The Munk Debates Podcast - Be it resolved: Today’s China is no place for the Olympics

Episode Date: June 16, 2021

As if pulling off the world's signature sporting event in Tokyo this summer during a global pandemic wasn't challenge enough, the International Olympic Committee is now facing a chorus of voices calling for a boycott of next February's Beijing Winter Olympics. Politicians from across the political spectrum as well as hundreds of human rights groups say that China's crackdown on democracy in Hong Kong and the genocide of the Uyghur community violate the fundamental principles of the Olympic charter and that the IOC must preserve the integrity of its mission by calling off the event. They argue that a failure to do so sends the message that the world condones China's actions, gives the country the international prestige it craves but has not earned, and misses a key opportunity to push for important human rights improvements in the country. Olympics boosters counter that more than ever the games need to go on: in our fractured world an international gathering of amateur athletes competing at the highest level sets just the kind of example of global cooperation the world needs right now and the Olympics are intended for. They argue that using athletes and the century-old Olympics to pursue geopolitical goals is what flies in the face of the movement's values, not hosting an event in an undemocratic country. Boycotts punish athletes and destroy their careers with no impact on a host country's conduct. The Moscow Olympic boycott in 1980 accomplished nothing and a Beijing boycott would be no different. Arguing for the motion is Jules Boykoff, Professor of Politics and Government at Pacific University, in Oregon, a former professional soccer player who played on the US Olympic Soccer team, and the author of numerous books about the Olympics, most recently NOlympians: Inside the Fight Against Capitalist Mega-Sports in Los Angeles, Tokyo and Beyond. Arguing against the motion is Richard Pound, a former Olympic swimmer who is a Canadian member and former Vice President of the International Olympic Committee. He was also the first president of the World Anti-Doping Agency.  Sources: Sky News Australia, Fox News, CNBC, NTD UK News CBC, CBS News, NBC News, Senator Mitt Romney, IOC Media The host of the Munk Debates is Rudyard Griffiths - @rudyardg.   Tweet your comments about this episode to @munkdebate or comment on our Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/munkdebates/ To sign up for a weekly email reminder for this podcast, send an email to [e-mail].   To support civil and substantive debate on the big questions of the day, consider becoming a Munk Member at https://munkdebates.com/membership Members receive access to our 10+ year library of great debates in HD video, a free Munk Debates book, newsletter and ticketing privileges at our live events. This podcast is a project of the Munk Debates, a Canadian charitable organization dedicated to fostering civil and substantive public dialogue - https://munkdebates.com/ The Munk Debates podcast is produced by Antica, Canada's largest private audio production company - https://www.anticaproductions.com/   Executive Producer: Stuart Coxe, CEO Antica Productions Senior Producer: Christina Campbell Editor: Kieran Lynch Associate Producer: Abhi RahejaBecome a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

There are options, and that's why we need to take this opportunity seriously. There's no way you can prevent global warming unless China is part of the solution. This is not normal male behavior. This is predatory behavior. We don't know how bad this bug is. We don't know what this bug does. All of that was thrown away in those eight minutes and 46 seconds, and that's the moment that I became an abolitionist. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Welcome to the Mug Debates. Every episode we bring. provide you with a civil and substantive debate on the big issue of the day,

to arm you the listener with enough information to make up your own mind. This episode's debate, be it resolved. Today's China is no place for the Olympic Games. A global push to strip Beijing of its Winter Olympics title has gained momentum amid growing concern. President Biden is facing some pressure to boycott the 2022 Olympic Games in Beijing. The coalition of 180 human rights groups is, urging governments to not send their delegations over reported human rights abuses in China. I would like everyone to speak out together.

China should not be allowed to host this 2022 Winter Olympics. Hello, I'm your moderator, Rudir-Griffith. Those are some of the growing number of voices calling for a boycott of the 2022 Winter Olympics, slated for next February in Beijing, China. Politicians from across the political spectrum as well as hundreds of human rights groups say that China's crackdown on democracy in Hong Kong and the alleged genocide of the Uyghur community inside China violate the basic ideals of the Olympics themselves,

and if the International Olympic Committee is not prepared to strip the games from Beijing, governments should respond with a boycott. Here's Nancy Pelosi, speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. For heads of state to go to China in light of a genocide that is ongoing, while you're sitting there in your seats

really begs the question, what moral authority do you have to speak again about human rights any place? Olympic boosters counter that more than ever the games need to go on in our fractured world and international gathering of amateur and elite athletes sets the kind of example

of global cooperation that the world so urgently needs. Olympic proponents argue also that boycotts punish athletes and put them in the impossible position of having to defend or condemn a host country's conduct. History also shows that boycotts are ineffective. The campaign against the 1980 Moscow Olympics did nothing to stop the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. The Beijing boycott will be no different. History has shown that Olympic boycotts plain and simply do not work. punished only athletes.

It punished the athletes that were meant to compete, those that they were meant to compete against, and frankly, generations of athletes that might have been inspired by them. On this installment of the Monk debates, we challenge the essence of these arguments by debating the motion, be it resolved, today's China is no place for the Olympic Games.

Arguing for the motion is Jules Boykhov. He's a professor of politics and government at the Pacific University in Oregon. He's also a former professional soccer player who played on the U.S. Olympic soccer team and is the author of numerous books about the Olympics. Most recently, No Olympians, Inside the Fight Against Mega Capitalist Sports in Los Angeles, Tokyo, and beyond. Arguing against the motion is Richard Pound, a former Olympic swimmer, who was also a Canadian member and former vice president of the International Olympic Committee. He was also the first president of WADA, the World Anti-Doping Agency. Richard Jules, welcome to the Monk Debates.

Thanks. It's great to be here. Hello. I'm really looking forward to today's conversation. This has to be one of the really the most kind of interesting and compelling debates around sports and athletics. Today, the future of the Olympics, not simply in Japan this coming summer and whether those games will proceed, but more importantly, the upcoming Olympics in China and how the world should react to the staging of these events

to individual countries' participation on the basis of the growing geopolitical competition between China and the United States that is reshaping our post-pandemic world. So to have the opportunity for both of you with sharply different points of view to come on and share your opinions, your insights and your analysis is going to make for a terrific debate and conversation.

Our motion today, simple to the point, be it resolved. Today's China is no place for the Olympic Games. Jules, you're arguing in favor of the motion. I'm going to put two minutes on the clock and turn the program over to you. Well, thank you. The Olympics tend to bring out the best in athletes, but the worst in host cities, whether we're talking about Beijing, Tokyo, Los Angeles, or London. Today I'll argue that China is no place for the Olympics because extreme human rights abuses in the country clash mightily with the

principles enshrined in the Olympic Charter. Take the Chinese government's treatment of the ethnic Uyghur Muslim population in Xinjiang province. Take the brutal crackdown on descent in Hong Kong. Take China's ongoing mistreatment of Tibetans. It's impossible to square these actions with the fundamental principle of Olympism that trumpets the harmonious development of humankind and the preservation of human dignity. To be sure, every country commits human rights abuses, including the U.S., which is slated to host the 28 Olympics in Los Angeles, where homelessness is a humanitarian crisis in plain sight. However, China is in a small subset of countries that is actively pursuing crimes against humanity. Moreover, Beijing has a track record when it comes to the Olympics, and it's

not pretty. The city hosted the 2008 Summer Olympics, and politics were once again at the forefront. Beijing's bid team explicitly claimed that the Games would create a Guantuan soil of democracy and human rights in China. But nothing of the sort transpired. Instead, the government used the Olympics as a pretext to retool its repressive apparatus. China not only used the 2008 Olympics to intensify its domestic surveillance of targeted groups, but also to market its surveillance systems to the world. Media and the internet were censored during the games. Activists were rounded up and detained. Journalists were arbitrarily arrested. Minky Warden of Human Rights Watch noted that to secure the right to host the 2008 summer games, the Chinese government made many promises

to improve human rights. These promises were broken, one after the other. Sophie Richardson, the China director at Human Rights Watch, argued that the Chinese government's hosting of the games was actually a catalyst for abuses. Since 2008, the human rights situation in China has only worsened. And yet, this didn't stop the International Olympic Committee from choosing Beijing to host the 2022 Winter Olympics. So I'm arguing we need to learn from history, not mindlessly repeat it. We need to read the present moment and act, not close our eyes to it and just hope for the best. Thank you, Jules, for that opening statement. Our debate today, be it resolved, today's China is no place for the Olympic Games.

Dick Pound, you're arguing against our motion. Let's have your opening statement, please. Just to clear some of the underbrush, what we're not talking about today is the capacity of China and or Beijing to host the games. I mean, they're quite capable of doing it. All of the opposition results from political considerations, and they are political.

I mean, they can be dressed up or labeled as human rights, but these are government actions by a state. And the resolution where debating is directed at a sovereign state and its political conduct, which leads us to the questions, what are the proponents of the motion trying to accomplish? I mean, assuming it's not just a rant.

And if they're serious, then the objective has to be. be to create conduct change in China. And how can that conduct change be done? We know what doesn't work, a condemnation by human rights groups and equivocal condemnation by some governments in very moderate terms and moderate trade restrictions and so forth. That simply is not going to do it. And so how do we direct the dialogue from statement to something that's action-oriented? Thank you, Richard. A lot to unpack here in this debate. Before we get into our three-way discussion, though, a chance for rebuttals. This is an opportunity for both of you to react to what you've just heard from each other.

So, Jules, your first. Another two minutes on the clock for your rebuttal. That's great. I appreciate the fact that Richard has basically said that what we're dealing with is politics, all too often members of the international. Olympic Committee say that the Olympics aren't political, whereas in reality, the Olympics are political through and through. The very structure of the games encourages political nationalism from marching into the opening ceremony by country to the flag waving, to the national anthems played for victors. And, you know, if we're to accept political scientist Harold Laswell's working definition of politics as who gets what, when, where, how, and why, then quite clearly the Olympics are supremely political. The IOC's alliances,

with corporate partners like Airbnb are political, with the company's track record of stoking gentrification, displacement, and shredding communities around the world. Take a look at the labor exploitation beneath the athletic apparel labels. That's definitely political. In fact, the International Olympic Committee gave a uniform contract for the next two Olympics to a Chinese textiles company that has an affiliated factory in Xinjiang province

and that openly advertises its use of Xinjiang cotton. Meanwhile, five international labor auditing firms said they could no longer assess supply chains in Xinjiang because the Chinese government's control and repression. It would be interesting for me to know if Mr. Pound could guarantee that garments being worn at the next two Olympics in Tokyo and Beijing are not made by forced labor. And if so, how can he know this? But the immediate point is that, like he said, the Olympics are political. And of course, as we're discussing today, the selection of Olympic host cities, is political. And I'm glad that we can, at the outset, reject the old-timey fairy tale that the Olympics transcend politics, because this proclamation that the International Olympic Committee has often made has rippled with hypocrisy. It's a particular type of politics that the IOC abhors, and that tends to be the politics of progress and liberation in thinking about human rights in this case. In other words, the IOC's self-declared political neutrality can actually be a form of bias that presses in the direction of

And in this case, in the direction of power, means supporting human rights abusers. In short, I think politics can actually be a big reason that cities and countries bid to host the Olympics. They view it as a way to signify political power and prestige to the world. And seeing this way, the IOC's so-called apoliticism is, in fact, deeply political. And I'm pleased to hear Mr. Pound acknowledge at the outset that we are dealing with a political situation. Thank you, Jules.

Richard, your opportunity now for a rebuttal also. More accurately, that's your construction of it. And hearing all of this does not move us into something that's useful action. So I'm actually wondering if we're asking ourselves the wrong question here. Awarding the games to Beijing is not a political vindication of Beijing. it's simply to make sure that you've got the games in a place that has the capacity and the ability to deliver games at the level that we now expect them to be. But the question of where this happens is not nearly as important as why they should happen.

Over the past 125 years, the Olympic movement has managed to carve out these little islands of peace in complicated and difficult political conditions. And I must say, not without some slips and falls along the way, but with a vision of trying to bring the youth of the world together in a peaceful coexistence through sport. And sport itself is kind of an interesting phenomenon in this, in the sense that it actually does away with a lot of the need for having the same language.

Distances, weights, and so on are all the same, no matter where you are. A lot of the governance of sport in competition is done by gestures and so forth. You don't actually need them. So in this effort to try and create that island every four years, we shouldn't be distracted by the location but be inspired by the message of the example that, yes, it can be done. It is possible.

There is hope for a world that could be less stressful. and it's come about as the result of support and the young people who participate in it. That's the real message of the Olympics. Thank you, Richard. My opportunity now to kind of join the debate and think through some questions that are top of mind for our listeners

listening to both of you in this excellent debate. And, Jules, maybe to come to you first on Richard's point there, that, look, at the end of the day, what you're looking for in a host country is an ability to stage games competently, effectively at a truly world-class standard. It's no simple feat to pull off in Olympic Games. China's doing this.

They did it in 2008. They're doing it again. Now, we have to put the interests of the athletes first. And by you raising political issues related to the Beijing government and what they're doing or not on human rights or a variety of other issues, is kind of beside the point. I think it helps for your audience to just sort of step back and think about the wider context on why Beijing is hosting in the first place.

Absolutely, the games have gotten really big, and they demand a lot out of the host city. You need resources. But certainly, Beijing is not the only place that has the capacity to pull off the Olympic Games, and where the Olympics very much matters. So if we rewind to 2015, we could see that only Beijing and Almaty Kazakhstan were left after bids from other places for the 2022 Olympics were torpedoed by public pushback. So there were originally six cities interested in staging the games. But Leviv, Ukraine, Krakow, Poland, and Stockholm and Sweden all pulled out.

The residents of Krakow in Poland saw civic bankruptcy looming, so they voted a resounding 70% no. And a referendum this week to hosting the 2022 winter. Then so did Oslo. They pulled out after Norway's parliament refused to grant the required government financial guarantees. The IOC had many pages of demands, including meetings with the King, VIP cocktail parties, dedicated traffic lanes. This did not go well in Norway once it got to the press. Other potential bids from Germany in Munich and Switzerland in St. Moritz and Davos failed to materialize after losing public referenda. The people just said no, which really raises the

question of why they all said no. And I think this leads us to wider issues that plague the Olympic Games that I think we need to talk about today. But since you asked Rudyard about the athletes, I do want to just say it is crucial to note that the IOC in picking Beijing has put athletes in this difficult position. The original sin in this situation, if you will, is that the IOC handed the Olympics to a clear-cut, indisputable human rights abuser. That human rights watch has gone as far as to determine after careful deliberation is actually committing crimes against humanity. That's a technical legal term against Turkic Muslims in Xinjiang province. And athletes had no voice in the decision to hand the 2022 games to Beijing.

And now yet athletes are caught in the middle. Don't take it, if you don't want to take it from me, take it from the two-time Olympic Alpine skiing champion, Michaela Schifrin, who just said a few months ago about the Beijing games that athletes should not be forced to choose between their morals. and their job. You know, the IOC has this slogan, it's athletes first. But I think it's pretty clear

in selecting Beijing to host the Olympics. They actually put the athletes among the last. So, Richard, I'm sure you've got some views on what you've just heard. Talk to us a bit about, again, how you square maybe these very noble Olympic principles with the reality of what we face in taking the games.

to China, not just the reality of human rights abuses that are going on, but the reality that, as Jules has just mentioned, athletes are put in this intense kind of moral quandary, have no choice of their own. They now have to balance the very future of their participation in a sport that they've given their life to versus some of the most fundamental beliefs that they have about the nature of human freedom of justice of our respect for our fellow man. Well, I think you can take that back to Joel's opening comment. There is no country on the face of the planet without sin, including his, including ours. And so if you're going to make that judgment, you've got to be really, really careful.

But what makes the Olympics in all of this such a juicy target and irresistible to a number of the folks and statements that Jules made is that their global importance. and their recognition. But if you look at it, all of these demands to sacrifice the games and the Olympic athletes costs nothing to all of the people that are proposing that. Somebody else pays the price at their behest. And if you pay really close attention to the proponents who say, we must do something about China, what they actually mean is not we. I mean, you, you the Olympic athletes are going to be the warriors in this particular conflict

that we have identified as being political, not sport, not youth. Somebody else should pay the price for it. That doesn't work. We've seen, we saw what happened in the Moscow boycott back in 1980. Governments were outraged by the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, for heaven's sake. and demanded overall support from country, each country at large, to demonstrate the rage with which this was being viewed. And I have notified the Olympic Committee

that with Soviet invading forces in Afghanistan, neither the American people nor I will support sending an Olympic team to Moscow. And in the end, what happened? Only the Olympic athletes paid the price in Canada. Canada, those of us here will remember, the outrage of Canada was so huge that we cut back air flights from four per week to three per week. We canceled a ballet tour. We boycotted the Olympics, which got lots of nice media, and we sold more wheat to the Russians than ever in our history. So there's an awful lot of hypocrisy that goes into this, particularly when those that are calling for the action pay no price themselves. and they know they pay no price,

and they know that this gesture is nothing but an empty gesture that will not bring about conduct change in China. So let's get real and look at what the Olympics can do in their own way to make the world a better place. Hi, Monk podcast listeners. Rudyard Griffiths here, your host and moderator. A big thank you to all of our listeners. We've achieved an important milestone.

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So, Jules, I'm glad we're bringing up history here because it's important. Talk to us about the 1980 Olympics, because as Richards just mentioned, I mean, that's an example that many would point to, in effect, a failed boycott, a boycott that was really about geopolitical interests and competition between the United States, then the Carter administration and the Soviet Union. And who paid the price? Well, athletes paid the price. the occupation of Afghanistan went on, and the reasons the Soviet Union fell nine years later had little or nothing to do with the boycott of those Olympic Games. Yeah, I don't dispute the fact that the boycotts of the 1980s hurt athletes.

I agree with that. And I would only support an athlete boycott of Beijing if athletes were in the lead, then I would follow. But there are other types of boycotts. that could be registered against what's happening in Beijing right now. There could be, as Mitt Romney suggested, an economic and a diplomatic boycott. There's serious discussions of that. It's disgusting that the IOC has provided Beijing a platform to host the world

and to have a nation which is committing genocide against the people is at the same time hosting Olympic Games is something which is jarring and outrageous. And as a result, the amendment calls for a diplomatic boycott such that we will not be sending any diplomats to participate in the Olympic experience there. Historically, in specific moments, Olympic boycotts are the threat of boycotts, have softened global support for problematic regimes. I mean, if you look at the pressure placed on South Africa for its racist apartheid policy through sport boycotts, it forced the IOC to push South Africa outside of the Olympic Union. circle from the 1960s through the 1990s. Now, of course, South Africa is in a much weaker geostrategic position than China finds itself today. And the International Olympic Committee in the modern era has shown a pretty notable deference to authoritarian powers, which takes us back to the initial

issue, really, the original sin, as I called it before, is that really the International Olympic Committee, by handing the Games to places like Beijing, is setting the table and putting the athletes in the middle. And you know, Mr. Pound raised the issue of paying the price for the Olympics. I mean, your listeners might be wondering, well, wait, why did all those countries and cities say no to the Olympics back in 2022, leaving only Beijing and Almaty, Kazakhstan standing? And that's because the social scientists have pinpointed four central negative externalities that plague all Olympics in various degrees, whether we're talking about Beijing, Tokyo, or future games like Paris or Los Angeles. And that is overspending.

the militarization of public space, the gentrification and displacement of everyday working people, and greenwashing, which is to say, talking a big environmental game, but not actually following through. It's those patterns that social scientists have identified that has put off a lot of potential bid cities, leaving only Beijing and Almaty.

And instead of saying, okay, let's reshuffle the deck here and try to figure out if we might be able to bring in some other possible bids, the IOC decided to go with the entity that it knew, Beijing, having hosted the 2008 games. In doing so, they basically are being, I think, fairly construed in the public sphere as condoning what's happening in Beijing, as condoning the fact that there hasn't been improvement in human rights since they hosted back in 2008. And so I think because of all those decisions made by the International Olympic Committee, optional decisions.

They're the ones that have put athletes in the middle. And I feel for athletes, but let's not forget the IOC put these athletes there. Let's talk about another historical example, Richard. And that was the 1936 summer games in then Nazi Germany, a newly elected regime led by Adolf Hitler, staged an Olympic Games to great kind of publicity and fan-fills. and extrapolated an incredible amount of domestic and international legitimacy out of staging that contest.

Would you not agree, Richard, that 1936 in hindsight was a mistake? We never should have given Hitler the Olympic Games. And further to Jules' point, if you do look at the actions of President Xi and China, while we certainly hope that they will never approach or culminate anything approximating the horrors of national socialism, they are extensive. They involve not only the squelching of democracy in Hong Kong, the suppression of the Uyghurs, the ongoing conflict with India over the Nepalese-Tibb border,

their perpetual harassment of democratic Taiwan. I mean, this is, it's one thing to say all countries have moral stains on their national character, but isn't there a risk here that we will look back in a number of years? and say, wow, that was a mistake. Just like 1936, we never should have awarded these games to China. Well, you got a lot of stuff in there, some of which is relevant, some of which is not. In South Africa, by the way, it was the IOC that moved well before governments did. And it was the IOC that expelled South Africa from the Olympic movement. And it was one of the main reasons that the apartheid regime collapsed because the government in South Africa could answer every question.

Oh, that's just political. That's just that. Except why will no one play with us? Why will no one play with us? And then this is a very sports oriented country. When we lifted the boycott for the 1992 games in Barcelona, George Bush fought. than president, waited for a day to see how that was received around the world, which was very positively. And then he lifted all of the economic and other sanctions. So let's not forget

all that. With respect to Germany, with the greatest of respect for all of this hindsight, the IOC, if it was fooled, was not the only organization, international or otherwise, that was fooled by Hitler. And it did get out of control. It was overly nationalized. It was the IOC, a very small and very weak organization at the time, that ordered Hitler to take down the spostikas in the Olympic Stadium. I mean, we did what we could with what we had at the time. Now, all of the recent cities that have pulled out have done so, mainly for economic reasons.

And I think the IOC has responded to that by changing entirely how we are going about choosing. host cities in the future. We've been reimagining how the Olympic Games is organized. Six recommendations from Olympic Agenda 2020 have inspired us to redesign, rethink, and reshape every aspect of the games, leading to 118 changes already in place, which could reduce the budget of the games by hundreds of millions of dollars. And it's not going to be a, you know, respond to a set of,

principles, et cetera, determined by the IOC in Lausanne. It's come and talk to us and let's see how we can make this a good experience for your country, how you can go about generating the necessary support, how you can go about demonstrating what the real costs should be, and we'll work out something that works for both of us. The expenses of the Olympic Games do not come from the games themselves. You can organize Olympic Games on the basis. of television revenues, sponsorships, ticket sales, and so forth.

But if you want to build an entirely different infrastructure as they did in Sochi, and that led to that unsupported assertion in the media that it cost $51 billion, that was absurd and got played out badly in politics. So we're addressing that, I think, very positively, and if had a very good response to that, The choice of Paris and Los Angeles as a twofer was the initial result of that kind of an approach. Having the games in Milano and Cortina in 2026 is another example of that where it's an entirely different approach and relationship to make this possible for developed countries to consider it. And I think the process is working very well. We may even have a choice for the 2032 games in Brisbane as early as the session in Tokyo.

So this is an evolving situation as the games get more and more important. And we're responding to that. But the answer is in the end that the where is less important than the fact that we have this international gathering. It is peaceful. It is non-discriminatory. that it plays out in front of young people and it plays out in front of the world. That's the contribution we should be looking at, not how much a ski jump it may or may have cost.

Richard, that's really helpful thinking to kind of push this debate forward. And just to follow up with one quick question to that is, what are the red lines out there that you would subscribe to to delineate when the Olympics shouldn't proceed to host games? I mean, we talked about South Africa. that was a clear and I think universally approved decision to ban South Africa from participation. But would you conceive that there are certain states currently existing where, for reasons of ethics and shared, again, shared humanity, we should not be staging Olympic Games? I'm not asking this rhetorically.

I'm just trying to understand if there's some kind of delineation that does exist. Other than capacity, let's assume every nation is capable of doing it. Are there some that just simply by virtue of their actions would be precluded? Or is it, again, is this transcending any one nation, any one set of issues that may grip them or grip the international scene at the moment? A couple of things on that. I mean, not everybody thinks the same way. So there will be those kind of differences. But if I were a Chinese political analysis, analysts rather, I would say, you know, we were up against Kazakhstan, for heaven's sake.

And I think there were 84 members of the IOC who voted. And in the end, mighty China won by four votes against little Kazakhstan. So there was a message there from a lot of IOC members that they were not comfortable with the particular choice that was left to them. And under the old model of the thing, we sort of have to wait for bids to come in over the transoms. Now we can go out and we can encourage the dialogue. The new system will help us with that. And I think the new system to the extent that there might be a universally recognized bad guy out there, that can probably be. dealt with very early in the process by not having that candidacy be advanced. So we're trying to

deal with issues of that nature. And every time we put on the games, we learn something new. And so the host city contract for 2032 is quite different from the one for 2010. Yeah. So, Jules, a similar question for you. What's the bar? Because I mean, your own country, the United States, I don't, last time I looked online, there are thousands of minors in your prison systems in solitary confinement. I mean, there are real and present human rights abuses going on in the United States. I can mention others that happen here in Canada. I'm not just being pejorative about America. But I guess what I'm trying to get at is, like, is there a danger here, Jules, that we get on a slope?

and nothing's good enough. So doesn't this at the end of the day just look like we're really beating up on China because we're in a new era of geopolitical competition with them? And frankly, if we weren't, we wouldn't even be having this debate. Yeah, that's a great point.

And I agree with you 100%. And I think there's a trap that I think we need to avoid, which is just making China and Beijing into a punching bag and not looking at a lot of these other cities that put forth bids for the Olympic Games. I mean, I'm coming to you from the United States where China is basically the bipartisan

bet noir. You can be a Democrat or a Republican and just have a free-for-all to wag a finger at China while ignoring human rights abuses that were responsible for, you know, from Guantanamo to kids in cages at the Mexico border to unquestionable support for Israel, which Human Rights Watch recently described as an apartheid state, to the homelessness situation in the United States, which, as I said, is a humanitarian crisis in plain sight. much of the rest of the world views the United States as a major threat to global relations, even more so than China. So politically it's easy for the U.S. to bash China and perhaps to openly suggest a boycott of the 2022 Winter Olympics. But I'm not doing that. And I'm really careful

about that. But I approve of giving scrutiny to places like Los Angeles where there is a terrible problem around homelessness. You know, you mentioned before the 1930s. And I think it's a really interesting Olympics to bring into the picture. In my view, historical parallels need to be drawn with extreme care. I certainly don't encourage like a cookie cutter view where history supposedly repeats itself in a sort of straightforward way. But I think that it's important to think through history to illuminate these patterns that help us make sense of the whirling swirl of right now. And if you think about the key actor from both 1936 Berlin Games and the assignment, of the 2022 Olympics to Beijing was the International Olympic Committee. They have shown an unfortunate

propensity for turning away from human rights atrocities in order to make sure that the games go on. Mr. Pound mentioned this Paris-L.A. Tufer. Again, the reason why they got this creative tufer was because so many other cities that were bidding on the 2024 Olympics decided not to continue their bids for the reasons that I mentioned before. It was a twofer for sure. But it was also, we might call it a Hail Mary. And I'm really actually worried about awarding the 20132 Olympics to places like Brisbane, because what that does is it undercuts democracy in these places. You give them the Olympics some 11 years in advance, as they did with Los Angeles, and it really undercuts the possibilities of having a vote where people understand what they're getting into with the Olympic Games.

As Mr. Pound has been saying all along, the Olympics are a big deal. They're also often a very expensive deal. And if you're going to host the Olympics in a city, it seems to me that every everyone in that city should have a chance to weigh in before the games are assigned. Don't forget, I also said, if you don't use this as an infrastructure project, for the future of your country or district, you can put on the Olympics with no impact on the tax base of the host country. Television, advertising, tickets, and so on. You don't have to spend taxpayer money to do this.

That's a little bit like saying you don't do cocaine, you just like the way it smells. Like you don't have to build all this infrastructure, which much of it you actually need to host the Olympics, because as we've been talking about from the beginning, it's a huge event. And you need the infrastructure to move the people around. And so a lot of the infrastructure that you're saying is sort of costly and superfluous is actually integral to actually hosting the Olympic Games. It's integral to the future of the country. And that's a different issue. What happens is lazy people conflate.

There's an Olympic budget. This is what you need to put on the games. There's an infrastructure budget, which is going to benefit the country for the next several decades. And people just put them together and say, oh, that's how much the Olympics costs. That's really lazy, misleading thinking. And we should all be very careful about falling into that particular trap. Richard, before we go to closing statements, just a final question that maybe a lot of our listeners are wondering about is, why not just have this debate at the IOC go away by saying, you know what, we've decided that in, you know, the complex, interconnected, technologically amplified world of the 21st century, you know, the time has come where we can hold the Olympics in a dedicated venue, time out and time again.

And why not return to the side of the original Olympics, the original Olympics of ancient Greece, Why not pick a nation like Greece? They could certainly use the infrastructure and say, we're all connected. Let's hold this in Greece. Let's invest in world-class facilities. And let's have all of this complicated politics and economics go away. And let's focus on the athletes. Isn't that the clearest, simplest solution to this controversy?

It assumes there's a silver bullet out there. Imagine putting all of this that's required in Greece. Greece. Who's going to pay for it? The Greeks certainly aren't. You can imagine what would happen in the parliament or in the Congress where every two or three years they say, how much do we have to send to Greece to maintain these facilities? How much?

But what about all those TV rights? all the sponsorship contracts, all the billions of dollars that the IOC raises each year on the basis of providing the world with access to the games. Well, and what we do with what we earn, as you may know, is about 90% of it is channeled back into sports, either into the organization of the games, the support of the International Sports Federation's, support of National Olympic Committees,

refugee team and so forth. I think we spend something like $3.5 million a day from exactly those sources of revenues. So we're doing an awful lot to support an international support system to develop the opportunities for athletes and create the possibility for these bubbles to occur.

Once every four years, you've got the view of what the world could be. I was in 1960 in the Rome games at the nadir of the Cold War. The USSR were two-dimensional monsters. Well, I saw Russian swimmers for the first time in the locker rooms and in the pools and the training. And they were just as nervous as we were. And some of them would go and throw up before they're racist. All of a sudden, they weren't two-dimensional anymore.

We couldn't speak to each other, but we shared something. If somebody did whatever time it was that I had achieved, I said, I know what went into doing that. And if somebody else matched that, you know, there's kind of an unspoken chivalry there. We're good for you. And I'm going to work harder and try and beat you the next time. But all of these things are valuable contributions to understanding that the world is not two-dimensional. And that we're not always getting the right information and data, either from political leaders or from those in opposition, citizen groups and so on. They don't have to be as right as somebody who's proposing that the Olympics be held in their country.

So let's open the channels that otherwise risk being closed because of inept and self-interested political considerations. Okay, before we go to closing statement, Jules, I want to give you an opportunity. I mean, do you have the $64,000 solution? I mean, is there, I don't know, is there a wholesale reform of the IOC, a democratization of this organization that you want to see? How do we do something that is important for humanity, but it is complicated that all countries are not equally capable of delivering an Olympics games at the standards that are. are required. What do we do? Well, first, I would say that I think we finally got something that Mr. Pound and I agree on, which is that giving the games to Greece is not a great idea. It was, it's not even really clear that the people of Greece would want that. They hosted the 2004 Athens

Games, spent a boatload of money, left a herd of white elephant stadiums in their wake, like softball fields strewn with weeds, Olympic fountains just sitting dormant, So it'd be hard maybe to convince them. And I appreciate that Mr. Pound was saying right there that, you know, the Olympics are really expensive. And he said, who's going to pay for it? That is really the big question of our moment. The Olympics have become a huge, huge event. The Summer Olympics have more than 11,000 athletes. And that presents a real difficulty for the host city in terms of how to manage that. They've just become so large and expensive that. it becomes difficult to get people on board. In terms of moving forward, I think that one thing that would help a lot is to decrease the power of the International Olympic Committee and increase the power and voice of athletes. That would be a great place to start. Second, I think that if you're going to build an Olympic village in each of these Olympic cities, which usually is what happens, that's where the athletes stay during the games, that should be converted every single time into housing

for people who are poor and marginalized. It should serve a positive social service. Whereas right now, it's usually just converted into market housing for rich people. There are so many little things that you could do like that that could leave a positive legacy for the Olympic Games. Those who host the games often use that word legacy. And in fact, that's what Athens didn't really get.

They did get a transport system out of the deal, and that's the one thing that people look back on and say, hey, we got something. but unfortunately the Olympics don't tend to leave positive legacies for everyday people in the Olympic city. Last, I think that the Olympics would really benefit from an infusion of democracy. Every single bid that gets put forward should have attached to it a requirement that the people in the city get to vote on whether they want to have it or not. That just seems to me to be a basic requirement. That way you could get a real read on whether the local population truly is in support of hosting one of these big major mega events.

Excellent. Let's go to our closing statements, our debate today that we've had with advantage of really some terrific analysis and insights here has been focused on the Olympics. Specifically, it's been be it resolved, today's China is no place for the Olympics. Richard Pound, you've been arguing against the motion. Let's have your closing remarks, please. I think that the location of a particular game is small picture. What the Olympics can do for the world is big picture, and we should be focusing on that. On Jules' issue regarding athletes, within the IOC, and I'm sure he knows this,

the athletes have the same level of representation in the IOC as all of these international sports federations put together and all of the 206 National Olympic Committees put together have. athletes are very much involved in that and let's let's face it not all of them are financial or construction experts or something like that but they they do provide a perspective on the games and the future and even the event in those games that are valuable and their their voices are all recognized and respected the same is pretty much true in each national Olympic committee in each international federation.

So the after use of infrastructure, like housing and so on, you don't all have what L.A. had with two university campuses there with the residences available, but certainly some significant portion ought to be in low-cost housing. And that was certainly the case in the last games that we had in Canada. And then Athens, World Athens, gets beaten. up all the time. I mean, the Greeks have this identification with the Olympics. They think it's a Greek concept, whereas it's not.

It's a universal concept. And that's another reason why you don't want to just be in Greece all the time. But while they're wild about the Olympics, they don't like all 28 sports. And I think Jules said they're abandoned softball. The Greeks don't play softball. They don't like it. But they had to have a stadium for that purpose. So it was not a big, huge, expensive one.

And they didn't maintain it. They didn't use it afterwards. But if you ask Greeks today, you've gotten loose in Athens and said, what about the games in 2004? I think almost unanimously they'd say they were great for Greece, where we were really, really happy about it. So there is something for everybody there. And I think what we shouldn't do in the midst,

of pointing out errors and God knows there are lots of errors and things that if you'd had to do it again, you'd have done differently. But let's not throw out the baby with the bathwater. The Olympics are really worth having for the betterment of humanity. Let's make it happen as well as we can and make sure that as many athletes in the world get a chance to be in that system. And this is one of the other great things about the Olympics is that if on the day you get it all right, you might be an Olympic champion. And that doesn't happen anywhere else. It's the largest peaceful gathering on the face of the planet. Let's not throw it away. Thank you, Richard Pound, for your closing statement. Jules, we're going to give you the last word in our debate today. Today's

China is no place for the Olympic Games. Let's hear your summing up. you. This debate has illuminated a significant chasm, and part of that chasm emerges because I've been largely relying on history and facts and evidence to form my arguments here today, whereas Mr. Pound is relying on lofty, indeed admirable, ideals, hypotheticals, and hopes. It could also possibly emerge from the fact that when I lived in Olympic cities, as I did, for instance, as a Fulbright Research Fellow in Rio de Janeiro before and during the 2016 summer games. I talked a lot to everyday people whose lives were upturned by the Olympics and who could never afford a ticket to the games. I spent time on the streets interacting with working

people, not the suites of the International Olympic Committee, where members of the executive board haul in $900 just in per diem. The Beijing Olympics are a mere symptom of a wider set of issues that plague the Olympic Games. Just look at what's unfolding in Tokyo, where more than 80% of the population in Japan does not want the games this summer. And yet the International Olympic Committee is nevertheless ramming ahead. And you can see that there are Olympic problems that are imported into each host city. It's worth slowing down and discussing these problems if we actually want to fix what's wrong with the Olympics. As I say, there's overspending, militarization of public space, gentrification and displacement, and greenwashing.

A key point that's often lost in the criticism of the International Olympic Committee's conspicuous tolerance for tyranny is that by hosting the Olympics, democracies become more authoritarian. The historical record is clear that staging the Olympics in places like Beijing does not help the cause of democracy and human rights. But neither does hosting the games in Los Angeles, Vancouver, Paris, or London. The International Olympic Committee knew in 2015, when it selected Beijing to host the 2022 Games, that despite promises about the 2008 Olympics

bringing human rights heyday to China, nothing of the sort happened. Hosting the 2008 Games was actually a catalyst for further human rights abuses. The IOC, unfortunately, oversees the most pervasive and perhaps least accountable sport infrastructures in the world. And opting to host the Olympics in Beijing is just the latest example of this. Yes, the dystopic repression in China should disqualify the country from hosting the Winter

Olympics in Beijing. But all Olympic hosts, including the United States, which is slated to host the 2028 summer games in Los Angeles, should receive similar scrutiny for how the Olympics can function in a way that both creates and distracts from important forms of injustice that very much deserve our collective attention. Thank you, Jules. And thank you, Richard. This has been a, just the debate I was hoping for, substantive, informed, really laying out the key arguments,

pro and con with a lot of civility and respect for each other's points of view. And that's just, again, putting yourself in service of our mission and mandate to further those types of conversations. So thank you both. on behalf of the Monk Debates community for coming on the program today. Thank you.

Thanks for having us. While that wraps up today's debate, I want to thank our participants, Jules, and Richard, they certainly gave us a lot to think about. If you have feedback or reflections on what you've just heard, please send us an email to podcast at monkdebates.com. That's MUNK DebateswithanS.com. Here's an email from Dave McDougall.

on the debate resolution we recently hosted, be it resolved, a one-state solution is the best hope for ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Dave writes, excellent debate. Many thanks and kudos to both debaters. I've come to realize how complex and historic the issue is. Still, it seems to me that a two-state solution simply delays healing and resolution. One state, learning and cooperating to live together, is the best long-term solution. It's harder, but better for all involved.

Hey, thanks for the feedback, Dave. We really appreciate it. The Monk Debates podcast is that special place for civil and substantive debate on the big issues of the day. To listen to more debates on everything from climate change to religion, to geopolitics, to the future of human progress, visit our website, monkdebates.com. Thank you for helping us bring back the art of public debate one conversation at a time. I'm your host and moderator, Rudyard Griffiths. The Monk Debates are produced by Antica Productions and supported by the Monk Foundation.

Rudyard Griffiths and Christina Campbell are the producers. Api Rahaja is the associate producer. The Monk Debate podcast is mixed by Kieran Lynch. The president of Antica Productions is Stuart Cox. Be sure to download and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And if you like us, feel free to give us a five-star rating. Thank you again for listening.