A two-line sentence may not seem like much, but in high stakes politics it often involves lengthy negotiations. This is what happened at the last G20 Summit at the mention of the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympic Games.
The Heads of State and Heads of Government said the following in the Rome Leaders’ Declaration: “We look ahead to the Beijing Winter Olympics and Paralympics 2022, as opportunities for competition for athletes from around the world, which serves as a symbol of humanity’s resilience”.
And IOC President Thomas Bach thanked the leaders for their support: “The IOC warmly welcomes the recognition and support of the G20 Leaders’ Summit for the Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games Beijing 2022, with the Olympic athletes demonstrating humanity’s resilience against COVID-19.”
Simple, right? No, it wasn’t. According to the “Politico” website’s Rome envoys, the U.S. and Canadian governments objected to Beijing’s intentions to have the G20 join its Games without qualms.
Beijing 2022 (from February 4th until February 20th) is following a similar path to that of Beijing 2008. That time the Olympic fire was extinguished in the middle of the journey as a result of political protests in different cities around the world. One of the reasons for those protests was the situation of the Uyghur minority, Muslims living in China’s Xinjiang province.
Almost 14 years later, the fire was not extinguished, because since then the symbolic flame is limited to national tours, and in the case of China that guarantees absolute control. But the controversies remain the same.
Experts and human rights organizations estimate up to one million Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Hui and other members of Muslim minorities in the Xinjiang Autonomous Region have been interned in what Beijing calls “re-education camps.”
The experts say the camps are used to align Uyghurs with the Communist Party and move them into forced labor.
In October, Australian Joahn Coates, one of the IOC’s vice presidents, expressed the body’s traditional position: there is not much that can be done.
“We are not the government of the world, we have to respect the sovereignty of the countries hosting the Games,” Coates said.
“We don’t have the ability to go to a country and tell them what to do... It’s not in our remit. It’s not within our purview,” he added.
The Uyghur situation and the proximity of the Winter Games run parallel to another potentially explosive situation, that of Taiwan.
During a recent interview with CNN, U.S. President Joe Biden responded with a “yes” when asked if his country will come to Taiwan’s defense should the island be attacked by China, which considers it part of its territory.
“We have a commitment to that,” he added.
Wang Yi, Chinese Foreign Minister, was clear in his message to the West hours before the start of the G20 Summit in Rome.
“Recently, the U.S. and other countries attempted to achieve breakthroughs on the issue of Taiwan, which is in contravention of the political guarantees they made when they established diplomatic relations with [the People’s Republic of] China,” Wang said.
“If they couldn’t stop the One China principle 50 years ago, it’s even more impossible in today’s world in the 21st century. If they forge ahead regardless, they will definitely pay a price accordingly.”
The tension has multiple edges and manifestations.
Mitt Romney, a Republican senator from Utah, is one of a number of legislators in both houses of the U.S. Congress calling for action against China over claims of human rights abuses. He is campaigning for zero funding of U.S. government activities involving the Games.
The former CEO of the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, Romney says in a statement that such a step “will hurt the Chinese Communist Party, rather than punish our American athletes”. The legislation would not affect funding for the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee, its contractors and Team USA athletes.
In this context of high tension, not attending the Rome Summit and following everything from Lausanne was probably a smart decision by the IOC. Not even Laura Chinchilla, former president of Costa Rica and a sort of “chancellor” of the IOC in various political events, came to Rome.
Thomas Bach attended in June 2019 the G20 Summit in Osaka, Japan. It was the pre-pandemic world and the Tokyo 2020 Games were thought to be barely a year away.
“The power of the Olympic Games is their universality. There is no discrimination, everyone respects the same rules, we are all equal. In this way, the Olympic athletes are sending an important message to the world. Yes, it is possible to compete with each other, even for the highest prize, but to live together peacefully.“
Bach’s message of hope was crowned with the following sentence: “In our fragile world we are living in today, such symbols of the unity of humanity in all our diversity, give us hope for a better future.”
Since then, the IOC has limited Bach’s exposure, although it continued to get statements of support for the Games during the virtual G20 Summit in Saudi Arabia in November 2020: “As a symbol of humanity’s resilience and global unity in overcoming COVID-19, we commend Japan’s determination to host the Olympic and Paralympic Games Tokyo 2020 next year. (...) We look forward to the Beijing Winter Olympics in 2022.”
The United Nations, an organization in which the IOC has observer status, has also expressed their support.
A resolution entitled “Sport as an enabler of sustainable development” from 23 November 2020 welcomed “with appreciation all upcoming Olympic and Paralympic Games, in particular those to be held in Tokyo in 2021, in Beijing in 2022, in Paris in 2024, in Milano-Cortina, Italy, in 2026 and in Los Angeles, United States of America, in 2028, as well as the Youth Olympic Games to be held in Dakar in 2026″.
The resolution also called upon “future hosts of such Games and other Member States to include sport, as appropriate, in conflict prevention activities and to ensure the effective implementation of the Olympic Truce during the Games”.
The paths of world politics and high sports politics often cross. It happened, for example, at the 2018 G20 Summit in Buenos Aires, when then Argentine president, Mauricio Macri, invited FIFA president Gianni Infantino to address the plenary.
“I found the G20 leaders’ thing unbelievable. When you give them a ball they are like us, they are all children,” Infantino said during an interview in Infobae with the author of this article.
FIFA at the G20 and the IOC at the UN? Infantino, who at the time was not yet at odds with the IOC over its project for a World Cup every two years, denied that such a split exists. But in those days he had joked about the possibility of FIFA formally becoming a member of the G20.
“No, there is no competition in this sense, it is only sport and there is only one truly global sport, which is soccer. And after what happened at FIFA it is very important for us that states want to have a direct relationship with us. That means that things have already changed, we have managed to change the perception of FIFA. Being a member of the G20 is more of a joke, but we know that developing soccer also has a positive effect for the G20 countries.”
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