For a time, the COVID-19 pandemic seemed to present the most serious risk to participants at the Beijing Olympics that open in just over two weeks.
At least as concerning, however, is the heavy hand of China’s authoritarian regime and the threats it has tossed out to athletes from Canada and elsewhere.
The host nation is demanding that athletes abandon any notion of free speech when they arrive in the country.
“Any behaviour or speech that is against the Olympic spirit, especially against Chinese laws and regulations, are also subject to certain punishment,” Yang Shu, deputy director of international relations for the Beijing organizing committee, told a news conference last week.
It must be the first time on record that the so-called “Olympic spirit” has been so explicitly wielded as a tool to cow participants and put a chill on anything they might be inclined to say of a critical nature.
Such a situation is wholly unacceptable to those countries that regard democratic freedoms as fundamental to who we are and how we live.
Such freedoms were too hard won, too dearly paid for, to be handed over with a shrug at customs.
With COVID-19 still at large, these Games were already a dodgy proposition.
The fact the host country will be all pride, smiles and self-congratulation, despite its treatment of Ugyhur Muslims, repression in Hong Kong, and overall dismal record on human rights, is also appalling.
Canada is among those countries — including the United States, Britain and Australia — to have announced a diplomatic boycott of the Beijing Games as a result of human rights and diplomatic concerns.
In Canada, of course, this includes the detention for more than two years of Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig, finally released last September after being held as bartering chips to lever the release of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou, who had been held in Canada as a result of a U.S. extradition order.
Human Rights Watch has already warned that the surveillance state that is China will be doing some gold-medal spying on its visitors. So much so, in fact, that athletes have been advised not to take digital devices loaded with personal or sensitive information to the Games.
But the notion that Canada’s athletes, and others, should have to button their lips or risk legal jeopardy and the crude justice of their hosts is beyond the pale.
Dick Pound, former vice-president of the IOC, told CBC News that Canada is not the only country to have had difficulties with China recently, but that he expects the host nation to “be on their best behaviour” with the eyes of the world looking on.
And former Canadian Olympian Angela Schneider told CBC Radio’s Sunday Magazine that it would be extraordinary for China to act against athletes it had invited into the country for the Games.
Schneider advised Canadian media, rather than shifting focus once the Games are over, to continue to give a spotlight to athletes when they are safely “back on Canadian soil” to speak their minds about China.
Until then, every level of the Canadian Olympic apparatus, along with the federal government, should make clear to China how offensive such threats are.
Bovine compliance with blatantly undemocratic orders is unworthy of any country that takes its values seriously.
To be silent is to be complicit in these brazen threats to fundamental rights.
