As with all bureaucracies of its size and aloof detachment, the International Olympic Committee is blithely indifferent to the very principles it claims to uphold. Its charter proclaims that ‘any form of discrimination with regard to a country or a person on grounds of race, religion, politics, gender or otherwise is incompatible with belonging to the Olympic Movement’.
It was precisely that discrimination – of country, race, religion, and politics – that inspired the worst atrocity the Olympic Games has ever seen. During the 1972 games in Munich, the Black September terrorist group took eleven members of the Israeli Olympic team hostage and killed them.
Over the last few months there has been a concerted attempt to lobby the IOC to mark the forty year anniversary of that attack by observing a minute’s silence at the opening ceremony.
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