We have just spent a whole fortnight watching the Olympic Games, but for me this has raised many questions. The Olympics is a legacy of ancient Greece where warring kings, weary of war, invented a way to achieve peace through sports. I am sure the Paris organisers knew that sports are a competition to determine, as in a war, a loser and a winner but without resulting in deaths as it is the case in wars. Nevertheless, recent events have tarred this peace-promoting exercise so much so that efforts are ceaselessly needed to keep promoting peace. In his famous “Ode to Sport”, Pierre de Courbertin wanted to achieve, in his words, “happy bonds between the peoples by drawing them together in reverence for strength which is controlled, organised and self-disciplined. It is through the young that respect would be learned for one another, thereby ensuring that the diversity of national traits becomes a source of generous and peaceful emulation to bring about justice, daring, honour, joy and, in the true spirit of noble inspiration, the means to achieve a perfect race as well as promoting health. Athletes would, accordingly, wish to see growing about him brisk and sturdy sons to follow him in the arena and [in] turn bear off joyous laurels.”
Alas there are no bounds to human hypocrisy and inconsistency. The IOC, in a blitz, despatched all those lofty principles by barring Russia from participation because of the its attack on Ukraine and tied Belarus to this ban for being a collaborator of Russia, but conceded the nationals of the two pariah states could participate as neutral individuals. In 1980 the USA boycotted the Moscow Olympics because of Russia’s invasion of Afghanistan. The heights of double speak were reached in 2024 in Paris when 88 Israeli athletes were welcomed by the IOC despite the Israeli genocide in Gaza. Selective morality at its best and a laconic “GENOCIDE OLYMPICS” says it all.
Does nationality really matter? The only teams, I believe, who lined up their ‘native’ nationals were Japan and China. Most of the European countries fielded a good number of second/third generation immigrants whose parents mainly come from Africa and the Caribbean. This brings to mind Lady Susan Hussey’s question of a Black Briton: ‘But where do you really, really come from, where do your people come from?’. What an irony! We have forgotten that Homo Sapiens originated from Africa. Neeraj Chopra of India and Nadeem Arshad from Pakistan and their mothers would have been the best architects of peace adding a proviso to Courbertin who had assigned the role to the youths only. When their sons were showing their Olympic medals, both mothers adopted each other’s sons. Narendra Modi and Shehbaz Sharif, did you see that? If you have, would you lay down your bombs, would you stop sabre-rattling, would you imitate your youths stop throwing javelins at each other [as inferred by F S Aijazuddin] and serve this as a template of real Olympic spirit?
What about the observation of the British novelist E. M. Forster? He wrote: “I am sure that if the mothers of various nations could meet, there would be no more wars. “
By Dawood Auleear
