Athletes go, Biden stays: Will the Olympics boycott carry weight?

The Explainer

The United States has trimmed its roster for this year’s Winter Olympics in Beijing. But not of athletes – instead, the U.S. isn’t sending its usual slate of political officials to the Games. 

This “diplomatic boycott” of the Beijing Olympics is a bank-shot response to political and human rights abuses in Xinjiang, Tibet, and Hong Kong. It allows U.S. President Joe Biden to confront the Chinese Communist Party’s behavior, but without a direct, more controversial athlete boycott. 

It’s not clear whether that shot will score the administration any points, but about half a dozen other countries – including Australia, Britain, and Canada – have followed suit. Each announced its own diplomatic boycotts soon after the U.S. 

What is a diplomatic boycott?

It’s the choice to withdraw government representatives from the Beijing Games. 

For the past 20 years or so, the U.S. has sent a small team of political officials to the Olympics. At last year’s Summer Games in Tokyo, first lady Jill Biden attended the opening ceremony, and a separate delegation led by United Nations Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield stayed for the closing ceremony. In between, they watched U.S. athletes compete and met with other diplomats. 

“Traditionally the Games are an opportunity, a venue for all kinds of meet, greet, informal discussions, negotiations, mediations, and so on,” says Bruce Kidd, professor emeritus of sport and public policy at the University of Toronto.

The boycott means there won’t be any such hobnobbing in Beijing.

Why is it happening?

In the past four years, China has all but eliminated democratic government in Hong Kong, punished ethnic minorities in Tibet, and reportedly forced more than a million Uyghurs into internment camps in the northwest province of Xinjiang. The Communist Party denies each accusation, but multiple countries, including the U.S., have accused the government of genocide.

Tough-on-China policies are popular in Washington, and an Olympics in the Chinese capital inevitably invited a response from the Biden administration. 

“U.S. diplomatic or official representation would treat these Games as business as usual in the face of the PRC’s [the People’s Republic of China’s] egregious human rights abuses and atrocities in Xinjiang,” said White House press secretary Jen Psaki. “And we simply can’t do that.”

Why not a full boycott?

The last time the U.S. tried a full boycott – athletes and all – it was a catastrophe. 

In early 1980, the Carter administration wanted a response to the Soviet Union’s recent invasion of Afghanistan. The Summer Olympics were in Moscow that year, and The Washington Post ran an article calling for a boycott by U.S. athletes. Then-President Jimmy Carter liked the idea. 

In mid-January, he announced an ultimatum to the Soviets: leave Afghanistan or the U.S. would skip the Games. Mr. Carter soon learned he didn’t have the authority to do that. The U.S. Olympic Committee (USOC), like most others around the world, is private. The U.S. government doesn’t fund it, and can’t control it. 

“Essentially, Carter thinks you can just say, ‘We’re going to do a boycott,’ and we’re going to do a boycott,” says Nicholas
Sarantakes, author of “Dropping the Torch: Jimmy Carter, the Olympic Boycott, and the Cold War.” “Turns out he has to do a lot of lobbying.”

The Soviets ignored the ultimatum, and Mr. Carter’s lobbying began. For months, the administration pressured allies and American Olympic officials – threatening to revoke athletes’ passports and asking that sponsors freeze donations. Eventually it strong-armed the USOC into a vote, in which committee members begrudgingly decided to skip the Games. 

Many U.S. athletes missed their only chance to compete in the Olympics, and the USOC (now renamed the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee) apologized for the decision 40 years later.

Although the number of competing countries in Moscow was the smallest at any Olympics since 1956, Dr. Sarantakes says the boycott didn’t include many of the U.S.’s most influential allies in the world of sports. Four years later, the USSR and more than a dozen Soviet allies retaliated with a boycott of their own at the Los Angeles Games.

Do diplomatic boycotts matter?

Practically, no. Symbolically, maybe. 

Due to COVID-19 and the recent omicron variant, the Beijing Olympics is expected to be the most restricted in history. The U.S. delegation already would’ve been small, and the opportunities to see athletes or other diplomats would’ve been limited. 

“I don’t know all of Mr. Biden’s calculations, but maybe he was making a ‘headlines point’ – giving up opportunities for diplomacy when COVID restrictions made them almost impossible,” says Dr. Kidd of the University of Toronto.

Even in a normal year, these delegations don’t do much. The Olympics have encouraged political change before – thawing Soviet-South Korea relations at the 1988 Seoul Games or calling attention to the horrors of apartheid by banning South Africa’s Olympic committee. But for the most part the diplomatic teams aren’t responsible for those. Most of the time, says Dr. Sarantakes, their job is just to support the athletes. 

But gestures matter, and a spokesperson for the Chinese Foreign Ministry warned the U.S. would face “resolute countermeasures.” It’s not clear what that means, and it may have been posturing to keep other countries from initiating their own boycotts, says Lisa Neirotti, a professor of sport management at George Washington University.

“For the Chinese, obviously, they’re not happy,” she says. “They’d rather have no boycott, whether it’s diplomatic or not. But in the end ... it’s not really going to harm their Olympic Games.”

How will this affect political speech at the Games?

It adds pressure. 

Ahead of last year’s Summer Games, the International Olympic Committee revised its Rule 50, which bans political speech during competition or on the podium. Athletes responded with demonstrations, some of which broke even the more relaxed, updated rules. For the most part, the IOC looked the other way. 

But Beijing isn’t Tokyo. The Chinese government is more sensitive to political demonstrations, and the diplomatic boycotts may add scrutiny to athletes’ behavior. 

“I’m hoping the IOC will have already persuaded or will persuade the Chinese to just simply shrug or take a deep breath and let things go on as happened in Tokyo,” says Dr. Kidd. But that’s hardly a guarantee, he says. If an athlete offends the Chinese government – say protesting the Uyghur internment on the podium – then no one knows what will happen. 

“I think everybody’s going to be watching,” says Dr. Kidd.