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0:07      KS: From the School of International Service at American University in Washington, this is Big World where we talk about something in the world that truly matters. Since the modern Olympic movement kicked off with the 1896 games in Athens, the Olympics have grown into a cultural behemoth, drawing the eyes of the world to a host City's efforts that typically include costs running into the billions of dollars. The games have endured through to World Wars and the more prosaic specters of corruption, corporatization, political boycotts, protests, and outright cheating, whether by bribery, doping, or a combination.

0:45      KS: And still every couple of years, billions of people around the world tune in to watch athletes attempt to transcend it all. We want to see that triumphant moment when someone reaches physical heights no one has previously. We still care about the Olympics, even if we don't always know why. But that's the public. Why would any nation want to invest the money and risk the negative consequences that can occur when the scrutiny of the world is directly on you? Today, cue the fanfare because we're talking about the Olympics and sports diplomacy. I'm Kay Summers and I'm joined by Robert Kelley. Rob is a professor in the School of International Service, and his research and interests lie at the intersection of culture and politics. He's an expert in new diplomacy studies that recognize the citizen as a legitimate global actor. Rob, thanks for joining me on Big World.

1:44      RK: It's great to be here.

1:45      KS: Rob, we're going to get fully into the Olympics in a sec, but first I want to make sure we all understand the terms that you're using in your research. You've written extensively about public diplomacy. So to start us off, can you briefly define both public diplomacy and sports diplomacy and explain their objectives?

2:07      RK: Sure. When we're talking about public diplomacy and how this relates, what we're talking about is a version of diplomacy, which involves the general public in some capacity. And this can happen in a number of different ways, but in the conventional sense, public diplomacy really intimates governments trying to influence publics, and that's it. It's governments and their one-way conversation with the public, and then the public responds and then they kind of do the thing which is aligned with a government's foreign policy goals.

2:44      RK: Now, in terms of sports diplomacy, sports diplomacy is just another version of a long list, a growing list of hyphenated diplomacies like cultural diplomacy and gastro diplomacy and hip hop diplomacy. There are so many different diplomacies out there now. Sports diplomacy has been going on for a little bit. It's really kind of come into view in the last 50 or 60 years, most notably when we had the famous ping-pong diplomacy episode in the early 1970s when relations between China and the rest of the world, specifically the United States and the West, were just reopening and ping-pong diplomacy was a major catalyst in that.

3:29      RK: But in that sense, you're kind of operating through the sporting event and through the athletes as the carriers of a message or a narrative or the exhibition of a relationship that is healing and of course, being a sporting event. It's happening in front of spectators. Everybody's watching.

3:54      KS: So Rob, for most people, the clearest example of sports diplomacy is likely the Olympic Games, and we had the opening ceremonies on Friday, July 26th, which is always a huge moment for the host country. I think probably in today's security environment. It's also a moment when the host country really kind of crosses their fingers and hopes for the best, hopes all their planning was the right planning and results in a favorable outcome. So this year we had a very unusual situation with the Paris games doing an opening ceremony that was held outside of a stadium, which already presented security challenges. And then there were some arson incidents in Paris earlier that day. So how do you think French officials addressed potential security concerns leading up to the event, and why would they try and do something that seems like it would be more challenging than the normal opening ceremony anyway?

4:51      RK: Yeah, great questions. The opening ceremonies have proven to be the stamp that the host city can place on their games from the outset. And so this is a great opportunity for the tone of the whole event to be set and for the host city to take center stage as it were, and show what it's about to do and make an enormous statement to the world, but not without incredible risk, as you just rightly pointed out. And there were some security threats and some security breaches in the run up to the ceremony that very day on the extensive transportation network in France. But it didn't prevent the games from getting underway and from the ceremony from going on and from the crowds making their way to the center of the city. 300,000 people attended, but they also had 40,000 strong security on site to make sure everything ran smoothly. So it was quite a day, it was a rainy day, but from most accounts, it was a great success. And so chalk one up for the organizers to make sure that that went on despite some of the potential pitfalls.

6:18      KS: And we've talked about sports diplomacy. We've talked about it from the perspective of the countries that host these big events and what it means for them in terms of the impression that they give to the world. But there's also the individual athletes who are the diplomats per se in these scenarios. And for every Olympics for decades, I know we've had cases where athletes compete for countries that are either not the country of their birth, maybe they are the country of a family member's birth, a country to which they perhaps had less of an obvious tie. Sometimes this creates a really good PR situation, and sometimes it blows up a little on the athlete.

6:55      KS: I know this time we have Joel Embiid who's a Cameroonian by birth, who's playing with the U.S basketball team. Two years ago, there was notably Eileen Gu who was a snowboarder, born and raised in San Francisco. One of her parents is Chinese, and she ended up snowboarding for China and making a really big impact in that entire culture for a bunch of girls who saw a role model in this sport that they had not seen before.

7:19      KS: So talk a little bit about the athletes as these diplomats and what it means when they attach themselves to countries that maybe people wouldn't expect them to.

7:28      RK: I think to start, I think it speaks volumes about the United States as a sports juggernaut, because if all the athletes that either attended university or trained in the United States competed under the banner of the United States in the games, the advantage would be overwhelmingly to the United States, and the Olympic delegation would just be enormous. I mean, there would just be no competing with the U.S. So I think that says a lot about the resources that the United States offers to world-class athletes to be able to come to this country and have just the elite coaching and facilities that they need in order to be world-class athletes.

8:16      RK: It follows that these athletes have a tie to the United States some closer than others that could justify aligning themselves with the United States in terms of their representation. But it also happens that many of these athletes are from other countries, and so they have a choice to make, right. I think it speaks to our highly integrated times when it comes to representation and citizenship that athletes can say, I have a claim to this country or that country as a citizen, so I'm going to compete.

9:00      RK: And it can be very ambiguous too. I mean, some athletes that have a little to zero connection to the country whom they are playing for, that also can happen too, because the country can make an offer that is a very frankly lucrative one for that athlete to compete on behalf of that country. And it also helps them stand out in a field of athletes that is otherwise highly dominated by American athletes. It's difficult to be a standout athlete in the United States when there are so many world-class athletes out of this country. So to be able to say, if you're Eileen Gu, and say, I'm not going to be one of many world-class Olympic snowboarders from the United States, I'm going to be part of a rising group of Olympic snowboarders from China that is not well known for its snowboarding tradition. I'm going to be that path breaker, then that is hugely advantageous to them.

10:07      KS: And then one more thing about the athletes themselves serving as the diplomats. I think there's very little that can strike people as quite so sad as athletes who are at the games under some sort of contested status or whose country is under some sort of sanction. This year we have the Russian and the Belarusian athletes who are competing under the Olympic banner. There have been variations on this in different games for different reasons. What I guess for these athletes in their home country, are their countries still supporting them? Are they getting into that spirit and saying, okay, this person is out there and they're doing this, for example, for Russia? Or is it a situation in which the country has kind of turned its back on these games because they've been sanctioned, and the athletes who really are out there are just out there on their own? What's that like for them?

11:00      RK: Yeah, this is where the games becomes intensely political. Because for one thing, the Olympic committee, the International Olympic Committee, the IOC is isolating and ostracizing a country for some sort of political act that it has made, that caused it to fall out of favor. And so in the case of Russia and Belarus, it has to deal with prosecuting the war in Ukraine, and in Belarus's case supporting Russia as a client state. And so both of those countries are paying the price in the form of being personas non grata at the Olympic Games. Now that said, these are two countries that have long traditions of sending very talented athletes, especially in gymnastics to the Olympics. So what do you do with those athletes, right? Because it would be a noticeable absence to have some of these high caliber athletes not in competition with the games, and cause it to cast a pall over the competition itself, right?

12:17      RK: So that's what the independent neutral athlete has been reserved for, is for bringing in these athletes. And the criteria that they have to meet in order to compete under the Olympic banner is a bit ambiguous. They have to somehow disavow themselves from the political activity of their home state, which as you can imagine, comes with a serious amount of risk. You can be incarcerated, jailed, targeted, exiled, like there are a lot of things that can come with it. Your family can be targeted. So what is an athlete to do, right? Part of the calculus that they have to examine very closely in process if they're going to go to the Olympics. But yes, there is a cadre of athletes this year, as in many of the past games competing under the Olympic flag, not affiliated with any state. They are in effect stateless for these games.

13:16      KS: So Rob, are there any specific examples that come to mind for you about when the Olympics has been able to serve as an important diplomatic bridge?

13:25      RK: There are lots of examples of this. And I'll say that as an event, what the Olympics represent and symbolize is probably the most visible and exposed form of soft power that a state can exercise. And we're talking about soft power, we're talking about power that is not including military power or power to coerce people into doing the thing that you want them to do. Soft power is really a means of being able to persuade and appeal and get people to kind of want what you want rather than to do what you want against your wishes. And so the Olympics is really symbolic of that. It tries to involve everything that a society has to put on offer for the whole world to see and do it in the most positive way.

14:22      RK: So there are a number of different ways that Olympics can accomplish this. But I think that is probably job number one of the Olympics, is to kind of make a statement to the world that this place is relevant and look at what we can do, look how we compete, look how our society runs. And it's a close up on that society because there's so much attention being drawn to that place when they run the Olympics.

14:48      KS: And what comes to mind immediately for me, and I just had to look it up to make sure I was getting anything resembling the dates correctly, when the North Korea and South Korea delegations of athletes symbolically march together in the opening ceremonies. It was a feel-good moment, it also seemed to signify something about what might be happening in the deeper relationship between the two countries. It doesn't appear to have panned out. But is that the kind of thing that falls under the heading of sports diplomacy?

15:25      RK: Yes, I think so. Because what these two nations have done is intentionally use the games as a staging area for telling the world a story about their relationship. And in that moment it was a story of unification. Even though the two countries are still very much at war and they are not unified. Sports diplomacy often provides a release valve for that, a pause for these relations and their politics and whatever they have going on that's causing the major dispute to just get put on hold. And we can compete in peace in the spirit of fair play with each other and also respect each other. So that's another way.

16:17      RK: I mean, that was very intentional. But if we're looking at examples here, there are so many unintentional examples too, when the Olympic Games is a staging area for something that was not scripted. And of course, one of the famous examples of this was the 1936 Berlin games when Jesse Owens, a Black American athlete, had great success in track and field events, and these Berlin games were being hosted by the Nazi regime. And Adolf Hitler was using this platform to demonstrate to the world how superior their society was. And of course, part of that superiority was the subjugation and the suppression and the marginalization of minorities. And of course, to have Jesse Owens come in and have such great success, was really not in the script for the organizers of those games.

17:10      KS: Right. And as you say, that was a very clear example of a country, and at that time it was Nazi, Germany trying to shine a light on this is us, this is what we can do. And having it kind of blow up rather magnificently in their faces when it didn't quite go according to script.

17:29      RK: Yeah.

17:29      KS: I'm wondering in the times of examples where the Olympics has managed to bring people together and to establish something, even if only for a moment of a pause, maybe conversely, when has the Olympics not brought nations together, but rather shown a spotlight on simmering political disputes and conflicts?

17:53      RK: Yeah, I think we're seeing that unfolding in the last 10 or 15 years of Olympic events.

18:00      RK: What has happened in the staging of the games is we've seen a pivot towards awarding the games to countries that have not traditionally held world-class sporting events. Many of them have been situated in Asia. We've seen hosting in China, we've seen it in Korea, and we've seen it in Russia, and we've seen it in Brazil. And so they don't often get to host games of this magnitude. And against the backdrop of where we are geopolitically, all of those hosting opportunities were significant because of what is going on in the wider world. When the games were held in Russia in 2014, that was not long after Russia had invaded Crimea. And so you had the Sochi Games just hundreds of miles away from the front lines of that battle. And of course, as a result, several nations in protest boycotted those games. We saw the same thing but for different reasons in 2022 with the most recent Beijing winter games when several western nations chose to exercise the diplomatic boycott and they didn't come to the games because of China's human rights policy.

19:31      RK: And also China was using these games more intentionally to demonstrate its alignment with non-Western countries and to really push its agenda of creating an alternative world order, one that would present nations who felt like they had been jilted or abused by the prevailing liberal international world order an opportunity to tilt towards China. And so China in the run-up to those games used it as an opportunity to meet with Vladimir Putin and also show the rest of the world that it was not trying to win over the West with those games. It was really trying to win over South Asia and Central Asia and Africa and South America with games like those.

20:32      KS: Rob Kelly, it's time to take five. You, our esteemed guest, get to order and reorder the world to your liking. With Paris as the backdrop for this conversation, tell me, what are five examples of Olympic Games that have been diplomatically successful and why?

20:48      RK: I love this question and there are so many choices. I'm going to count it down in dramatic fashion from my fifth to my first, if you don't mind. So my number five choice is a real mystery games. It's from 1948. These are the winter games of St. Moritz in Switzerland. And the reason why I'm choosing this one is because it was the first games to be staged after the second World War and incredibly so. I just think it's a major achievement that there were any games at all. There were 700 athletes. Compare that to the Paris Games. They have over 10,000 athletes in these games. Somehow they managed to pull it off in 1948. After that, my fourth is Beijing in 2022. Maybe there's kind of a recency bias here, but I do think that Beijing improved on their 2008 games in a sense that they just disavowed themselves of any idea of swaying the West towards China.

21:50      RK: They were really thinking more about just bringing the non-aligned countries, if you can call them that, of the world to their side. Again, Africa, Central Asia, South Asia, East Asia and South America, trying to just win them over with games like these. So it was really a platform for an alternative to the prevailing western liberal international order. For third place, I have kind of a tie here. I have the Seoul Games of 1988, this is in Korea, and the Barcelona Games of 1992 in Spain. And in both cases, I'll say they were huge successes because they were arrivals, let's put it that way, of two places that had just emerged from highly repressive eras in their respective countries. And the result was just a blossoming of two societies. Second place, the Tokyo Games of 1964, similar to the Seoul Games and the Barcelona Games in the sense that you have a rebirth of a place that had seen a lot of trauma.

23:05      RK: And of course, Tokyo had been flattened in the Second World War, but by 1964 they were back and they were hosting a games and they had returned to show the world what the new Japanese society looked like. It was also the beginning of a new political era for the games when you saw the use of boycotts in bans. 1964 was the first year that South Africa was banned from the games. That ban extended until 1988 for the Apartheid regime. And then we also saw that China had opted not to participate in these games because Taiwan had been recognized. So we still had no Chinese participation. So there were a lot of politics swirling around these games, and it was heralding an era of politics in the games.

23:55      RK: And then the last one of course is my favorite games, the Los Angeles Games of 1984. That was not joined by the Soviet Union. That was a boycott that I would think did not quite pan out in the way that they had hoped that they could get many other countries to their side. So it was a triumph in the sense that the games were able to go on despite the politics of the time, and it also spawned a number of star athletes. The commercialism and the athleticism were kind of in balance at that point, but it was regarded as one of the first highly commercial games. I'd say it was the maturity of the games as a major world event combined with world-class athleticism and a high level of participation despite the politics. So that's my number one.

24:51      KS: I have a big grin on my face. I was so happy when you said '84 in Los Angeles. My sister had a 1984 Olympics beach towel I still remember, and I do remember watching Carl Lewis. So yeah, that one always is top of the list for me. Thank you so much.

25:10      KS: According to the International Olympic Committee's Olympic Charter, the goal of Olympism, which I did not even know was a word, and the modern Olympic movement is to "place sport at the service of the harmonious development of humankind with a view to promoting a peaceful society concerned with the preservation of human dignity". However, we often have seen that the Olympics can be rife with human rights abuses, especially as part of the massive construction projects that typify the run-up to any modern Olympic Games. There are tons of examples, but for just kind of spectacle, I always think of the awesome looking Bird's Nest stadium in Beijing that was built for the 2008 summer games as a great example of a truly massive project constructed just for a games. So you have these projects, some of which are stunning to look at on one hand and on the other you have examples of migrant labor abuses and deaths, the arrest of journalists, and even mass displacement. So how do these abuses in whatever city is hosting the games, how do these jab with the objectives of sports diplomacy and sort of the stated goal of the games?

26:28      RK: Yeah, it's a moral and ethical quandary, isn't it? And it really shines a light on these international federations and organizations, which really stage... They're really the ones who decide where the games go. The International Olympic Committee, of course, is a world body and they have all the power, but it's also pretty clear that many of these world bodies like IOC or FIFA can be influenced.

27:00      RK: ... influenced, and that's part of what happens in the run-up to the decision-making of who's going to host these games is it's a game of influence. What is it that these candidate cities and countries bring to the table? And is there anything outside of the view of the general public when these choices are being made that might tilt the decision one way or another? So it's pretty clear that a lot of horse-trading is going on behind the scenes when it comes to when these games and where they take place. And it's a major financial commitment regardless of what kind of political system is running the country. When they put their chips on the table, they really want to see this thing pan out. But everyone's reasons are a little bit different depending on who is hosting and why. They vary a little bit, but they're willing to go to great lengths to get it done.

28:02      RK: There were major questions. Even a country like Japan, which is considered very much a part of the mainstream international system, they were supposed to stage their games in 2020, their summer games in Tokyo, and then COVID comes along. And the question hanging over those games became, are they really going to still do this? Yes. There is the human rights aspect of who's putting the games together, but now we're talking about the athletes and all the spectators as well, and everybody is at risk. Are we still going to do this? And ultimately, it was decided they did need to do it, and they did do it in a place that had been very conservative about the treatment of COVID. But a lot of this has to do with the fact that massive amounts of investment had been poured into those games and investors wanted to have a return on that.

28:54      KS: Rob, again, going back to how we laid this out, that these are, the staging of these massive events, especially the Olympics are a country's attempt to say, "This is us, this is what we can do." And to some extent, control the narrative. And as you said, that's a lot easier in an authoritarian society, but regardless of that, you invite in a bunch of athletes from hundreds of countries and they have their own ideas about what the message is that needs to be sent. And I promise this is the last time that I will quote from the Olympic charter, but rule 50 of the Olympic charter reads, "Every kind of demonstration or propaganda, whether political, religious or racial in the Olympic areas is forbidden." So that's pretty clear, but we know that's not reality. How have the Olympics been used as a platform for protest in the past, and why is this not allowed today?

29:52      RK: Yeah, the Olympics really wants to have it both ways, don't they? Because on the one hand, they're really demanding that participants in the games subscribe to an idea that nations should be at peace, that they should be embracing peace. And if you're not embracing peace, if you're doing something in the world that is disruptive and highly objectionable, then you have no place at the Olympics. And right now, these games, as it was the case in the last games in Beijing, Russia and Belarus are going to be present under the Olympic banner, not under their own national flags and very ambiguously the athletes have to have demonstrated some kind of distance from whatever it is that their sponsoring countries are doing, whatever their home countries are doing in the world that have caused such disruption. So the Olympics wants to have that, but at the same time, they want the athletes to come to the games and set all politics aside and just compete.

30:52      RK: Compete in the moment, and in the event that they're competing in. The games tries to create, what they've learned over the years is kind of after the fact, there was the famous protest in 1968 at the Mexico City Games of two American black athletes on the metal podium holding up their fist, clenched fist in alignment with black power, and they were stripped of their medals. As time has gone on, the Olympic Committee has tried to create spaces for peaceful protest, but these spaces tend to be far away from the epicenters of where the events are, the Olympic Village, it's just, "Okay, you can have your space, but it's not to be caught on camera. It's certainly not going to be part of the venue. It's not going to be happening in the village. We just don't want this to be causing disruption."

31:51      RK: So it's just over and over the games tries very hard to, especially the hosts, they want to be welcoming, and in many cases, they are suspending some of their standard social norms to make this possible for athletes that come from other parts of the world, and yet they can't be ready for everything. They want to be welcoming, but they also need to have a safe games. They want to be accepting and tolerant, but it's also happening in a particular context. And so this is the games' attempt to try to, as I said before, have it all. They want to be able to subscribe to liberal international values where they allow the press access and they provide spaces for dissent and protest, but not at the cost of undermining the quality of the games and the value of the games.

32:53      KS: Last question, Rob, do you still watch the Olympics?

32:56      RK: Oh my gosh, yes. I watch them religiously, yeah. I'd like to think that I came of age during a golden era of the Olympics, that we've seen different eras of the Olympics, but when I came of age, there was just... There weren't that many television stations, you watch the Olympics, you cheered for your athletes, and the commercialism wasn't as rampant as it is now, and the politics were a bit simpler, even if they weren't better. But there was definitely a certain type of allure in magic about the games in the latter half of the 20th century.

33:32      KS: Rob Kelly, thank you for joining Big World and talking about the Olympics and the soft power of sports diplomacy. It's been a pleasure to speak with you.

33:41      RK: You're very welcome.

33:43      KS: Big World is a production of the School of International Service at American University. Our podcast is available on our website, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Good ratings or reviews have one thing in common with ice cream, no one can ever really have too much. Our theme music is, It was just cold by Andrew Codeman. Until next time.