Boycott of Olympic Games, a weapon with limited effects

The United States announced to diplomatically boycotte Beijing Winter Games. A decision on debatable efficiency, in the light of the previous ones during the twentieth century.

by and

Analysis. Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin will be able to parade, on February 4, at the opening ceremony of the Olympic Winter Games. In the absence of the American Joe Biden, the Chinese and Russian presidents will be smiling in the official Pékin National Stadium, alongside the Secretary-General of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres, and the boss of the International Olympic Committee (IOC ), Thomas Bach. On December 6, 2021, the United States announced a diplomatic boycott of the competition, because of the “genocide and crimes against humanity in progress in Xinjiang”.

The threat was sleepy. The Peng Shuai case – the name of this tennis player suffered by Beijing after she accused rape a former senior Chinese Communist Party – had, a few weeks earlier, revived the American-Chinese tensions. Since the announcement of the White House, Australia, the United Kingdom and Canada – the nearest allies of Washington – joined the US offensive: none of these countries will only send official representatives. From the Chinese Grand Mass of Snow and Ice Sports. The European Union, it is torn by the interests contrary to its members and seems to agree on a common position. For its part, Japan, which took care to avoid qualifying its decision of boycott, reported at the end of December 2021 that no government representative would travel to China for games.

The boycott of sports competitions is a usual weapon of the diplomatic arsenal. In 1956, Egypt, Iraq and Lebanon did not take part in the Games of Melbourne (Australia) to denounce the Franco-British occupation of the Suez Canal; Spain, the Netherlands and Switzerland, withdrew from the competition as a sign of protest against the Soviet intervention in Hungary. Another example: In 1976, in Montreal, about twenty African countries refused to participate in the Olympic medal race. The reason ? The presence in Quebec of the New Zealand Rugby, which had, by confronting the Springboks little before, broken the international isolation of South Africa in full apartheid.

Symbolic measurement

But in contemporary history, the most emblematic examples of boycott remain that of the Olympic Games of Moscow in 1980 by the United States and their allies to demand the withdrawal of the USSR of Afghanistan, then that of Los Angeles in 1984, by the Soviets and twelve communist countries in retaliation.

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/Media reports.