The ‘No Sochi’ Pledge

September 5, 2013 at 8:04 pm | Posted in Abuse of Office, Enemies of Freedom, Fairness | Leave a comment
Tags: fair and open competition, gay bashing, gay rights, homophobia, Kathy Lally, Olympics, Philip Kennicott, Russia, Sochi, sports, Washington Post, Will Englund, Winter Olympics

Ice hockey game between the Canadian and Swedish teams during the 1928 Winter Olympics in St. Moritz. Bundesarchiv, Bild 102-05472 / CC-BY-SA

There is a justified uproar about the choice of Sochi as the site of the 2014 Winter Olympics.  Sochi is under Russian law, which is hysterically fearful of homosexuality, as if it were contagious.  Homosexuals are widely persecuted in Russia, and of course the police do not protect them.  See here, here, and here.

It is unlikely that any athlete who is known to be gay or lesbian will be allowed to compete, so the competition will not be free and open.  The winners will not necessarily be the best athletes.  They will  merely be the best among those who were allowed to compete.

Even if an athlete’s homosexuality were not publicaly known, if they went to Sochi they would be vulnerable to being ejected if their mental configuration were discovered while they were there, and would be likely to suffer physical abuse as well as mistreatment by any officials they encountered, for example, in the airport.

The same applies to spectators, and to the judges at the events.

Since the Sochi Olympics cannot be fair to the pool of athletes, nor to the pool of potential spectators, many urge a boycott.

Any boycotting should include the advertisers, who pay enormous sums to advertise during broadcasts of the Games, and should also include the broadcasters themselves.  Hence the following pledge:

I pledge
– to not go to Sochi to watch the Winter Olympics of 2014;
– to not watch any part of the Winter Olympics of 2014 on television or on the internet, nor to acquire videos of it;
– to avoid the products and services of any entity that advertises at the 2014 Winter Olympics, or that broadcasts the contests there.  To do so, I will consult a list of the advertisers and broadcasters that will have been compiled by human rights organizations.

If you wish to make this pledge, please leave a comment to that effect.

Since comments to this blog can be submitted only by Word Press bloggers, please encourage human rights organizations world wide to co-sponsor this pledge, and to host it on their own web sites.

Olympic Rings without “rims” (gaps between the rings), as used, eg. in the logos of the 2008 and 2016 Olympics. The colour scheme applied here pertains to the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. The original design was by Pierre de Coubertin (1863-1937). This image is due to O Alexander, 4 January 2011.

 

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