Southpaw 44: Welcome to Japan
Can the Olympic Games be reformed?
Dear Readers,
As you well know, this week marked the culmination of one of the most gripping and consequential sports-and-politics storylines of the past five years: Tom Brady’s weird and ambiguous bro-mance with Donald Trump. For years, politicos and sports fans alike have been speculating about the precise nature of Brady’s relationship with the former president—understated friendship? opportunistic alliance? begrudging alliance?—but this week, we got something like a definitive answer when Brady visited President Joe Biden at the White House and cracked a bunch of (not especially clever) jokes at Trump’s expense. Would Touchdown Tom’s tenor have been different had Trump prevailed in 2020? Who’s to say—though Brady does love a winner. Either way, as New York Magazine’s Jonathan Chait put it, “It was a scene straight out of a Donald Trump nightmare, and quite possibly the worst day of Donald Trump’s life.” We don’t have much more to say, other than this: welcome to the #resistance, Tom.
Of course, the actual major sports and culture story this week was the beginning of Olympic competition in Tokyo. It hasn’t exactly been a smooth ride to arrive at this point: the pandemic forced the cancellation of the games last summer, COVID cases are still on the rise in Japan, and most of Japan’s citizens don’t want to Games to happen at all—and all that was all before a bear and some killer oysters decided to intervene on the pandemic’s behalf. Together with vast global disparities in vaccine availability—and athletes’ willingness to take it—the events of the past year have conspired to transform the 2021 version of the Olympic Dream into a bit of a political and logistical nightmare. All these factors have placed the spotlight on the International Olympic Committee (IOC), so we’ve decided to chat about the broader implications of a corrupt IOC and suggested how to fix it. Hope you enjoy!
-Calder and Ian
Four Olympic Fixes
It is hardly a secret that the Olympics themselves—and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) that oversees them—are deeply, deeply flawed institutions.
Rather than recite the lengthy list of the game’s past and present crimes, we will merely point you toward an excellent piece by John Branch that ran in The New York Times this week. Branch does a good job of describing the ugly side of the Olympics—their conspicuously anachronistic nationalism, the IOC’s undisguised corruption, the threats of displacement, exploitation, and general misery that the Games create for local residents—but he also notes that, for fans the world over, any awareness of these wrongs exist in tension with an attachment to the good about the games.
As Branch aptly puts it, commentators on the politics of the Olympics tend to look at the games “from one end of a telescope or the other”—in other words, either as fans who are totally engrossed in the spectacle and suspense of the competitions themselves, or as critics who are either unable or unwilling to look past the gross inequities that the games have engendered to enjoy the thrill of the competitions themselves. Here’s what Branch has to say:
In some ways—too many ways, critics argue—the Olympics are stuck in time, a 19th-century construct floating through a 21st-century world.
“They’ve evolved, or not evolved, this system completely separate from the rest of society,” said Han Xiao, a former member of the United States national table tennis team who is now active in the Olympic movement. “And that’s where a lot of the problems come in, whether it’s with corruption or imbalances in power that lead to athlete abuse or human rights violations. If you’re not keeping up with the advances that other areas of society are making, or you’re not subject to the oversight of society as a whole, it’s kind of predictable that these things are going to happen.”
In short, the Olympics are built on excess, tangled in geopolitics, rife with corruption and cheating. Each Olympic cycle raises uncomfortable questions about sustainability, environmental damage and human rights.
Branch also notes that few people—even among the Olympics’ most strident critics—favor abolishing the games altogether. From a spectator’s standpoint, total abolition would be a damn shame, and from a purely practical standpoint, it’s unlikely to happen anytime soon. The Olympics are a political nightmare, but they are a political nightmare that many around the world justifiably love. In other words, the Olympics are here to stay, and while they may be “unreformable,” as one of Branch’s sources called them, we lose out on something valuable by not trying to fix them in the first place.
Critics of the Olympics often point to a broader global culture of exploitation and corruption, explaining that “sports are a reflection of society.” If the Olympics serves as the pinnacle of sport, the logic goes, it’s also the most likely to be rife with all of the problems we have everywhere else. But as Xiao points out, the entity has actually evolved largely on its own. Even though it’s an event that generates tremendous revenue, changing the Olympics isn’t nearly as daunting as changing how the global economy works. In fact, there are some solutions that a couple of kids (us) in their early-to-mid-twenties came up with.
Below, we’ve sketched out a handful of short-term reforms to make the Olympics a little more equitable:
Make the host city selection process public. In 2019, after consistent criticism, the IOC overhauled the process it uses to select host cities, creating two panels to review potential cities and make recommendations to the organization’s board. Currently, though, would-be host cities still submit bids to host the Games, and then members of the IOC vote on them via secret ballot. As you would expect, this closed-door process creates innumerable opportunities for corruption, encourages back-channel dealing, and works against smaller and less wealthy countries who submit bids.
The solution is simple: make the process public. The public should be able to see each city’s presentation materials in full, and the IOC should announce which members voted for which cities. Moreover, an open and transparent process could help local advocates construct a better case either for or against their respective cities, and it would serve to make IOC members think twice before casting votes based on promises of kickbacks. Sure, there would still be some nefarious shenanigans surrounding the process—getting rid of that would require reforming the whole of IOC membership—but in the short term, sunlight is the best disinfectant, as the saying goes.
Diversify IOC leadership. As Branch points out in his piece, the IOC has only had nine presidents in its 125-year history, all of whom have been white men from Europe (with one exception—a white man from the United States.) This would be a fairly straightforward and (hopefully) uncontroversial reform. The IOC holds an inordinate amount of influence over the Games, and appointing someone other than a white dude from Europe could go some way toward shaking up the entrenched IOC power structure and increasing transparency and accountability.
Give athletes a seat at the table. Currently, athletes participate in the IOC through the “Athlete’s Commission,” an elected body that “serves as a link between the athletes and the IOC” (whatever that means). The commission nominally exists to give athletes some say in the IOC decisions, but it really just exists to give athletes the appearance of control. As American sprinter Allyson Felix recently told the Times, “The athletes do not have a seat at the table when the decisions are being made.” So, let’s change that. Like unions in professional American sports leagues, Olympic athletes should have real representation. This is complicated by the fact that every four years, there’s a whole new crop of athletes. But if we expand the Athlete Commission to work in between the Games like the IOC does, membership on the Commission could be more contiguous.
Eliminate Rule 50. We’ve already written at some length about the IOC’s Rule 50—which prohibits “demonstration or political, religious or racial propaganda . . . in any Olympic sites, venues or other areas”—but we can’t pass up on an opportunity to say it again: Rule 50 has to go.
Facing mounting pressure to allow athletes to speak their minds during the Games, the IOC announced this month some very, very minor changes to its enforcement of the rule, but the new guidelines keep the IOC’s political gag rule fundamentally intact. Aside from the obvious wrongness of constricting athletes’ speech, Rule 50 helps maintain the myth that the Olympics are an entirely apolitical institution—a self-evident falsehood that the IOC maintains to stymie broader discussions of the political impacts and implications of the Games. In this respect, eliminating Rule 50 would allow athletes and fans to force the IOC to confront its misdeeds—and enact new reforms to address them.
There are some complications here. For example, if a protest is “allowed,” is it really a protest? We would answer no, but would also answer that allowances of more expression are always positive. If Olympic athletes still feel the need to be subversive after these reforms we’ve described, we’re sure they could continue to find a way.
RODNEY’S ROUNDUP
Do you want to read about . . .
. . an update on the U.S. women’s national team’s legal fight for equal pay? ‘“The U.S. women’s soccer team files an opening brief in their ongoing equal pay lawsuit,” by Alexandra Petri and Andrew Das in The New York Times (May 24, 2021).
. . . the Cleveland baseball team’s name change? “Cleveland’s MLB team announces its new name, will rebrand as the Guardians,” by Chelsea Janes in The Washington Post (July 23, 2021).
. . . the NFL’s new ultimatum for vaccine-hesitant players? “N.F.L. Sets Stiff Penalties for the Unvaccinated, Jolting Teams,” by Emmanuel Morgan in The New York Times (July 23, 2021).
. . . what the Bucks’ victory in the NBA Finals means for basketball in Africa? “Giannis Antetokounmpo’s victory is part of a greater basketball moment for Africa,” by Michael Lee in The Washington Post (May 23, 2021).
. . . the latest on MLB star and sexual assailant Trevor Bauer? “”Dodgers’ Trevor Bauer granted a continuance: Here’s what happens next and what it means,” by Fabian Ardaya and Brittany Ghiroli in The Athletic (July 23, 2021).