If only one symbol of two decades of elective affinity between China and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) had to be retained, it would be this bust which has been enthroned since January 18 in the Dongsi Olympic Park in Beijing. The realization of the work is rough, but we can distinguish the features of Thomas Bach, President of the IOC since September 2013, statuefied during his lifetime for having given China its second Olympic Games (OG) in fourteen years.
After those of summer in 2008, the Chinese capital is the first city to host the Winter Games. No Western rival has ever achieved this feat. “The Games are not only sport but also art and culture”, said Yu Zaiqing, vice president of Beijing 2022 when unveiling the artwork. He himself is… a member of the IOC.
Never, since the boycott of the Moscow Olympics in 1980, has an Olympics aroused such unease because of the gulf between the Olympic values – the IOC claims to want promote human rights through sport – and the political reality of the host country on the central issue of human rights (Xinjiang, Hong Kong, Tibet).
“Hopefully this edition will mark the end of the laughable myth that the Games are apolitical, says the American researcher Jules Boykoff, author of a book (Power Games: A Political History of the Olympics, Verso Books, 2016) and studies on the instrumentalization of the Olympic movement by political powers, starting with dictatorships, to heal or whitewash their image. If hypocrisy were an Olympic discipline, the IOC would win the gold medal without firing a shot. »
The Peng Shuai affair as a revealer
In recent weeks, the position of strict neutrality claimed by the IOC has drawn strong criticism. These redoubled after the highlighting of a video call from Thomas Bach to the Chinese tennis player Peng Shuai, who had disappeared in November 2021 after having denounced a sexual assault by a cacique of the regime. This interview, supposed to prove that the player “was fine”, accentuated the suspicions of duplicity of Beijing and the IOC without alleviating the fears concerning the fate of the interested party.
During an (extremely rare) interview with the German public broadcaster ZDF on December 14, 2021, Thomas Bach, impassive, repeated the IOC’s slogan of non-interference: “What happened in the meantime [depuis 2008 quand la Chine avait laissé entendre que ses premiers JO accompagneraient l’ouverture politique du pays] is not within our purview or sphere of influence. If we were to organize Games only where we would agree on everything, then we would be alone at home soon enough. Our responsibility is not to solve the political problems of this world. »
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