Leave the Olympics alone

I wish people would leave China alone. Instead of thinking ahead to this summer's Beijing Olympics, all we are hearing about is China's ruthless colonial dealings in Tibet, its lack of democracy, its human rights failings, &c., and how it should be boycotted, snubbed, insulted or at least lectured on its evil ways.

But sport is not an effective vehicle for politics.

First, because the only people who are really hurt by political boycotts are the athletes themselves, who spend so much time and money and energy preparing for competition. China is not going be hurt in the same way: it is a proud and ancient country, and is not going to be bullied into submission by western moralising, right or wrong. Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao are not going to wake up one morning and think, gosh, Bush and Brown say we're being nasty to Tibet, let's give them independence right away, get the Dalai Lama on the phone.

Second, once you establish the principle that global sports meetings can be boycotted on political grounds, there's no end to it—and probably no more Olympics either. No country on earth is 100 per cent virtuous, not even the US. Some countries won't want to compete with American athletes because of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib and renditions and the Iraq invasion. Some will avoid British athletes because of Tony Blair's grovelling support for George Bush. The British already don't want to play cricket with the Zimbabweans because of Robert Mugabe. Next thing you know, Indians won't compete with Pakistanis, Venezuelans with Colombians, Russians with Ukranians, or Shias with Sunnis, and half the word will want to shun Israel.

There's been more than enough of that already. Since Adolf Hitler's Nazi Party politicised the summer Olympics in Berlin in 1936, there have been boycotts over Israel, the Soviet invasion of Hungary, the British attack on Suez, South African apartheid, the status of Taiwan, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, not to mention the Atlanta bomb in 1996 and the Black September assault on the Israeli contingent in Munich in 1972.

Did any of this make a difference to anything? No. Did anything change politically? No. It merely damaged sport, damaged the athletes, and damaged the Olympics themselves, which are about bringing nations closer together at a human level, not about airing political conflicts.

Let the diplomats get to work on the politics, let demonstrators besiege the embassies if they think it will do any good. But when gifted individual human beings get together to compete at the highest level, bringing rare pleasure to billions of spectators, leave them alone to get on with it.