Thread by @P_Kallioniemi

In today’s Vatnik Soup, we’ll introduce the International Olympic Committee (IOC) @Olympics . It’s mostly known for organizing sporting events, and for being supposed to foster the Olympic ideal while actually submitting to dictators.

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The International Olympic Committee (IOC) was founded in 1894 in Paris by Pierre de Coubertin with a noble goal: promote peace through sports. Politics out, sportsmanship in: sounds great in theory.

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But in practice, the IOC has a long history of accommodating authoritarian regimes, always in the name of “neutrality,” “dialogue,” and “keeping sports separate from politics”, usually not in a particularly consistent or moral way.

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The most infamous example is the 1936 Berlin Olympics. The IOC allowed Hitler to use the Games as a propaganda showcase for Nazi Germany, which already had anti-Jewish laws, concentration camps, and swastikas and Nazi salutes everywhere.

They still sell the t-shirt.

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The Games helped legitimize Hitler’s regime on the global stage. It was among the first major spectacles extensively filmed and broadcast live internationally. Black athletes achieved remarkable success, yet Hitler did not shake their hands nor question his race theories.

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During the 1972 Munich Olympics, Palestinian terrorists murdered 11 Israeli athletes. The IOC declared, “the Games must go on,” a phrase that became symbolic of how preserving the spectacle often took priority over confronting political reality.

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The 1980 Moscow Olympics took place just months after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. More than 60 countries boycotted the Games in protest of the aggression. The invasion was devastating for Afghanistan but ultimately became a defeat for Moscow.

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Then there’s Taiwan: the IOC forced Taiwanese athletes to compete as “Chinese Taipei” under a special flag.

Just because the People’s Republic of China has expressed a desire to invade and occupy their sovereign country.

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Russia had many athletes banned from the 2016 Rio Olympics, but not due to its invasions: due to its massive state-run doping program. Its athletes later competed as “neutrals” in PyeongChang 2018, Tokyo 2020, and Beijing 2022 instead of under the Russian flag.

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Russia has a long and infamous tradition of using sports as a political means since Soviet times, with Putin’s employer, the KGB, directly involved in a doping program on an industrial scale.

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Due to Russia’s genocidal war of aggression and terrorist bombings, Ukrainian athletes train under air-raid sirens and the constant threat of missiles and drone attacks.

660 Ukrainian athletes and coaches have already been killed by Russia.

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Despite this, Russians are currently in Italy competing at the Olympics. Sport has always been a political tool in Russia: big sports events are a way to divert the people’s attention from the regime’s failures while promoting it abroad.

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And the IOC collaborates with them by re-electing Russians like Shamil Tarpischev as members. Tarpischev is a former tennis professional who is very close to the Kremlin — Putin even awarded him the Order “For Merit to the Fatherland” in July 2022.

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But when Ukrainian skeleton rider Vladyslav Heraskevych @heraskevych honored the memory of his fellow athletes murdered by Russia on his helmet, he was disqualified. In the twisted logic of the IOC, the burden of “keeping politics out of sport” falls only on the victims.

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Olympics should stand for peace and sportsmanship. Instead, from promoting Nazi Germany to “neutral” Russians, from “Chinese Taipei” to disqualifying Ukrainians, the pattern is the same: the IOC chooses victim-blaming and accommodating dictatorships over Olympic ethics.

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Russia spends $5 billion a year on propaganda and corruption to manufacture support for its invasions, including by tainting sports in the worst Soviet tradition. Fact-based research to counter it takes time and effort — please support our work:
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