IT is hard in the current turmoil to think ahead to the 2012 Olympics that, we know now, will be in London. Yet the British success in convincing the International Olympic Committee that they would be better hosts than the hot favorite Paris, better too than Moscow, Madrid or New York, could possibly have an effect on the way the British behave in the world in the coming seven years.
The Beijing Olympics in 2008 will mark China’s coming of age within the international community. Already well on the way to becoming the new century’s economic superpower the games will be another powerful way in which the Chinese will demonstrate what they can now do. They see vast prestige in the Olympics and are investing everything in order to make them an outstanding success.
The British who hosted the first post-World War II Olympics in 1948, are less interested in the prestige. They are, however, interested in demonstrating what they can still do.
Britain is currently run by a generation that grew up as its empire shrank and the country was searching for a new role in the world. Though that role is clearly in Europe, Britons have yet to overcome their inherent insularity and their desire to stand alone. Tony Blair invested much political capital in winning the 2012 Olympics, flying to Singapore Monday to make a special appeal to the IOC Committee. He returned yesterday to the G-8 Summit which Britain is hosting in Scotland. For the next six months, Britain also holds the presidency of the EU.
This all makes the British feel rather proud that they are still playing a significant role in world affairs, which nevertheless may have to change. Staging the ultimate sporting contest, when the countries of the world come together in friendly rivalry, will demand a subtly different foreign policy from now.
By the time, seven years from now, when the Olympic torch finally arrives in London, Tony Blair will be out of office and the gun-slinging egocentric arrogant US policies of the Bush years will, one hopes, have been abandoned.
Organizing an event as huge and complex as an Olympics demands more than massive building sites and infrastructural upgrades. It also requires the goodwill of the world community. No one should forget the debacle of the 1980 Moscow Olympics, widely boycotted because of the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. For sportsmen and fans around the world, it was a shattering disappointment. The British government supported the US-led boycott, though its athletes, unlike those from the USA, were free to decide to compete if they wanted to. Four years earlier, Tanzania had led 22 African countries in a boycott of the Montreal Olympics because of the presence of New Zealand, whose rugby team had toured apartheid South Africa in defiance of a sporting ban.
All this shows how the sensitivities of global politics threaten Olympics.
