storyTo sing or not to sing? Protest or remain discreet? Cry or smile? Ever since sports competitions have existed, the attitude of athletes during the broadcast of anthems has come under scrutiny and debate.
Singing or meditating, hand on heart or dangling arms, dazzling smile or tears of joy… Athletes know a thousand ways to behave when a hymn comes to celebrate their exploits. A thousand ways to savor and overcome the emotion of this long-awaited moment. A thousand ways, finally, to take advantage of this moment of glory in mondovision to convey a message, private (it’s sometimes charming) or political (it’s more complicated). No doubt this is what the Chinese authorities fear, when hosting, from February 4 to 20, the 2022 Winter Olympics placed under surveillance since many athletes from all over the world have taken cause for the Uighur minority and are concerned about the fate of Chinese tennis player Peng Shuai, who on November 2 accused a member of the Communist Party of having sexually assaulted her.
Saturday, February 5, the first athlete adorned with gold should be a cross-country skier, winner of the skiathlon event. In accordance with the protocol revised by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to contain the spread of Covid-19, the champion, like her runners-up, will be asked to remove her mask at the last moment., “just before going up on the podium of the winners”. Up there, she will be able to contemplate the raising of the flags and listen to the anthem to the glory of her country – “Athletes and the public will have to turn to the flags”, specifies an article of the IOC code. Will the first Olympic champion of 2022 experience this podium climb “the lump in the stomach and the legs that are shaking”, like Carole Montillet, gold medalist in the downhill in Salt Lake City in 2002? Will she sing “internally”, like the French skier, to better feel “very selfishly the most beautiful moment of [s]“career”? Or will she dare to make a gesture, a look of defiance?
Since the 1932 Olympic Games in Los Angeles, protocol no longer invites champions to go in front of personalities to bow their backs and receive their distinction. The reports are reversed, the medalist dominates the situation from his podium. Power symbolically changed sides, and the athletes were quick to seize it, recalls the historian of the Olympic movement David Wallechinsky. From the following Olympics, in 1936 in Berlin, the Korean Sohn Kee-chung, winner of the marathon, covers with his hand the rising sun sewn on his tracksuit and ostensibly lowers his head when the Japanese anthem resounds, to the glory of the occupying country. his. In 1968, American sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos each raised a black gloved fist to the skies of Mexico City, to denounce the fate reserved for black Americans.
You have 76.18% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.