Advertisement

Why the IOC ban on protests at Tokyo Games is breathtaking hypocrisy

<span>Photograph: AP</span>
Photograph: AP

In a memoir published a few months after Arthur Ashe’s death the tennis champion reflected on one of the most famous demonstrations in sporting history. Tommie Smith and John Carlos made their Black Power salute at the Mexico Olympics in 1968, the year that Ashe won the first US Open. “Although I did not always agree with everything these men had said and done,” he wrote, “I respected the way they had stood tall against the sky and had insisted on being heard on matters other than boxing or track and field.”

Since January, the entertainment industry’s awards season has delivered a barrage of politically inspired protest from A-listers, be they Dave’s takedown of Boris Johnson, Oscar presenters trolling their own event or Joaquin Phoenix’s personal crusade against big dairy. At the same time the International Olympic Committee has issued guidelines banning all forms of protest at the Tokyo Games this summer, be they written signs or gestures such as kneeling during the US anthem.

Related: Tokyo marathon cancels mass race over coronavirus scare

This is not a new rule. The Olympics have been playing their holier-than-thou, more-neutral-than-Switzerland shtick ever since Baron Pierre de Coubertin decided that training athletes for the modern pentathlon was the best way to stop the Prussians invading France. The IOC’s breathtaking hypocrisy has been well-noted – the president backing this ban, Thomas Bach, is the same one who claimed that North and South Korea’s joint 2032 bid was a contribution to world peace – but it’s the sanctimony of its self-styled “mission” that really rankles.

This is an organisation that wants to make very clear it is far too noble-minded to allow of the unfortunate “divisions” in the real world. Smith’s and Carlos’s 68 protest came only a fortnight after hundreds of students were killed by the Mexican government in the very city that was hosting the Games. “If our Games were to be stopped every time the politicians violate the law of humanity,” said Avery Brundage, the IOC president at the time, “there will never be any international contests.”

That magnanimity of spirit has not died: you can see it in the IOC’s decision to stage its 2014 winter edition in a country that knows all about banning dissidents, as well as throwing them in jail – and far worse.

But let’s return to Ashe, a man who didn’t have the luxury of pretending that sport existed in a fantasy world, where all-comers met on an equal footing of mutual respect and unity of purpose. He was born into a situation where simply picking up a racket, or walking on to a court, was political. As a young black man in the American south in the mid-20th century, the prevailing politics denied him the chance to compete with his peers and had him thrown off training courts.

A recent biography by Raymond Arsenault illuminates Ashe’s own journey towards activism. His childhood coach and mentor, Dr Robert Walter Johnson, taught his protege to show restraint in all things and give no one an excuse to exclude him. Ashe gave his opponents the benefit of the doubt on all line calls and never protested an injustice. As a student athlete in California he quietly benched himself when a whites-only club refused to issue him with a tournament invitation.

The year before the Mexico Olympics, in his first autobiography, Advantage Ashe, the 23-year-old claimed he was “not the crusader type”. When it came to advancing the civil rights cause, he said: “I do it my way – behaving.” But as he lived, and as he learned, and as he encountered more of the world – in particular, apartheid South Africa – he found his own voice of protest, dignified and intelligent. He did not expect his fellow competitors to make the kind of personal stands he was prepared to – “It’s not that they don’t care” – but he reserved his contempt for the tennis leadership who were “terrified of taking a stand on political affairs, or on controversial questions of social justice”.

Another book, A People’s History of Tennis, (Pluto Press, out in May), makes the case that, for all its conservative, establishment wrapping, there exists within tennis a narrative of radical acts. For instance, the sport was a quiet harbour for feminism, as the first that encouraged women’s participation alongside men’s. A People’s History … also points out that “when Ashe was being cheered for winning the [Wimbledon] men’s singles in 1975, Britain’s number one player, Buster Mottram, was expressing political support for the openly racist National Front”.

Related: Tokyo Olympics: dance by Japan’s indigenous people dropped from opening ceremony

In the final few months of his battle with Aids, Ashe was arrested protesting against the treatment of Haitian refugees under the presidency of George HW Bush – and setting an example he hoped others would follow. Protesting, he said, was liberating and cathartic.

Ashe’s friend Harry Edwards – a sociologist who founded the Olympic Project for Human Rights that was behind Smith’s and Carlos’s gloved salute – said last year that another wave of sporting dissent could be on its way. “At a certain point,” he told the LA Times, “the cost becomes irrelevant because the cause is so critical. Injustice pushes the envelope to the point where that protest reaction becomes inevitable.”

The IOC has said it encourages athletes to share their political views this summer via traditional and social media; and there is some logic to its blanket ban. We wouldn’t want to see a gold medallist giving a far-right salute, for instance. (The Olympics witnessed plenty of them in 1936, another banner year for its code of moral superiority.)

The irony is that the element of transgression tends to make a protest statement stronger. Last September Smith and Carlos were finally inducted into the US Olympic Hall of Fame but their names were already etched in sporting legend. In cases such as theirs and Ashe it is the individuals whose courage and conviction we remember – not that of the organisations that tried to silence them.