This is our first weekly repost from the Sports Examiner, an important Olympic news service founded by Rich Perelman, a long-time Olympic journalist. The following piece was written by David Miller, a guest columnist for The Sports Examiner, and his column is on a potential Olympic Boycott in Paris 2024. It makes for fascinating reading. We encourage all to subscribe to The Sports Examiner. After this column, we will post a subscription offer.
/It’s a pleasure to present this guest column by one of the most knowledgeable observers of the Olympic Movement, Britain’s David Miller. For more than 50 years, the former English footballer has covered the Olympic Games and the sports within it, including 15 years as the Chief Sports Correspondent of The Times of London, with stints at the Daily Express and the Daily Telegraph. Author of books on athletics, football and the Olympics, he was the Official Historian of the IOC from 1997-2018. His opinions are, of course, his own alone./
The renewed aspiration of the International Olympic Committee for maintaining ‘universality’ with ideological integration at the Paris Olympic Games 2024 – embracing drug-free athletes from Russia and Belarus uninvolved in Ukraine atrocities – could be spectacularly counter-productive. Evidence is accumulating that IOC imagined ethics will become not peaceful leadership but fatal cancer of Paris’s long-awaited third Games next year.
Aware that not only much of NATO – Ukraine themselves anxious candidates – but indeed world equilibrium is under threat from Putin’s demonic empire lust, Western nations are known to be considering a boycott of Paris rather than competing against an alien state. Fourteen effective neighbours of Ukraine were among the top 45 medal-winning nations at Tokyo’s suspended Summer Games of 2021. Their absence from Paris would be catastrophic: winners of a third of 900 medals at Tokyo.
“The plan to devise acceptable conditions for inclusion of Russian athletes is far too early, Ukraine’s allies indeed all of Europe, is wholly justified in their concern,” affirmed Gerhard Heiberg, veteran retired Norwegian IOC Member and industrialist who masterminded Lillehammer’s Winter Games of 1994; subsequently IOC financial director.
“More information is needed on Putin and his military leaders, who are still formidably aggressive. It is much too soon for leaders of the Olympic Council of Asia to be investigating…
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