Today is the first day of the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris. I’m a huge sports fan and I love watching games. But the Olympics do have a scary dark side. Past games have made way for stadium construction with horrific forced displacement of residents, saddled taxpayers with huge cost overruns, and served as propaganda showcases for brutal authoritarian regimes such as Russia, China and Nazi Germany.
This year’s competition was better than previous years. For all its shortcomings, France is not a dictatorship that engages in mass murder like Russia or China. Paris organizers have kept costs down to some extent by relying on existing facilities. Still, some migrants and homeless people will be displaced by the Olympics (researchers estimate around 12,500 people were forced to leave), and if French taxpayers avoid suffering serious cost overruns, even on a smaller scale than these, I would also be very surprised.
It doesn’t have to be this way. In 2022, in the aftermath of the horrific Beijing Winter Olympics, I outline a series of reforms that could address the Games’ dark side while preserving its role as a great sporting event:
1. No public subsidies. Let the Olympics be entirely funded by private organizations and sponsors, as was the case with the successful 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. This way, no one has to pay for the games except those who profit from them and the viewers who voluntarily choose to watch.
2. Residents, private enterprises or civil organizations shall not be forced to relocate. We can and should have sporting events instead of kicking innocent people out of their homes.
3. There is no right to receive authoritarian human rights abusers. There are many possible Olympic venues that are outside the control of the likes of Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. Denying trusteeship to these types of rulers will not fundamentally change their regimes. But it would at least damage their image and deprive them of a publicity victory.
4. There must be full freedom of expression in the Olympic Village and all other Olympic venues. At the very least, athletes, journalists and spectators should be completely free to criticize the host government and its policies (or any other government) [freedom of speech has often been violated when authoritarian states host the Games].
5. There must be no “public health” measures that impede normal human interaction between athletes, media personnel and residents of the host city. These measures defeat the purpose of holding the Olympics in a specific city from the outset. If the Olympics were to be held in a “bubble,” they could be held almost anywhere. Furthermore, there is growing scientific evidence that lockdowns and other similar restrictions on freedom of movement do little to stop the spread of COVID-19 and instead cause enormous harm. But if a city is truly too disease-ridden for some reason to allow for normal human interaction, then it is also too disease-ridden to host the Olympics.
Point 5 is inspired by the ridiculous COVID restrictions at the 2022 Beijing Olympics. It is only occasionally relevant. But others have broader applicability.
I also explain how the United States and other liberal democracies are forcing the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to adopt these reforms:
[N]One of these ideas may well be adopted by the notoriously corrupt International Olympic Committee. The IOC has proven time and again that it is willing to tolerate almost any injustice as long as it benefits the organization and its leaders.
But the United States and other liberal democracies can easily impose these reforms if they make them a condition of future Olympic participation. Without the involvement of the United States and its allies, the IOC’s revenue would plummet as the value of broadcast rights plummets.
The question is whether the United States and other Western governments have the political will to do what needs to be done. At this point, I’m far from optimistic….
[T]The United States and other democracies can make these demands more credible by threatening to host their own winter and summer Olympics. This would weaken objections to unfairly depriving athletes of the opportunity to compete at the highest level. I propose a similar strategy to force the IOC to move the 2022 Olympics out of Beijing.
I remain pessimistic that this strategy will be implemented anytime soon. But if we have the will, there is a way.
