Skip to content

LETTER: Given China's track record, Beijing Olympics should've been shelved

'It seems our let-it-be attitude toward sports overrides our ability to empathize with victims of genocide and torture,' says Barrie resident
2022-01-25 Beijing China
Stock image

CollingwoodToday welcomes letters to the editor at [email protected]. Please include your daytime phone number and address (for verification of authorship, not publication). The following letter is from Barrie resident Christopher Mansour 
*************************

With the Olympics about to begin in Beijing and the professional sports season progressing on the networks, people are undoubtedly ecstatic about attending live events in all the stadiums wheresoever they are.

It has indeed been a long, life-changing pandemic and people will certainly look for ways to kill off the tedium and bad memories a disease like corona has clearly caused.

The athletes, too, have undoubtedly felt the impact of such unusual conditions that interrupted their training or closed down entire stadiums or franchises.

But there is another kind of "disease" that preoccupies the human mind like some bad motif from a popular novel. Amidst the tumult of war threats and terror, antagonisms, crimes and hate is the old myopia when it comes to sports.

We love our sports to extraordinary and often ridiculous degrees. Sports can bring out the very worst in our behaviour and a premium of unrivalled selfishness. Yes, they can inspire us to be better than we are. But the devil-may-care and laissez-faire attitude they bring out are worrisome.

This year's Olympics are once again being held in China.

China is the bellicose dictatorship threatening Taiwan with invasion and imprisoning non-citizens like our own Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig. Their concentration camps are laying waste to the Uighur and ethnic Islamic cultures inhabiting Asia. Their policy of domination and global control should have been enough to dissuade athletes from risking imprisonment or abuse at the hands of a maniacal government. And it seems our let-it-be attitude toward sports overrides our ability to empathize with victims of genocide and torture.

Some will argue that such an attitude I am describing is hypocritical before the number of times athletes attended the Games hosted by other dictatorships. But even the Soviet Union, after the death of Stalin, as jingoist as it was, never committed the scale of horror as this Chinese government is capable of. However fruitless it may be to compare devilish figures.

But the human desire for entertainment at all costs supersedes the compassion needed to refuse attendance at a spectacle hosted by a government that pretends it is doing no wrong. Or just doesn't care. The world was duly warned by many Hong Kong media figures and democracy advocates now languishing in Chinese prisons, many for decades.

However entertaining the athletes' performances will be, this is one Olympics, given current events, that should've been shelved. One would think the West had learned that the fortunate release of the two Michaels will likely not be a repeat performance. Canada's appearance there is particularly surprising.

All the media, including the Toronto Star, describe China as the new superpower in the wing, rising even as America wanes. If the West doesn't change its weak-willed attitude in the face of Beijing's aggression, we may lament the passing of the last Cold War. At least there were times when we could reason with the Soviets.

Christopher Mansour
Barrie

*************************