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Olympic athletes want politics out Competitors reject political efforts
Updated: Thursday June 21, 2001 12:15 PM WASHINGTON (AP) -- Former Olympic athletes urged Congress to reject political efforts to deny Beijing's bid for the 2008 Summer Olympics because of human rights abuses in China. Sen. Jesse Helms, R-North Carolina, and Rep. Tom Lantos, R-California, are sponsoring legislation discouraging U.S. delegates to the International Olympic Committee from voting for China's bid unless the nation releases political prisoners and institutes human rights reforms. On Wednesday, a handful of former Olympians endorsed the resolution of Sen. Patty Murray, D-Washington, to keep politics out of the Olympic selection process. "(Helms' legislation) shows too little respect for Olympism itself to be a promoter of human rights," said Nathaniel Mills, an Olympic speed skater in 1992, '94 and '98. Jack Brosius, a member of the 1972 canoe and kayak team, said Olympians couldn't care less about politics. "When we go into competition we have only one focus, that is doing the best we can," he said. "They don't care where the games are." U.S. Olympic Committee President Sandy Baldwin, in Washington for a luncheon marking the 105th anniversary of the first modern Olympics, said politics should take a back seat. "I think all of us directly involved in the Olympics believe the Olympic Games supersede politics," she said. It is athletes who suffer when politics get involved in the games, as they did in the U.S. boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics, said Linda Miller, a rowing team member in the 2000 Olympics. She said she saw the true Olympic ideal in Sydney when North Korea and South Korea marched together in the opening ceremonies. Lantos agreed that the Olympics are about sports, "but human rights are also central to the Olympic ideal." "The Olympic charter makes clear the Olympism includes respect for universal fundamental ethical principles, and it's clear that China does not show this respect and therefore does not deserve the games," he said. In 1993, a Lantos-sponsored resolution urging that China not be awarded the 2000 Olympics passed the House. None of the proposed resolutions would be binding on the four American IOC members. Beijing is competing with Toronto; Paris; Osaka, Japan; and Istanbul, Turkey, for the right to hold the 2008 Summer Olympics. The IOC will select the host July 13. "The Olympic Games is a competition between athletes, not between countries," said Rep. Jim Kolbe, R-Arizona, a House sponsor of Murray's legislation. "That is not to say we endorse the human rights record of China. We all have concerns about that record." But Kolbe and others argued the Olympics could do more to change China's human rights record than political meddling.
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