Games of shame
“The vision of the International Olympic Committee is to Build a Better World through Sport.”
A noble goal from the leaders of the Olympic Games. So, what does building a better world through sport look like?
In Paris, it could be mistaken for George Orwell’s 1984. The streets are lined with temporary fencing. AI-powered surveillance watches everyone. Tens of thousands of police stand on corners checking people’s QR codes to make sure they are where the state thinks they are. The French government has pulled out all the stops for “the games”, turning Paris into a city in which even residents cannot move freely.
In the run-up to the Olympics, thousands of homeless people were displaced by authorities. Hundreds were bussed out of the city and abandoned. Homeless encampments have been aggressively torn down and fenced off. The government claims it’s unrelated, but when 400 migrants are driven out of an abandoned factory a few hundred metres away from the Olympic Village, you can’t help but think there might be a hidden agenda.
The area hosting the Olympic Village, Île-Saint-Denis, is one of the most impoverished in Paris. Around 40 percent of residents live in social or public housing. When the games are finished and the athletes’ village empties, the luxury apartments will be sold, and an ever-shrinking one-quarter (formerly one-third) will be left for social housing. The area will likely be gentrified: two train lines have been established, and luxurious restaurants have been built next to the river Seine near the new aquatic centre. Meanwhile, working-class residents are pushed further and further to the city limits.
This is a familiar story. Apparently, this “better world” for the International Olympic Committee is a better world only for the rich and powerful. It’s a world where they can move around in luxury without being bothered by the ugly reality of the poverty they are responsible for.
Olympic host cities yammer on about how the games will boost their economies and enrich the lives of their residents. Anticipating the 2028 games in Los Angeles, the city’s mayor has expressed the hope that the Olympics will be a “catalyst ... that eventually ends street homelessness”.
In 2023, volunteers counted 75,518 homeless people in the city, a 9 percent increase on the previous year. Solving the problem would require more public housing, increasing the minimum wage and increasing community services. Unfortunately, capitalist sports competitions will never create a better world for struggling Angelenos. Instead, the Olympics will mean what they always mean: heavy-handed policing, militarisation and forced displacement.
The last time the Olympics were held in Los Angeles, in 1984, the police department dramatically increased harassment of Black and Latino youths, further normalising the excessive violence and setting the foundation of the brutality of the federal government’s notorious War on Drugs.
In Atlanta in the lead-up to the 1996 Olympics, cops arrested up to 9,000 people and demolished the remaining social housing in the CBD, replacing it with commercial real estate. The Olympics destroyed ordinary people’s worlds in order to make it better for the wealthy.
The story was little different in Rio, Tokyo, London and more.
The presence of Israel at this year’s games is impossible to ignore. Athletes from Russia and Belarus have been banned from competing because their governments broke the Olympic Charter. The IOC Executive Board in March last year ruled that athletes with a Russian or Belarusian passport “must compete only as Individual Neutral Athletes”, and that those who “actively support the war” in Ukraine and those “who are contracted to the Russian or Belarusian military or national security agencies” cannot compete.
Israeli athletes, however, remain, competing under the Israeli flag and with no conditions related to their support or otherwise for the unfolding genocide in Gaza or to their links to the Israeli occupation forces.
Nor have athletes from the United States, the destroyer of several countries, ever faced sanctions at the hands of the Olympic Committee.
Over-policing, ubiquitous surveillance, forced displacement of the homeless, hypocrisy: that’s the “Olympic spirit”.
