Beijing Olympic Games

Like yin and yang, Olympics shining and sinister

By JOHN LEICESTER, AP Olympics Columnist

BEIJING (AP)—Usain Bolt and the labor camp grannies. Both wrote chapters of the Beijing Olympics, where shining and sinister moments were as inseparable as yin and yang.

Bolt’s record-breaking dash in the 200 meters came the same day we learned that the Olympics’ Chinese hosts had sentenced Wu Dianyuan and her neighbor Wang Xiuying to “re-education through labor.” The Beijing ladies, in their 70s, had the temerity to test China’s promise—which remained unfulfilled—to allow protests during the games.

And that, really, is the story of the Beijing Olympics: fantastic sporting achievements that failed to hide the darker sides of China’s communist authorities, no matter how hard the Chinese police tried and regardless of the $40 billion that was spent to build facilities that wowed the world and where the athletes worked their magic.

As thrilling as Bolt’s feats or those of any Olympian were, they could not erase the image of Wu and Wang facing the possibility of breaking rocks in the Chinese gulag. The sports could not make us forget about repression in Tibet or China’s support for the Sudanese regime with its hand in murder in Darfur.

Underneath the celebration of youth and human endeavour these sores were always there, even if many Chinese knew nothing about them. The Olympics and the International Olympic Committee came out a little soiled because of it.

Let’s hear no more of that tired old lie that at the Olympics, sports and politics don’t mix.

These games were always political for China’s Communist Party, which got an Olympic-sized boost to its international and domestic prestige, without being made to pay the consequences for breaking promises it made to the IOC.

These games were always political for the IOC, which argued that the Olympics would help change China for the better but seemed more interested in boosting revenues and appealing to a huge new market. It proved spineless when the limits of promised change were made so abundantly clear.

The two sides were in cahoots from the beginning, in an arranged marriage of mutual benefit and risk.

Rewind to 2001. Already then, the IOC was starting to worry that Athens might not have its venues and preparations finished in time for the 2004 games that were looming on the horizon.

So when Beijing promised there would be no such problems if it was picked as the Olympic host for 2008, the IOC bought in. Sponsors lined up: What better marketing vehicle than the Olympics to reach out to China’s growing markets of millions?

But for all the preening and rebuilding that Beijing underwent in the subsequent seven years, for all the unfailing smiles from the tens of thousands of volunteers who helped ensure that the sports and the Olympic logistics ran so smoothly these past weeks, the warts still poked through the makeup.

Just ask Wu and Wang, the elderly protesters. The likelihood, given their age, is that the authorities won’t make them serve their yearlong labor camp sentence. But the threat will hang over them long after the Olympics have left town. Said Wu’s son, Li Xuehui: “They can also be taken away at any time.”

Or ask Yu Jie, a blacklisted author who had plainclothes police stationed outside his house for the Olympic duration. Only with the officers in tow, he says, has he been allowed out of his neighborhood while Michael Phelps made swimming history and Bolt sprinted into the record books.

“Faster, Higher, Stronger”—the Olympic motto aptly describes the global power China is becoming.

Its talented, hard-working sportsmen and women showed the promise of China during the past two weeks, scooping up more gold medals—51—than any other country for the first time.

Chinese were proud, and rightly so, that their athletes were doing so well and that the world had come to their once-closed door. The games showed off a nation in full economic bloom, a city transformed and a people far more confident about their role and importance in the world than they were a few decades back.

But with power also comes responsibilities, basic norms of good behavior. And that is where the authorities fell down, where their stated slogan of “One world, one dream” rang hollow. Thinking of those elderly ladies, it was hard to party with Bolt.

John Leicester is an Olympics columnist for The Associated Press. Write to him at jleicester(at)ap.org