The majority of countries will not join the international boycott of the Beijing Games.
A majority of the governments of the 90 countries participated in 2022’s Beijing winter Olympics. Unfortunately, they haven’t decided to support a diplomatic boycott at this year’s Games, International Olympic Committee (IOC) President Thomas Bach said.
The United States, Britain, and Australia are among the nations that have recently announced a formal boycott of February. 4- 20 Beijing Games over China’s human rights record, an action which China rejected as “political posture.”
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The European Union and France have been seeking a united EU response. Still, the bloc is divided over whether it should join the diplomatic boycott or not, concerned with Chinese reprisals that could hurt trade.
“There are countries such as that of the United States, Britain, and Australia that made this decision,” Bach told German radio station ZDF late on Tuesday.
“Several other nations, not just several, when we assume that the Games will have at least 90 National Olympic Committees (NOC) that will be present at the Games There are likely to be more than 70 or greater than NOCs whose governments haven’t issued such declarations.”
“But the fact is that they have something in common, and that’s that they are all supportive of the Olympic team … to ensure that their athletes can fulfill their Olympic goals,” Bach said.
Rights groups have long criticized the IOC for granting this year’s Games to China for the second time after the human rights violations in Olympic Games in 2008. However, Beijing summer Olympics were not improved as per the group.
This week Tibetan pupils tied themselves onto the Olympic rings at the Olympic committee’s Swiss Headquarters in Lausanne and demanded the international Games boycott.
In October, similar protests occurred in the Beijing Games torch-lighting ceremony in Greece’s ancient Olympia and Athens.
“What occurred between those two years isn’t in our realm of influence,” said Bach, who was a German lawyer who took home the gold medal in fencing in the 1976 Olympics.
“You are not able to put the blame on the IOC and hold it accountable for something that a generation two of politicians could not do well in.”
“We are the ones responsible for this year’s Olympic Games,” Bach stated. “Expectations about how the Games will alter the political system of a nation are overstated.”
She is a freelance blogger, writer, and speaker, and writes for various entertainment magazines.