Let the Russians play...sometimes
When Russian and Belarussian athletes should - and shouldn't - be allowed to compete.
Ever since Russia invaded Ukraine, there has been a heated debate about what to do with Russian (and Belarussian) athletes competing internationally. It flared up most recently at the Australian Open tennis tournament, where they were allowed to compete, but their national flags were banned from the stadium, reportedly leading to an awkward moment when an official tried to confiscate the red, white and blue flag of…Serbia.
Mind you, many of the most obnoxious pro-Russian, pro-Putin spectators at the tournament turned out to be Serbian, including Novak Djokovic’s father. This shouldn’t come as much of a surprise, as Serbia is one of the few (perhaps the only) European country where public opinion is largely on Russia’s side - much to the chagrin of Russian dissidents who’ve taken refuge in Belgrade.
And why is that? Some pro-Russian Serbs interviewed in this Deutsche Welle documentary are still angry about the NATO bombing of their country in 1999, but one guy mentions Austria being his country’s enemy.
Likely a reference to some unpleasantness which erupted in the region in 1914, when the Austro-Hungarian Empire declared war on Serbia, to which Russia responded by coming to Serbia’s defence, which in turn resulted in [TL;DR] deep-seated national hatreds which haven’t completely healed 109 years later.
As I’ve said before, some places have way too much history, especially in Europe.
As for Russian athletes, well, what do we do with them? Is it fair to hold individuals responsible for the actions of their dictatorial government? Or does allowing them to compete send the message that what their country is doing is no big deal and that its representatives shouldn’t face consequences?
My own position, as with so much else, is…it depends.
During the Apartheid era, South Africa was subject to a sporting boycott that prevented it from sending teams to international competitions like the Olympics. And it may have helped move the needle: I’ve long remembered reading from a white South African who said they could put up with economic and cultural boycotts, but losing out on top-tier cricket matches was a bridge too far.
The ban didn’t apply everywhere, though, and the dividing line seemed to be between sporting events in which people represented their country, and those in which they competed as individuals. That’s why Jody Scheckter could become Formula One World Champion in 19791 and Gary Player could compete on the PGA Tour.
That’s where I would draw the line for Russian athletes today. If you’re playing on an NHL team like Putin fanboy Alex Ovechkin, you are representing the team and the city in which it is located. If you are a Russian competing in, say, a tennis or golf tournament, you undoubtedly have fiercely nationalistic fans rooting for you, but if you win it’s your name given pride of place on the trophy, not Russia. And if you’re a Russian driving in Formula One, it’s a moot point anyway because you suck.
There’s some talk of allowing Russian athletes to compete at the 2024 Summer Olympics as “individuals,” however, and that’s where my tolerance has limits. This has actually been going on for the past few Olympiads, ever since Russia’s massive doping operations were uncovered, with their competitors being classified as “Olympic Athletes from Russia” and entering the stadium being under the Olympic flag.
Technically, they aren’t representatives of their country, wink wink. In practice, everyone still knows it’s the Russian Olympic team in all but name.
I’ve long expressed sympathy for Russian liberals and dissidents, who find themselves increasingly isolated and under threat of arrest at home and denounced abroad for not singlehandedly bringing down Putin themselves. Were I in that situation I’d like to think I’d fight back if I lived in Russia and would openly denounce the war if I were competing on a major stage abroad. Human nature and history suggest I would more likely keep my mouth shut.
It’s probably not fair if you’re a Russian competing in a sport which only gets noticed every four years - say, pole vaulting - instead of one which has a well-compensated professional tour. But when it comes down to acting as a symbol for the country and its government, that’s when the rest of the world has to say no.
Hiring Cathy Young as a regular columnist was a Drew-Brees-To-The-Saints signing for The Bulwark, and on Tuesday she had another banger, about people who were horribly wrong about COVID-19 taking thoroughly undeserved victory laps:
In recent months, the so-called “liberal media” have shown a willingness to concede that some aggressive interventions launched early in the pandemic, such as school closures and some lockdowns, were excessive; some commentators, such as Brown University professor Emily Oster in the Atlantic, have suggested an “amnesty” over mistakes made in the scramble to deal with an unknown and frightening illness. The response on the right has been to do an “I told you so!” victory dance over the concessions and gleefully cry that there will be no quarter for the guilty. The idea that National Institutes of Health chief immunologist Anthony Fauci must be punished for his role in inflicting upon America a supposed totalitarian nightmare seems to have particular currency; it has even been picked up by Twitter’s new “Chief Twit,” Elon Musk, although the degree of irony he intends is hard to discern:
My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 11, 2022
Meanwhile, one would look in vain for similar concessions or contrition on the right. No one is asking for forgiveness for the fine folks who confidently predicted in the spring of 2020 that COVID-19 would end up being no worse than an average flu season or that fatalities wouldn’t go up by much after the first 60 deaths by mid-March.
Or who peddled ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine (remember that?).
Or who celebrated vaccine refusers while brushing off their later deaths of COVID.
Or who contributed to the strong trend of more people in red states and counties dying of COVID-19 because of lower vaccination rates—a pattern that a September 2022 paper by three Yale scientists confirmed on the individual, Republican vs. Democrat, voter registration level. (Killing off one’s own political “tribe”: Now there’s a novel and compassionate strategy.)
Instead, the covidiot ecosystem on the right—and, to some extent, in “anti-woke” and “cultural dissident” circles that don’t always explicitly identify as right-wing—continues to flourish. Most recently, it’s been manifesting itself in the rather fanciful notion that people didn’t “suddenly” die of heart attacks and strokes before “the jab” came along.
I think Young is a bit too easy on “mainstream” media outlets and medical professionals, who badly damaged their credibility several times during the pandemic.
It took a long time for speculating about the origins of COVID-19 - specifically, whether it originated in the Wuhan infectious diseases lab - to not be considered evidence of paranoia and anti-Chinese bigotry.2 The low point might have come after the murder of George Floyd, when lockdown hawks decided you actually had not just a right but a duty to gather in large numbers to protest against police brutality and racism.
That said, most of the reversals and inconsistencies we’ve seen from the “medical establishment” are pretty much to be expected, because that’s literally how science works. New, potentially game-changing, information is discovered all the time, and must be taken into consideration. This was a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic during which everyone was learning on the fly.
Hopefully, they are learning from their inevitable mistakes. The same cannot necessarily be said for those who downplayed the pandemic at the outset and are now throwing stones without accounting for their own failures in judgment:
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