The half-measures taken to protest an undeniably morally compromised Olympics are warranted, yet ultimately meaningless. But the event feels undeniably blah, utterly lacking the warm, fuzzy, global goodwill that is, yes, a shared fiction, but also the Olympics’ actual stated reason for existing. This year in Beijing, the world’s finest figure skaters will be as glorious and elegant as ever, the skiers just as laser-focused and fearless, the curlers just as… curl-y. diplomatic boycott just two months ago at the beginning of December, she declared that “diplomatic or official representation would treat these games as business as usual in the face of the PRC’s egregious human rights abuses and atrocities in Xinjiang, and we simply can’t do that.”īut they are simply business as usual, and that’s exactly the problem. When White House press secretary Jen Psaki announced the U.S. That’s put athletes, not really by any choice of their own, in an equally compromised position, with the American skier Mikaela Shiffrin telling CNN last year that “you certainly don’t want to be put in the position of having to choose between human rights, like morality versus being able to do your job.” The corporations feasting at the games’ ad-revenue buffet have mostly tried to have it both ways, keeping controversy at arm’s length - as best represented by Coca-Cola, the ur-American brand, which is running its Olympic ad campaign only in China this year. Not a single country has withdrawn its athletes.

But an actual boycott, as with the 1980 games in Moscow? No way. The United States, U.K., Taiwan and a handful of other democracies have declared a diplomatic boycott of the games, declining to send state officials as representatives. Given this, one might imagine there would be mass international resistance to Beijing’s hosting of the games, which traditionally serve as a showcase for the host country to flex its influence and show off its myriad achievements.

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