Politics and Olympic Games can mix, at least just a little

FRIDAY MORNING EDITORIAL — It’s hard to decide. sometimes, whether the Olympics really should be separate and apart from politics. It’s certain, though, that they are not.

Whether it be the massacre at the 1972 Munich Summer Games, or these 2014 Sochi Winter Games in which gay rights have been an issue throughout, to Thursday’s insistence by a Ukrainian skier that the International Olympics Committee had prevented her from wearing a black armband in competition, there’s no doubt that the Olympics and politics are irrevocably tied.

There was talk before these Games about boycotts, as there have been before many Olympics of the past. Sometimes, boycotts have actually been carried out; mostly they’re just threats.

Yesterday, Bogdana Matsotska said she was pulling out of skiing events at the Games because the IOC refused to let her wear a black armband in honour of those being killed in the Ukraine’s internal strife.

The day she said that, several dozen people were shot to death by government snipers during the ongoing riots in Kiev.

At about the same time, the Russian female punk band Pussy Riot was in trouble again, this time being beaten with horsewhips by Russian police for staging a small street protest against the government.

Matsotska, the skier, said she couldn’t in good conscience compete on behalf of the Ukrainian government led by Viktor Yanukovych, neither would she compete in an event at which she was refused the symbolic gesture of wearing a black armband to communicate her grief.

The IOC, however, says it has not banned the wearing of black armbands, though its policy is to avoid anything akin to a political statement. The media, of course, had already taken Yanukovych at her word, and was widely reporting the ban as fact.

There are many conflicting statements about whether the ban was real, imagined or fabricated, but the controversy, along with the latest Pussy Riot incident, emphasizes the all-too-obvious fact of life that the Olympics and politics simply can’t be separated.

Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing is totally a matter of individual preference. Surely, though, there’s a middle ground. Extreme forms of protest that disrupt the Games should be discouraged, but something as simple as an armband or even a street-dance protest doesn’t threaten the purity of sport.