Pity the Chinese. Pity their vision of a glorious Olympics in 2008, a vision they’ve nurtured for years and now… Now they’ve got the curse of an Olympic flame that has to cross another 19 countires before it gets to Beijing. A journey that will be booby trapped at every opportunity. Today in Greece, where the flame was lit, it took half a dozen protestors to provide the TV images that ran round the world.
It won’t take any more, at each of the stops, to ensure that the grand ideals of the Olympic movement, the great Chinese coming out into the 21st century to take its rightful place, is tripped up, derailed, humiliated. When Kate Howie (the ex-minister for sport in the UK) gives her effective blessing to the protest, even the countries hosting the visit of the flame are compromised. Are you really going to crush a protest on behalf of the Chinese when there’s Tibet, Darfur and, of course, the unmentionable fear of a latent superpower?
Politics As Sport 