The world’s biggest sporting event, the quadrennial Olympic games see athletes from all over the world participate for a shot at glory, and therefore it is unsurprising that world politics will have a significant bearing on events.
With Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff now seriously involved in a political scandal in the lead-up to the Rio 2016 Olympics and some serious organizational issues revealing themselves, we look at five times political issues escalated to seriously affect the Olympic Games:
1972 Olympic Games, Germany
Perhaps the darkest time in the history of the Olympic Games, the 1972 Olympics in Munich, West Germany, saw 11 Israeli athletes kidnapped and brutally murdered.
Their hostage takers were part of Palestinian terror organization Black September, which was said to have close associations to Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization, although the extent of that association is still unclear.
Members of the terror faction infiltrated the Olympic village and took the athletes hostage, demanding the reciprocal release of Palestinian prisoners in Israel and that of two Germans involved in terrorism.
To demonstrate their point, the attackers killed Israel’s wrestling coach Moshe Weinberg, throwing his body out of the window after he tried to fight them.
Israel followed national security protocol and completely rejected any negotiations whatsoever, while Germany was said to have offered the attackers an ‘unlimited amount of money,’ which they refused.
The Palestinians made demands of Israel, which they feigned agreement to as they planned an ambush operation at the airport where the Palestinian attackers would be led to believe their demands were being capitulated to.
Eventually, with German teams positioned at the airport there, the attackers believed that their demands were being yielded to. German police were dressed as flight crew and the plan was that they would lure the terrorists into a false sense of security before retaliating. Unfortunately, the team underestimated the breadth of the Palestinian attack, and the crew aborted the mission at the last moment without informing their crew.
This meant the attackers realised they had been lured into a trap, and the two leaders fled. The hostages, meanwhile, loaded onto the helicopters the attackers believed would fly them out, were tragically shot dead, with not a single survivor.
The incident led to heavy exchanges of gunfire between the already fractious nations, and precipitated future Olympic organizers to put counter-terrorism measures in place for all subsequent games
1936 Olympic Games, Berlin, Germany
Germany built a massive stadium ahead of the 1936 Olympic Games, with new and improved facilities for athletes from around the world.
The Olympics, however, were held a mere two years before the Nazi Party came to power, with then-Reich Chancellor Adolf Hitler overseeing proceedings to ensure the Olympics served as a propaganda machine for the SS.
Ahead of the Olympic Games in Berlin, Hitler declared in the Nazi Party’s official paper that ‘Jews and black people would not be allowed to participate’ – a decision that he was forced to withdraw after most other nations threatened to boycott the games.
But beneath the guise of this ‘acceptance’ and capitulation, Hitler’s forces rounded up the Romani population of the city and placed them in concentration camps.
With Hitler’s government coming to power in the years before, countries had considered boycotting the games in light of the human rights atrocities that were already being committed, but the Games would go ahead nevertheless.
Spain, the then-Soviet Union and Turkey all boycotted the Olympics that year, with several political figures condemning the games.
American track-and-field legend Jesse Owens won four gold medals that year, with the soon-to-be-dictator refusing to shake hands with him. Several athletes who medaled at the games also refused to perform the Nazi salute on the podium in a form of protest.
2008 Olympic Games, Beijing
Several factors went into a proposed boycott of the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, China. Human rights activists world over had protested several aspects of China’s political regime.
The country has never had a spotless human rights record, and matters reached a head when the Olympics were announced for the city.
China’s political and human rights history precluded it, however, and the nation’s stance towards Tibet in particular was heavily, and widely, criticized worldwide. The country’s regime is also severely restrictive on its citizens, whose online communications and interactions are seriously controlled and monitored by a totalitarian government.
It was alleged also that foreign journalists at the Olympics saw serious restrictions on what they could report, speak about, communicate to the outside world,and journalists were also allegedly silenced under the threat of physical violence.
China’s political affiliations have also been under the scanner, with the nation supporting international human rights conflicts.
Even as the Games concluded, there were serious accusations of non-representation of minority communities, and serious allegations of age falsification on the part of China’s own athletes.
International organizations accused China of ‘institutionalised cheating’, with some allegations turning out to have been true.
1952 Olympic Games, Helsinki
Cold War tensions were beginning to reach a head by the time the 1952 Olympic Games in Helsinki, Finland rolled around. Cold War issues would make repeated appearances over the then-future of the Olympic Games, but Helsinki marked the first of those issues.
That year marked the first time a team from Russia, participating as the USSR, had been in the Olympic Games after a 40-year gap. The Soviet Bloc, or the Eastern Bloc, largely comprised countries that had political affiliations with communist states in Eastern Europe. The Western Bloc, meanwhile, comprised all the countries allied with the United States and NATO, and tensions between the two blocs had reached a peak that year.
Matters got so tense at the time that the USSR team suggested they would house their team in the Russian city of Leningrad (the modern-day St. Petersburg) and fly their athletes to Helsinki each day. That idea was eventually vetoed, with an entirely separate Olympic village created for all Eastern Bloc athletes in the nearby Finnish city of Otaniemi.
Germany and Japan had also rejoined the Olympics that year, in the immediate, jarring aftermath of the Second World War; East Germany had wanted to participate in the Olympics but the team was not allowed to participate, with West German athletes taking part under the German flag.
1960 Olympic Games, Rome
Sports were segregated in South Africa, then in the throes of apartheid. Athletes were racially segregated, with separate rules and governing bodies for athletes of colour. South Africa’s ‘official’Olympic association only saw white athletes affiliated to it, and although there had been serious complaints through the 1940s and 1950s, the IOC said it would not take any action because it wished to “keep politics and sport separate.”
Eastern Bloc countries had begun protesting this in the 1950s, a movement spurred on by the beginning of the decolonization of Africa (although South Africa would not itself be decolonized until much later).
The racist regime saw South Africa disallowed from Olympic participation, a ban that would remain for three decades afterwards. That ban would finally be lifted in 1992, when South Africa’s Olympic association agreed that it could not seek readmission to the IOC until apartheid was abolished.
That same year, track and field legend Abebe Bikila of Ethiopia won the marathon – running barefooted – to become the first black African Olympic champion in history.
Former polio patient Wilma Rudolph won three gold medals that year in track and field and became the ‘fastest woman in the world,’ while Muhammad Ali, then Cassius Clay, won the light-heavyweight boxing medal.
