King Kaufman's Sports Daily

With a year to go before the Beijing Olympics, activists say China hasn't kept the promises it made to get them.

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Aug. 9, 2007 | China held a big pre-Opening Ceremonies ceremony in Tiananmen Square Wednesday to celebrate the Beijing Olympics being one year away.

Various activists and politicians have been marking the date this week in a slightly different way, hammering China for failing to live up to the promises it made on human rights, press freedom, the environment and other issues in its 2001 bid to land the '08 Games.

Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., introduced a nonbinding resolution to Congress over the weekend asking President Bush to "take immediate action to boycott the Summer Olympic Games of 2008 in Beijing" over China's support for the Sudanese government and other human rights offenses.

I'd bet $100 on Bush converting to Buddhism and switching to the Green Party while coming out as gay before I'd bet a nickel on the U.S. boycotting an Olympic Games in the world's biggest market, but how big a role can the Olympics -- a huge sporting event but a mere sporting event -- have in pushing a giant on the world stage into doing things it doesn't want to do?

"We believe the Games are going to move ahead the agenda of the social and human rights as far as possible," International Olympic Committee president Jacques Rogge told Reuters Monday. "The Games are going to be a force for good. But the Games are not a panacea."

"I think he's right, they can't be a panacea," says Bill Mallon, co-founder of the International Society of Olympic Historians and author or co-author of several books on Olympic history. "The way they work as a force for good is something that Jim McKay, the old ABC sportscaster, said years ago: It's the largest peacetime gathering of humanity in the history of the world. There's no other time you bring people from 200 countries together peacefully like that."

But while peacefully bringing the nations of the world together can be a good thing in all sorts of ways, it doesn't necessarily mean much is going to change for the host city or country. Still, the Olympics have been known to make their weight felt.

"The preliminary one that got people going was in the '60s when the IOC convinced West and East Germany to enter a combined team," says Olympic historian David Wallechinsky. "But the real one was 1988, where tremendous pressure was put on the South Korean military dictatorship in the years leading up to the '88 Games. You know, 'We might take the Games away from you.'

"Nobody said that in public, but you know, 'Things could go very badly for you.' So they did, in fact, in an amazing event, the dictatorship handed over power, held free elections, and South Korea's been a democracy ever since."

Next page: Did the IOC use Seoul as an excuse to award the games to China?