Oh ho ho – how predictable, the Olympic torch is run through London today as an opportunity for the Free Tibet Lobby to make their point, very kind of the Chinese to organise this fantastic anti-Chinese photo shoot. PR disaster – you bet, but entirely predictable – it’s one of those notable things that Chinese experts keep going on about the West’s need to learn more about Chinese culture. But the reverse applies equally. Who advised them to run the Olympic flame 31 miles through central London anyway?
The great thing is the ambiguous position adopted by the athletes/celebs who defend the Olympic spirit but disassociate themselves from the Chinese and their civil rights record. Easy. If they’d run the torch through London for the Nazi 1936 games, the story would have no doubt been the same. But then these sports people still seem to think that politics and sport are separate. Gordon Brown our great new Prime Minister is under no such illusion – but he is torn by a further political constraint that London hosts the Olympics in 2012. His solution was to divert the flame into Downing street but not actually touch it himself – how very Pontius Pilate.
The only people with any integrity are the Sugababes who pulled out of their headline slot at the end of the trail. Hold on, let’s have that again – the reason given is that one of them has a sore throat (Oh Yeah). So they didn’t even manage to make a decent political gesture out of the realisation they were about to be stuffed by giving their many teen fans the impression they were colluding with the “forces of oppression” in Tibet. That we have reached such simplistic state of affairs is a pity – what about Darfur and the rest of Africa where the Chinese are buying up natural resources, or their role in the Middle East, what about the global economy, what about the Chinese people themselves – the dilemma of a one-child policy that surely infringes their human rights, but protects the world from a population crisis that will make your pathetic attempt to be green look pain free.
The BBC of course plays a “neutral” hand – ha ha. The helicopter pictures show the flame at the centre of a circle of blue clad Chinese flame guardians, surrounded by day-glow yellow police, in turn surrounded by a further concentric circle of black clad police who rugby tackle Free Tibet protestors. But the headlines run like a top ten of disruption and the commentators lather themselves up into a burst of excitement every time another protestor upsets the phalanx of guards which hustle the flame through London.
The flame will make it to the end of the journey. But then it’s off to France and given that Sarkozy has already said he won’t be going to the Opening ceremony, who knows what further humiliation the Chinese are preparing themselves to endure…?
Politics As Sport 