After the 1956 Olympic Games in Melbourne 61 athletes and officials defected. Heroes, every one of them, in an era when switching from east to west – or vice versa – made the humans themselves prized trophies, coveted propaganda wins in the endless Cold War dick-measuring contest. Following last month’s Commonwealth Games on Australia’s Gold Coast it has been revealed that around 200 athletes and officials have outstayed their visas and are now seeking asylum. (Another 50 remain in the country illegally.) It is not called defecting today, you’ll note, even if it is from the sort of places that first world countries like Australia love to define themselves against.
Maybe defecting sounds too noble, too morally rooted, too hard to disparage. “Asylum seeking” is preferred, coming pre-loaded with all of the grim associations politicians have foisted on the term in the past couple of decades of international migration and refugee crises. It is a quick skip from “asylum seeking” to “grasping”, and oh look! Australia’s home affairs minister, Peter Dutton, has already described the athletes seeking protection as “freeloaders”. Let’s see that in action. “Australians hate being taken for a ride by freeloaders,” declared Dutton. That was not the official slogan for the Games, incidentally. For whatever reason they went with “Share the dream”.
As usual the first lesson here is never to believe what a country tells you about itself during a sporting mega-event. It is almost always a terrible – and terribly lucrative – lie. It is much more instructive to look at all the branding and all the soft-power statecraft and all the backpatting and literally believe the opposite. (London 2012 being a case in point. The message of that Games was “We’re a united nation with only a wry and well-adjusted sense of nostalgia”. A few years later all that can be said is “LOL are we?!”)
We are about to go through something similar with Russia for the World Cup, which is already explaining how inclusive it is. Indeed the Kremlin is currently pushing the idea that the delay in renewing the Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich’s visa reminds us that while Russia may be a soft touch, the UK is anything but. According to a Putin spokesman, Russian businesses in the UK often encounter “unfriendly and unscrupulous actions”. We can only apologise. It does sound like a pattern of unreasonable behaviour – and the Kremlin is thanked for the lesson in international warmth. I guess none of us really understands diplomatic tenderness until we come home to the welcoming smell of novichok on our doorknob.
Still, let us not detract from Russia’s Fifa-mandated embrace of gay rights. “You can kiss all you like,” claims the tenuously woke Russian World Cup ambassador Alexei Smertin, “and hug one another, within the bounds of normal reason.” Course you can – just for the duration of the tournament, though.
Speaking to the Independent this week, the head of the Russian LGBT sport federation puts things in perspective. “By emphasising the safety of foreign LGBT fans, authorities have managed to present homosexuality as something foreign, un-Russian,” Alexander Agapov said. “Clearly they will do everything to make sure the World Cup passes trouble-free but when it does, the discrimination, the homophobia and the laws will remain.” Or, as the State Duma deputy, Vitaly Milonov, had it: “We have never persecuted people on account of their satanic sexual perversions.”
Tell you who has, though – 69% of Commonwealth countries whose athletes were competing at the Gold Coast Games, some of whose athletes are now seeking asylum. Weirdly, many of the athletes on whose back the Games was built have a dream that does not involve them being criminalised for their sexuality. And yet, we surely knew they were there at the Games all along. Tom Daley, for one, made a point of drawing attention to the persecution and oppression of gay people in 37 out of 53 countries represented by his fellow competitors.
Alas, the pose of inclusivity is akin to Cinderella’s night at the ball. At the stroke of midnight on the final day of any games, it vanishes. Whatever nonsense is spoken at the time, there is no “halo effect” to these multibillion-dollar events if barely a month later athletes seeking protection via legal channels are described as “freeloaders” by a government.
Politicians love to piggyback on sport – indeed, it would be interesting to learn how many of them “freeloaded” at the Commonwealth Games, although there is always another name for it when you are at the top of the pile and not the bottom. Representing the proud government, perhaps. But if you want to leech athletes’ success to burnish you somehow as a host nation, then why be surprised when they take you at your word? Maybe countries should not bid for events if they cannot handle people believing the marketing.
They should certainly display less of a fundamental misunderstanding about sport. Sport has long been a means of escape in more ways than one. Countless great athletes have explained the chance their talent gave them to get away from the worlds into which they were born. For many it is an intrinsic part of the dream – the social mobility, the path away from the streets, the ticket out. This sense of sport as a transformational journey is almost the dominant mode of communication for modern broadcasters, whose montages would be lost without it. This person started off training on a dirt track. This person lived eight to a room. This person could be imprisoned and tortured for being gay. Wait – what do you mean they want to share our dream?