Something that I have currently been wondering about is the state of the Olympic Games in Brazil this summer. There is the outbreak of the Zika virus, an economic recession, riots in the favelas (the urban slums), and massive protests against President Rousseff. All of these occurrences would pose a challenge without an Olympics. Brazil has sold very few Olympic tickets and will most likely lose a massive amount of money as a result. The venues are nearly completed but the presiding political dilemmas pose a challenge.
Rio 2016 will definitely not be the first Olympics where political turmoil coincides with the Olympics. The 2014 Olympics in Sochi also coincided with political unrest in the country. People protested and critiqued Russia’s anti-gay laws as well as the corruption surrounding the Olympics with its exorbitant ticket prices, according to Al Jazeera. People critiqued the repressive Chinese government in Beijing in 2008. In 1980, the U.S. boycotted Russia and in 1984 Russia boycotted the U.S. as retribution. There are countless other examples of Olympics where the present politics interfere with the event. We cannot really expect politics and the Olympics to disassociate from one another due to the complex relationships between and within governments around the world.
The Olympics also lead to the resurrections of complex histories. Many countries critiqued China’s government in 2008, which highlighted the ongoing dichotomy between “the West” and “the rest.” At the same time, Russia does have some of the harshest anti-gay laws but at the time of Sochi, many U.S. states had comparable laws as well as many other countries (here is an article from Politico elaborating). The debate and tensions reminded of the Cold War and continued tense relationships between the U.S. and Russia.
The difficulties arising in Brazil are in part the fault of the Brazilian government but it is also the result of a legacy of Western influence and involvement in the region. The Olympics in Brazil may not be perfect, but no country will ever host a perfect Olympics. That is an impossible goal when States with strained relationships interact, even through sports. At the same time, for far too long the Olympics were hosted in almost exclusively Europe or the U.S. Even when addressing why Olympics are hosted where they are, histories of colonialism and neo-imperialism cannot be ignored. Hopefully, when Brazil hosts this summer the country is not critiqued for its political faults without a broadened discussion of how other countries have influenced the current political topography.
