- Video
-
Club Roar
Captured a great grassroots sporting moment? We want to see it!Content Collections
The Roar Community
- Join
- Login
International Olympic Committee president Jacques Rogge said today athletes were free to criticise China but asked them not to do so in Games stadiums.
“The athletes can criticise China freely in their country, in public places in China, in the mixed zones where you (reporters) meet them,” Rogge told reporters.
“We ask them simply to not take part in propaganda or any political, religious, commercial or racial demonstration,” he said.
Rogge said the Olympic family contained 205 different teams, several of them representing countries involved in religious or military conflicts, and that these conflicts must be kept out of the Games.
“If we allow propaganda in the Olympic village or in the stadiums, it is the end of the Olympic harmony,” he said.
China has come under huge international criticism in the run-up to the Beijing Games on a range of issues from environmental degradation to human rights, and campaigners have urged athletes to show their dissatisfaction.
Some Olympic athletes have already raised the possibility they may make a protest and some have pleaded with China to act on different issues.
US basketball Olympian Kobe Bryant has filmed a message encouraging pressure on China over ties to Darfur, the war-torn Sudanese region where up to 300,000 people have died.
China has been accused of supporting the Sudanese government, which critics say has orchestrated much of the violence.