‘Gold medals are being given priority over people’s lives’If athletes make up one half of the profit-extracting machine of the Olympics, the places that host them make up the other. And if corruption were an Olympic category, Daniel Drezner writes in The Washington Post, “only FIFA could challenge the I.O.C. “While the Olympics tend to bring out the very best in athletes, they also tend to bring out the very worst in host cities,” the political scientist Jules Boykoff told Teen Vogue. refuses to stand in solidarity with those being denied their universal human rights.”The pandemic has thrown another garish light on the Olympics’ fraught humanitarian record. “Gold medals are being given priority over people’s lives,” Misako Ichimura, the leader of Japan’s anti-Olympics movement, warned in April.

Source: International New York Times July 29, 2021 21:56 UTC