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Peace to its soul, which had little pure and virginal in fact. Call it what you will, but not the Olympic Games. They can be the games of pettiness, the games of segregation, the games of war, the games of cowardice, the games of addiction, the games of exclusion, the games of humiliation, the games of denial, the games of ostentation, the games of anything that has nothing to do with the nobility of the ideal preached by Baron Pierre de Coubertin and much less with the spirit of the rituals of peace and culture of ancient Greece; but not the Olympic Games.

The so-called “Olympic spirit” has long been a fraud, especially since it was assaulted as a promotional vehicle for the brands of the most powerful globalizing transnationals. Despite this, the space of athletes, coaches, and other players in the competitive dynamics, judges and referees, volunteers and spectators seemed immune to organizational and sponsoring corruption.

They cultivated emotion, spectacle, attraction, friendship in rivalry and human overcoming that sport, or rather, sports also provide. There are, of course, doping, cheating, games of influence, the glaring differences in means of preparation and competition, but the fantastic feats, many of them becoming legendary over the 128 years of the so-called “Olympic Games of the Modern Era”, feed memories, fill stadiums, pavilions and swimming pools.

It is also true that several previous episodes denying the so-called “Olympic spirit” and the refunding principles of the Olympics proclaimed by Baron Pierre de Coubertin and his peers in the last decade of the nineteenth century have deeply stained this gigantic sporting gathering; a “celebration of humanity, a platform for peace and understanding”, as defined by those who wanted to recreate in modernity the ideals of conviviality, fraternity, traditions, rituals and good examples of the Games of almost 3000 years ago.

From Hitler to Ukrainian Nazi-Banderism

The celebration of the 1936 Games in Nazi Germany, through which the International Olympic Committee of the time contributed to the promotion of Hitler, his segregationism and his imperial aesthetics; the boycott mounted by the United States of Reagan and his subjects in Western Europe against the Moscow Olympic Games in 1980, as the beginning of the neoliberalization of the Olympic Movement; the contemporaneity of several editions of the Games with the Western wars unleashed by the West in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, without considering the declaration of any “Olympic truce”; the treacherous and cowardly use of the world’s attention on the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympic Games on August 8, 2008 for the then Americanized regime of Georgia to invade the Russian-speaking territory of South Ossetia, causing a massacre of more than 2,000 people in just the first few hours; the lack of a declaration of truce in the war in Ukraine now that athletes from almost all over the world are gathering in Paris – all these events are just a few examples of how the dominant political powers internationally trample on the autonomy of the International Olympic Committee and Coubertin’s expressed intention that the Games be “a celebration of universal language that transcends borders and cultures”. The arbitrary “rules-based international order” has thrown its hands behind the Games, demolishes principles, undermines the best intentions and stifled the Olympic spirit.

In the year 424 BC, in the luminous fifth century of Plato, Aristotle, Socrates and other legendary philosophers of classical Greece, for the first time the “sacred truce” proper to the Olympic Games was not declared due to fears of an invasion by Sparta, which in the end did not happen. The Olympic “holy truce” was conceived not only for mystical reasons – the Games were dedicated to Zeus – but also so that athletes, judges and organizers could travel to Athens and return safely to their places of origin.

424 BC was only one exception; the rule was the declaration of a truce every four years. Nowadays, the Olympic mentors blatantly ignore the tradition of the truce; the exception of the past has become the rule in modernity.

The Olympic Games of Classical Antiquity, which began in the year 776 BC, were banned and extinguished 1169 years later, in 393 of our era, by the Christian Roman emperor Theodosius I, for being a “pagan” event. The tendency of “Christian and Western civilization” to adulterate and exterminate all events created in a spirit and principles that in practice contradict its way of looking at the world, its unrestrained domination, colonial and imperial vocation, goes back a long way.

Pettiness, segregation, exclusion

And we arrived at the Paris 2024 Games. We hear the conversations, the comments, the litanies, the routine clichés, words piled upon words in which everything is deliberately omitted and everything is done to erase the original sin of this edition: the exclusion of athletes from the Russian Federation and Belarus, with the exception of those who publicly declare themselves against their presidents and other freely elected bodies of power. Sportsmen and women who, even so, will not be able to compete with the equipment of their national team, listen to the anthem and see the flag of their country raised in case they win the events in which they participate.

There are many and varied aberrations of this decision, which humiliates and mortally wounds the “homage to the human spirit and its capacity for greatness” that Baron Pierre de Coubertin had defined as one of the golden rules of the Olympic Games idealized by him.

On a somewhat marginal level, but with a significant charge of perversity, is the fact that Russian and Belarusian athletes participating in the Games do not need enemies if they are their friends in the “civilization” on this side. Now, if Western governments, thanks to their control of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), demand that athletes confront Putin, Lukashenko and the power of Moscow and Minsk, which they consider dictatorial, they know that Russian and Belarusian citizens present at competitions may be the target of alleged reprisals when they return to their countries. Either the politicians of NATO and the European Union sacrifice the athletes of the proscribed countries to their war propaganda objectives or else they do not even believe what they say about the anti-democratic nature of the punished political systems.

Regarding this behaviour without a minimum of coherence, let us suppose, by reduction to absurdity, that the IOC assumed the independence that is in its rules and, assuming that the political game thus rigged was unavoidable, imposed sanctions on athletes from countries such as the United States, France, Germany and Ukraine for also being responsible for the Ukrainian war, namely by sabotaging the possibilities of peace negotiations, fuelling the conflict with weapons and violating commitments made, such as the Minsk Agreements. In this context, only athletes who publicly declared themselves against the expansionist and warmongering U.S. regime, against the autocracy of NATO and the European Union, based on anti-democratic bodies – because they are not elected – such as the European Commission and the European Council, would be admitted to the Games. The dimension of the audacity and the corresponding scandal would be enough to exonerate the IOC or even cancel the Games.

“Our” leaders no longer have the notion of ridicule and deliberately oppose the Olympic Charter itself, which is also completely disrespected by the IOC.

The text of the Charter is clear, precise, and drafted in such a way that there is no room for doubt as to the so-called “Olympic spirit”. In chapter 2 of the document, dedicated to “the mission and role of the IOC”, paragraph 5 stipulates that this body must act “to strengthen the International Olympic Movement (IOC), maintain and promote its political neutrality and preserve the autonomy of sport”; and Article 6 requires the IOC to act against “any form of discrimination against the Olympic Movement”.

Pierre de Coubertin summed up these concepts in a simple phrase, grossly violated by the agents who shaped the Paris Olympic Games: “We (in the IOC) are not technical advisors to policy, we are only the curators of the Olympic ideal”.

It would not be necessary to go any further to conclude that the Paris Olympic Games are a fraud.

The punishment imposed on Russian and Belarusian athletes by the collective West and the IOC as its transmission belt also reveals the pettiness of the arrogant, but insecure, sportingly fearful, who have neither the capacity nor the courage to assert their reasons and resort to constant tricks, in this case the most basic and denounceable, to impose force through arbitrariness. What is it in the interest of these persistent falsifiers, in politics and, by extension, in sport, that one day, in 1925, Baron Pierre de Coubertin said that “the Games are global, all competitors can participate, without debate”; or that “the Olympic Games are for the world and all nations should be admitted to them”?

In addition to being fraudulent, due to the lack of respect for Olympism, the Paris Games are also a manifestation of sports corruption – and that is not insignificant.

The responsibility, of course, does not lie with the athletes, who generally wish to compete regardless of their opponents, even those who are potentially superior to them. Therefore, they like sports and practice it at the highest level.

Sports corruption lies in the fact that some of the best athletes and teams in the world are removed, without any competitive or other infraction, which devalues victories, removes prestige and value from medals, harms the spectacle and influences the quality of some of the individual and collective competitions. Russia is usually one of the most medalled countries, with the ability to place in the first place of the unofficial ranking by number of awards. Between 1994 and 2020, Russian athletes won 426 medals, 149 of which were gold, numbers that are only surpassed by competitors from the United States. A significant number of Olympic trophies will thus be distributed this year to sportsmen and women who, under normal circumstances, would not win them. This means addiction, competitive corruption.

In sports jargon applied to victories with wounded or debatable merit, uncomfortable matters are usually settled by saying that for history what counts is who won and not who was absent, was removed or complained, for example, about an unmarked penalty, even if legitimate. Is this so? Or will the winner, at least, remember that he competed without the main rivals and the reality could have been different?

Is genocide an Olympic sport?

Russian and Belarusian athletes are subject to severe restrictions and anti-Olympic norms because their governments are involved in a military aggression that targets the ruling power in Ukraine; what happens after the Ukrainian regime nazified by the 2014 coup promoted by the United States and the European Union – which overthrew a democratically elected president – carried out a military aggression of more than eight years against the Russian-majority populations of the eastern and south-eastern territories of the country and ordered the civic segregation of all citizens who are not considered “pure” Ukrainians.

Everything is possible: the Olympic participation of athletes from Morocco, despite the fact that their government practices a policy of occupation, violence and permanent violations of human rights against the sovereign people of the Western Sahara; and, above all, that athletes from Israel, the country responsible for 75 years for the genocide and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people, whose methods are illustrated by the extermination action underway in Gaza – a strong indication of the attempt to achieve a “final solution” of the problem, can be present in Paris.

The behaviour of the Zionist State has been defined as “genocide” by the International Court of Justice, without disagreement from the International Criminal Court, but the seriousness of the meaning of these positions does not bother Israel, the European Union and the United States, a country that has now opened the doors of Congress to a speech extolling Zionist criminality, and even threatening Washington delivered by the eternal Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

In Paris, during the rehearsal for the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games and a football match, whistles were heard against the Zionist presence, but that is the side for which the IOC and the collective West sleep best – and without problems of conscience. An equivalent situation was recorded in the last Eurovision Song Contest.

The participation of Israeli athletes, some of them – unlike the Russians – in the service of the genocidal Israel Defense Forces, is the fatal blow to what was left of Olympism, a clear demonstration of the hypocrisy of Western leaders and the IOC, an avowed lack of respect for athletes who compete loyally in the Games, an insult to the intelligence of public opinion in all countries of the world.

Baron Pierre de Coubertin defined the Olympic Games, he recalls, as “the celebration of humanity, a platform for peace and understanding”.

Respect for the words and ideas of the founder of the Olympic Games of the Modern Era is not something that motivates the current Olympic leaders and their guardians. Coherence and words are carried away by the wind; and Olympism was liquidated by the spirit of war and genocide of those who claim to defend it.

A test of the police state

Paris is in a state of siege. Citizens need special cards to access certain areas of the city, the legendary secular Parisian culture has been cancelled through the closure of museums and other spaces of humanist enjoyment, the number of armed police officers on the streets is much higher than the number of athletes participating in the Games, on this floor it will be higher than the residents of the city, many of them fleeing to places where the image of a war environment is only shown on TV; In short, fear is afraid of fear.

The neoliberal and authoritarian powers of the European Union do not miss an opportunity to test the assembly of mechanisms inherent to a police state. Urban violence served as an argument for the Swedish government to define areas and neighbourhoods of restricted access in Stockholm, ghettos intended mainly for immigrant communities, authentic virtually walled cities; the Olympic Games now serve for the so-called “security means” to exercise the use of intensive surveillance, inch by inch, to consider each citizen a potential criminal, perhaps an agent of Putin, to scrutinize the movements of people, to bar spaces due to simple suspicions, or even intuitions. Police arbitrariness became the rule, the control of freedoms became law.

Whatever happens in the French capital, don’t call it the Olympic Games. It is rather an international sports mega-festival rigged from a competitive and ethical point of view long before it started; a gigantic event with hints of a popular fair and a commercial event financed and sponsored by the profitable ostentation of transnational power and without control of the old and nouveau riche for whom the whole world is theirs. Pierre de Coubertin, much more than a century ago, saw sport as “a school of virtues”. Look at what this has led to, by the work of the not virtuous “Western civilization.”