At first, it reads like the kind of good news story the Rio de Janeiro Organising Committee for the Olympic Games (ROCOG) and IOC need in the face of swarming Zika mosquitos and rumours of unfinished velodromes.
But beneath the veneer of a mildly mundane, carefully crafted press release, on March 2, the International Olympic Committee confirmed that a team of refugees will compete in Rio. And that might just be one of the boldest political statements they have ever made.
The announcement itself was hardly unexpected. In January, president Thomas Bach toured a reception centre for refugees in Athens telling reporters “we want to draw the attention of the world to the problems of the refugees”.
His plan for doing so is simple. Forty-three Olympic-calibre athletes who are currently displaced or stateless, have been identified and are receiving funding and other support from the IOC. In June, approximately ten will be selected from this pool to compete under the Olympic flag as part of the Team of Refugee Olympic Athletes (ROA).
This is a good news story. One would be hard-pressed to make the argument that a world-class athlete should be denied the glory of participating in the Games through no fault of their own. What’s striking, however, is that this decision comes against the backdrop of Europe’s ever-worsening, hyper-political refugee crisis.
For close to a year, images of boats sinking in the Mediterranean and tiny children being washed ashore on Turkish beaches have been beamed across the world to a strange mix of outrage and disinterest. As violent conflicts gripped the Middle East in 2015, more than a million refugees flooded into Europe seeking asylum. Just as the battles keep raging on, so do the debates about who these people are, and where they should go.
It is perplexing then that an organisation whose members must swear an oath to keep themselves “free of any political or commercial influence” would so deliberately and vocally throw their support (and dollars) behind one side of a heated, worldwide argument.
After all, the issue of nation-less sportspeople is not a new one for the IOC.
Since 1992 Independent Olympic Athletes have been permitted to compete in various forms under the Olympic flag. The initiative first served competitors from Slobodan Milošević’s then heavily sanctioned, soon to be dissolved Yugoslavia, and the very newly formed Macedonia; both of which were unable to send official teams to Barcelona.
IOA went on to support competitors from South Sudan, the Netherlands, Antilles and among others, East Timor. The benefits to the athletes and sport as a whole were undeniable. The UN official who led the 2000 three-man team from East Timor into Stadium Australia, said at the time, “When [this team] get off the plane after the Olympics, I have no doubt there will be hundreds, maybe thousands of people waiting to greet them.”
It was a win-win for the IOC, providing an opportunity for athletes who would otherwise be denied, and generating the kind of feel-good stories we’ve come to expect from modern day Olympics coverage. Stories like Guor Marial Mading Maker who became an Olympian after losing 28 members of his family in war-torn Sudan. And Águeda Fátima Amaral whose 43rd finish in the marathon at Sydney “inspired the world” according to The New York Times.
Yes, win-win. That is, until now.
It would be naive, of course, to assume that the IOC and the Games are as inherently apolitical as they pretend to be. There’s been every variety of boycott you could imagine – Irish, Hungarian, Cold War, Apartheid. There was Putin’s obsession with anti-LGBT “public morality” at Sochi and the murderous terror attacks of ’72.
But ROA, beyond making Olympic dreams come true, might signal the beginning of a new era for the IOC, and an outspoken one at that.
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