Every Olympic Games exhorts crowds and competitors alike to ‘keep politics out of sport’—before becoming gripped by the particular politics of that moment. With the Paris Olympics just around the corner, the build-up to the greatest show on earth provides a snapshot of the European mainstream’s mood right now—and it’s got nothing to do with sport.
Take the choice of U.S. rapper Snoop Dogg (Calvin Broadus Jr.) as one of the final torchbearers of the Olympic flame before Friday’s opening ceremony. Although an avid sports fan and qualified football coach, the convicted criminal and self-confessed pimp/drug dealer still seems an unlikely representative of Pierre de Coubertin’s ideals.
While Japanese gymnastics captain Shoko Miyata was sent home for smoking tobacco, Broadus’s career is riddled with drugs-related arrests. His selection shows the French establishment stretching for ever-greater diversity and pop culture relevance, at the expense of the excellence which the Olympics Games were founded to represent.
If Snoop Dogg’s previous support for Donald Trump is out of step with the European mainstream, his support for Palestine—not recognised as a state, unlike its Olympic team—puts him firmly in the camp of mainstream European bien pensant thinking. Indeed, both La France Insoumise (LFI) and the Palestinian Olympic Committee respectively have called for Israel’s team of 88 athletes to be ‘unwelcomed’ and banned from Paris games. While this is unlikely to help Palestine creep higher up the medal table, it sets the tone for an increasingly politicised Olympics.
Hostility to Israel will mean protests at Friday’s opening ceremony and outside every event where the Israeli team competes. It invites parallels with Munich 1972, where 11 Israeli athletes were murdered by Palestinian terrorists at the Olympics. Yonathan Arfi of the Representative Council of French Jewish Institutions (CRIF), said LFI deputy Thomas Portes had put “a target on the backs of Israeli athletes.”
Since 2022 the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has committed itself to “helping” athletes “become role models through the uplifting work they do to give back to their communities.” Such Olympians supplement their sports training with learning how to campaign on sustainability, community empowerment, mental health, and other issues beloved by NGOs—but with next to nothing in common with sporting excellence. To the universal goals of Citius, Altius, Fortius (Faster, Higher, Stronger), the IOC has added an activist manifesto.
As Friday’s opening ceremony on the banks of the Seine gets closer, expect more ideological oddness in the weeks ahead.
