标题: 2022.02.02 北京冬奥会的外交抵制的缺陷 [打印本页] 作者: shiyi18 时间: 2022-2-10 05:33 标题: 2022.02.02 北京冬奥会的外交抵制的缺陷 By Invitation | Sport and politics
Sebastian Coe on the flawed diplomatic boycott of Beijing’s Winter Olympics
Sporting events can foster debate and discussion—tools critical for preventing conflict
By Sebastian Coe
Feb 2nd 2022
With fanfare and fireworks, the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympic Games will begin on February 4th. But many officials will be missing from the opening ceremony. Countries including Britain, America and Australia are instigating a diplomatic boycott of the Games. They are wasting an opportunity to engage with their Chinese counterparts on the issues that matter to them.
If we agree that discussion and diplomacy are the best ways to resolve or avoid conflict, then I believe that there should be more consistency in how these governments behave. It does not make sense to impose diplomatic boycotts on China when the winter games could facilitate both.
The world of sport should never be coy or naive about moral and ethical issues. The Winter Olympic Games attract some 3,000 athletes from 91 countries and provide ample opportunity for diplomacy. I helped to organise the Olympics in London almost a decade ago. I know full well that many countries that competed did so while holding their noses over British foreign policy at the time. Yet there was no talk of a boycott—athletic or diplomatic. Instead in meetings around the London games those issues and tensions, some of which related to Britain’s involvement in Iraq, were discussed robustly.
Sport used properly is a deft component of soft power. At the Afro-Asian Games in Hyderabad in 2003 I witnessed foreign ministers from India and Pakistan reduce tensions between their two countries by talking on the margins of the sporting event. And in 2018 at the last Winter Olympic Games in South Korea’s Pyeongchang, North Korean and South Korean athletes entered the opening ceremony together under one flag.
I have my own experience, too. I didn’t just live through the boycott of Moscow’s Olympic Games in 1980—which involved dozens of countries and was organised by America. I was at the centre of it. My father, who was my coach, was called in for a chat by a young minister in the Foreign Office, Douglas Hurd (who went on to become Britain’s foreign secretary). He wanted my father to encourage me to be less vocal about my opposition to a proposed British boycott of the games.
Ultimately, I was one of the lucky ones. The British Olympic Association stood tall and independent in the face of huge pressure from the government not to attend. But I also know athletes from around the world who were less lucky. Athletes who had devoted half their young lives in the preparation had their efforts, and the sacrifices of their families, ripped asunder because National Olympic Committees ultimately bowed to that pressure.
Mercifully, the landscape has changed since then. Almost every National Olympic Committee has withstood the pressure to call for a boycott of the winter games in Beijing by athletes (though some may not attend for other reasons). This is why, in certain cases, the diplomatic boycott has been adopted. The significance of huge sporting competitions makes them obvious targets for politicians around the world. They sometimes attack these contests in intellectually dishonest ways—even when they have no role in them and have not been invited to attend them.
For all its occasional mutations, sport is a powerful vehicle for social and cultural progress. Redefining our sporting relationships based on either short- or long-term judgments about political systems risks dismantling international sport. To those countries that have declared a meaningless diplomatic boycott of the Winter Olympic Games in Beijing I pose two questions. How can politicians call for a diplomatic boycott of the Winter Olympics but still send their ambassadors or other serving diplomats to represent them? And how does this boycott help their mission in China? If lawmakers are serious about finding answers and changing policies then they should use all avenues of discourse available to them—and that includes sport.■
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Sebastian Coe is president of World Athletics, the governing body of international athletics. He has also served as an mp in Britain’s parliament and was president of the London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games. As an athlete he won four Olympic medals for middle-distance running.
