Don't play politics with games

Aug 5 2008 By Karren Brady

THE whole country will be united in supporting us this weekend and, no, not Blues in the Championship, I mean our competitors in the Olympic Games.

Running, jumping and flinging things don't mean an awful lot to me unless they happen on a football field but the Olympics are different: they reach beyond sport and into every household.

Often you may wonder what anyone finds interesting in scrambling around on a mat or bashing a beach ball over a net although I must acknowledge that one man's pleasure can be another man's penance because, unbelievably, there are people who can't bear to watch Robbie Savage.

For couch potatoes and even those of us with the washing and ironing to do instead, every Olympics provides dramas, controversies and riveting entertainment. All of which means that someone somewhere wants to misuse the stage and turn it into a political event, protest or statement.

Whether the games should have been awarded to Beijing is immaterial now.

They begin on Saturday with a roster of events that has nothing to do with the Chinese treatment of Tibet, personal freedom or throat-lacerating pollution but with the cycling road race, individual sabre, judo, weightlifting and shooting.

As a curtain raiser, this list fails to grip anything beyond my sleep ducts, but there you go. The IOC might have been too easily persuaded that the Chinese would obey the rules that require free speech in and around the games yet I can't help thinking that there will be more of it in Beijing in the next fortnight than in the past sixty years.

That at least is a gust of fresh air, however temporary and no matter how officious and restrictive the security may become.

It must be reasoned, too, that it would be hypocritical to continue to fulfil our insatiable appetite for cheap Chinese goods while informing them that they don't match up to running the world's greatest sporting event.

Keeping politics out of sport is impossible. But the damage has to be limited. The Olympics overcame two boycotts and emerged stronger than ever. It has tackled racism, shamateurism and bigotry and largely been victorious.

It hasn't beaten drugs yet but it has a better chance than any other event.

And it will triumph in Beijing, even as it did by hindsight after the Munich massacre, because that is what it does.

We should be a little cautious in Britain, anyway.

By 2012 who knows what cause will lead to protests in London. It could be the Greens or asylum seekers, Muslims or