The Olympics and the Torch

WHO says Sunday was a shambles? Who says the police were “humiliated”? A triumph, I call it. What are the Olympics about if not persistence, courage and goodwill towards foreigners (in this case Tibetans), and the expression of these qualities through the kind of doughty physical fitness that leaps over barriers and wrestles sinewy opponents? As for the police, they did their job and kept everyone concerned alive. Good.

OK, a few of the protesters (in London) were just out for a ruck; that is the case in all demonstrations. But most were sincere and non-violent and took pains to get Tibetan flags and paint literate banners. You do not need to be fanatically anti-Chinese to admit that the Chinese Government is not behaving well in Tibet, or to be uneasy at the calculated pageantry of the Olympic torch’s procession through our streets with a phalanx of Chinese guards. Given that Turkey and Greece had already demonstrated and France was gearing up, it would have been feeble indeed if Britain had not bothered.

Western democracies had no need to go along with this relay. The international flame-tour is not time-honoured. Hitler invented it in 1936 with the torch coming from Greece to Germany as a pan-Aryan gesture. It did not catch on for 64 years, until Sydney touted it round the Pacific rim, again for political reasons. Then Athens staged a tour in 2004 to mark the Games’ return to their first home. It just went round the bidding cities, with little brouhaha, turned up at Wimbledon and went up the Mall with Sir Roger Bannister. It passed calmly; but then Greece was not engaged in abusing an oppressed province. It is China — economically rising, full of national pride — that set up this unprecedented 85,000 mile epic.

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Strangely, so you might think after all that, I am not against the Beijing Olympics or advocating a pious boycott. Provided the athletes are allowed to speak out freely, they should be left to compete in peace.

From an article by Libby Purves in ‘The Times’, London, April 8