’re supposed to be wearing your uniform.’ I think that’s really important too. So, Rule 50 serves a purpose. If the IOC said, ‘we’re killing Rule 50, do whatever you want,’ would anyone pay attention?
SP: What do you see as the natural evolution of protest? Some traditional forms of protest seem to have been co-opted. So what would genuinely transgressive, active protests—like the ones in 1968—look like? What is the next transgressive act?
AB: The raised fist in 1968 was recognizable because of the context of the rise of Black Power and the rise of the Black Panthers. So context is an important part of this. When [tennis player] Naomi Osaka put names on her masks [of Black victims of police brutality] people started showing up to see what name would be next and started understanding the horror that there were so many names for her to choose from. That was a brilliant protest that included the pandemic as well. I never liked to choose which tactics are good or what have you. But I think some of it is subtle and doesn’t have to always be very political. British gymnasts refusing to wear leotards, taking a stand against outdated rules, that’s subtle and beautiful and showing us something different. It makes its point without protest signs or what have you. I think those tend to be the most powerful. But, you know, we’ll see. Right now, not wearing a mask is an act of politics. So we’ll see.
RODNEY’S ROUNDUP
Do you want to read about . . .
. . . the NCAA’s about-face on athlete compensation? “N.C.A.A. Chief, Pressured by State Laws, Pushes to Let Athletes Cash In,” by Alan Blinder in The New York Times (May 8, 2021).
. . . another crack in the Olympics’ facade? “Australian basketball star threatens Tokyo boycott over ‘whitewashing’ in country’s Olympic promotions,” by Matt Bonesteel in The Washington Post (May 7, 2021).
. . . Northwestern University’s decision to hire a defendant in a sexual harassment lawsuit as its new athletic director? “Northwestern students, faculty protest hiring of AD,” by Shannon Ryan in The Chicago Tribune (May 7, 2021).
. . . the smoldering ashes of the European Super League? “Super League Surrender: Nine Teams Apologize but New Fight Looms,” by Tariq Panja in The New York Times (May 7, 2021).