POSTED: December 7th 2011
SpeakingUp
NEIL WILSON: Boycotts and shattered Olympic Dreams for the athletes
THE NEIL WILSON COLUMN / An exclusive, authoritative series from Sports Features Communications
LONDON: Hurray! The Indians will take part in the Olympic Games in London. Its Olympic Association has dismissed talk among athletes and in the media of boycotting the Games.
Hurray, because the only losers of any boycott are the athletes themselves. A year down the road, nobody will remember those who were not at the Games, only those who competed.
On this occasion the cause is the involvement of Olympic sponsor Dow Chemicals in the Games. The company took over an Indian company some years ago whose subsidiary had been the cause of the Bhopal disaster, the worst industrial incident ever.
Dow did not own the company at the time of the incident. Indeed, it did not become owner until the subsidiary had long gone and massive compensation agreed with the Indian government. So the connection is remote.
The Olympics though is so vast itself in the public mind, so attractive to public attention, that any with a cause see it as a moth does a flame. The cry immediately is boycott.
The IOA sensibly wanted nothing to do with it. They know boycotts achieve nothing, only heart-break for the competitors who have devoted years of their lives to an end they are denied.
Ask an American such as Ed Moses, denied a gold medal in 1980 by the call of President Jimmy Carter to boycott on the grounds that Olympic hosts, the Soviet Union, had invaded Afghanistan.
Or Kenyan athlete Mike Boit, denied by his country’s boycott of the 1976 Games on the flimsiest grounds that New Zealand which was participating in Montreal had allowed its rugby union team to play apartheid South Africa. Rugby, remember, was not even an Olympic sport.
Or Sergey Zabolotnov, the Russian backstroker who set a world record in 1984 at the Friendship Games when his country would have been at the Olympics but for its boycott. And why did it boycott? Because the US had boycotted its Games, boycott begetting boycott.
Or you could ask the British sailors whose Olympic Association refused a government demand to boycott the 1980 Games and bravely sent as competitors the likes of Sebastian Coe, now chairman of the 2012 Organizing Committee, and Colin Moynihan, now chairman of the British Olympic Association.
The sailors did not get to go because its national sailing federation, the Establishment and then very conservative Royal Yachting Association, unilaterally decided to go along with Margaret Thatcher’s conservative government’s boycott call.
At least two of the British crews were gold medal shots, Chris Law in a Finn and Rob White and David Campbell James in Tornado. Each won the European titles that year with a day’s racing to spare. All each has to remember their Olympic selection is a certificate signed by Prince Philip confirming that they would have been in the team that never was.
As the furore over Dow raged in India, nine of those sailors fought on for recognition, tabling a motion to the RYA’s annual meeting calling for a constitutional ban on all future boycotts and a campaign for those who missed out on 1980 to be honoured in 2012.
They will be lucky, indeed, if they are. The politicians who called for boycott in 1980 are long gone from office, So are the weak-kneed sporting bureaucrats who conceded to them.
Alone with a memory of what might have been are the athletes. It was ever thus.
NEIL WILSON reported his first Olympic Games in Munich in 1972. He has since covered another nine summer and nine winter Olympics for various newspapers, including The Independent and the Daily Mail with whom he has worked for the last 19 years as Athletics and Olympic correspondent. He was Britain's Sports Journalist of the Year in 1984 and is the author of seven books.
Keywords · IOA · Indian Olympic Association · Neil Wilson
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