The biennial multisport gathering that is the Olympic and Paralympic games, both summer and winter, is for many a powerful reminder of the complexities and intensities of sport as both spectacle and politics. They can be events that bring great pleasure and enjoyment to audiences. For many, they can encourage previously unknown levels of expertise about curling, street skating, boccia, luge, three day eventing, or the classification systems for disabled athletes. For some, they become real learning opportunities: for example, realising that it is because of the continuation of France’s empire that the 2024 Paris games’ surfing took place in Tahiti, in a time zone ten hours after the host city.
For many others, these mega-events are periods of dislocation and alienation as their cities are taken over by security forces, as development plans demolish residential areas, and as enhanced policing levels target and cleanse cities of street life and homeless communities. These factors, as well as environmental damage – now more obvious in the winter than summer games – and burgeoning costs have led to a growing rate of public rejection of Olympic bids since Denver said thanks but no thanks to the 1976 (winter) games.
The public profiles of sporting mega-events make them a valuable forum for pursuing social justice and other struggles. The Olympic games in particular have been a site of heightened action, including calls for a range of sanctions including athlete boycotts, suspensions of membership, and expulsion: in 2024 alone, there have been challenges to the status of Russia, Belorussia, and Israel related to wars in Ukraine and Gaza. Making sense of these calls means unpicking the meaning and character of the boycott as a tactic and as a practice.
Even though the word is a relatively recent addition to the English language – emerging from the Irish independence struggle in the 1880s – the boycott as a social movement and solidarity tactic is long-standing. Often used in the interests of social justice (as in County Mayo in the 1880s) it was a feature of the campaign for the abolition of slavery (the late 18th century sugar boycott in England), and perhaps most famously in the USA’s civil rights movement (the 1955-56 Montgomery Bus Boycott).
Its use as a tool of statecraft is more recent, only becoming a coordinated coercive instrument of international politics with the League of Nations’ efforts in the 1930s. Historical discussions of Olympic boycotts tend to be dominated by such state-led efforts, especially the USA and its allies’ efforts to keep their athletes away from the Moscow summer games in 1980, and the Soviet bloc withdrawal from the 1984 Los Angeles summer games. The US-led boycott of the Moscow games was a state driven response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. While the Soviet-led withdrawal from the 1984 games is often presented as ‘tit-for-tat’, there are also reasonable grounds to accept their claims of security fears in the context of heightened, Reagan-led Cold War anti-Soviet rhetoric.
A distinction between the boycott as an instrument of statecraft and of social movement solidarity can help us distinguish these 1980 and 1984 Olympic withdrawals (and the more recent actions against Russia and Belorussia) from many other social movement-led Olympic boycott actions.
These social movement-led actions include the withdrawal of 29 national teams from the 1976 Montreal summer games in support of the global campaign for the isolation of apartheid South Africa, the efforts in 1936 to boycott the Berlin games over the status of Jewish athletes, and the current efforts to isolate Israel both at the Olympics and in football in support of the Palestinian civil society-led Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) campaign launched in 2005.
One of the issues in distinguishing between the boycott as statecraft and the boycott as social movement solidarity is the arcane rules and closed door decision-making of those private clubs that are sports international governing bodies. Occasionally those bodies act in ways that are beyond the governance of sport in a narrow sense, such as the International Olympic Committee (IOC) decision to form the Refugee Olympic Team for the 2016 summer games, or its decision in time for the 2024 summer games to work with the Afghan National Olympic Committee in exile and bar Taliban officials from involvement.
Another issue is that discussions around sports boycotts seldom consider the different organisational and strategic features of boycotts that can determine their significance. For states, if not for athletes, expressing and responding to political disagreement around events such as the Olympics remains relatively low cost Campaigners’ calls for non-participation in the 2022 Beijing games over Uyghur human rights resulted in some state delegations being downgraded from senior government representatives to lower ranked diplomats. Similarly, calls for a boycott of Sochi in 2014 over Russia’s repressive LGBTQ legislation saw the USA include high profile gay and lesbian retired athletes in its official delegation. Whereas the civil society call for a boycott of Beijing was in solidarity with Uyghur community campaigns globally, the call for a boycott of Sochi had no grounding in Russian LGBTQ activist groups. In both cases there was little infrastructure in place to give the demand any likelihood of going far.
In contrast, the withdrawal by mainly African teams on the eve of the 1976 Montreal games was in solidarity with calls from South Africa’s liberation movements and the global anti-apartheid campaign. It was also a response to the persistence of the New Zealand Rugby Football Union in maintaining links with apartheid South Africa. The withdrawal of those 29 teams is significant for three principal reasons.
First, it blindsided the organisers and the IOC, who had the day before resolved the long running issue of Chinese participation, securing a compromise that sees both Taiwan and the People’s Republic now participating, although neither did in 1976. Second, its focus was a non-Olympic sport, rugby union, broadening the terms of the Olympic-linked sports boycott campaign, and producing significant changes in Commonwealth diplomacy with the 1977 Gleneagles Agreement. Third, it was an action in response to calls from anti-apartheid groups within South Africa, including the South African Council of Sport (SACOS), recognised by the IOC as South Africa’s (non-racial) National Olympic Committee in waiting. It is this third factor that puts the 1976 withdrawal apart from other Olympic boycotts, and grants concurrent Paralympic anti-apartheid activism its weight.
The place of sport in the long-running international campaign to isolate apartheid South Africa tells us much about solidarity campaigns to change state policy, and about the place of cultural practices in those campaigns. The 1976 sports boycott was in support of calls from within South Africa. It was part of a multi-stranded campaign to isolate the apartheid regime that had been building international coherence from the late 1950s. Crucially, however, although it was deeply felt and stimulated powerful emotional effects within South Africa, its direct contribution to the end of the apartheid state was probably quite minimal. Its indirect contribution however, in weakening moral resolve in a sport-loving white community, was arguably quite significant.
The literature exploring cultural (including sporting) sanctions, embargoes and boycotts shows that they are effective only as part of a wide package of isolating measures and are a slow impact tactic. Any efforts to assess their effectiveness must consider access to alternatives, and the fact that their direct impact tends to be on national psychological well-being. The anti-apartheid campaign suggests that sports boycotts gain legitimacy and therefore solidarity and support when they align with an indigenous, liberation movement-linked, call. The South Africa evidence also suggests the importance of alternative representative sports bodies, such as SACOS.
Unpacking these sporting and other cultural boycott calls is relevant in current times because it can help us to understand, for instance, how in the case of Sochi and the LGBTQ-rights linked boycott call, it was the call that mattered as an expression of opposition to Russian government policy, not the likelihood of a boycott occurring. There is some indication that this call also raised awareness about the risks facing LGBTQ athletes, and contributed to subsequent amendments to the IOC’s Olympic Charter.
Specific attention to the South African case is especially relevant because of the growing awareness of and engagement with the Palestinian BDS campaign. This campaign, led by civil society organisations, is explicitly modelled on its South African predecessor. Both of these campaigns have invoked boycotts and other forms of sanction in a manner that differentiates them from the state-based coercive policy instruments seen in the 1980 and 1984 USA and Soviet-led Olympic withdrawals, or those imposed selectively on leading figures in Zimbabwe, Syria, Russia, Iran, and elsewhere. Our failure to distinguish those differences means we fail to adequately make sense of key aspects of the international politics and potential for transnational solidarity within these sporting mega-events.
Feature image: Boycott Beijing 2008 Olympics protest in France [edited photograph]. By Prakhar Ambar, via Wikicommons.
