China’s treatment of Uighurs has been deemed by Canada as genocide. Are we about to legitimise the regime responsible?History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes. I am staring at two bundles of newspaper clippings – one present day, one past – and feeling a deepening chill. The first pile details China’s treatment of the Uighur Muslim population in Xinjiang, where more than a million people have been “re-educated” in camps, as well as the calls for the 2022 Winter Olympics to be stripped from Beijing. The second is from the Manchester Guardian in 1935, recording the abuse of Jews in Germany and demanding a boycott of the Berlin Games. The echoes are eerie. The looming question, then as now,...
The world’s oldest Olympic champion survived the Holocaust and the Soviet clampdown on Hungary – and fizzes with energyIf a Hollywood scriptwriter had come up with the extraordinary story of Agnes Keleti – the world’s oldest Olympic champion, who celebrated her 100th birthday on Saturday – as a piece of fiction, they surely would have been told to rein it in. Fleeing the Nazis, surviving the Holocaust with a false ID, and later escaping the Soviet clampdown on Hungary? Competing in a first Olympic Games aged 31 before going on to win more medals than anyone else in Melbourne four years later? And then, just for good measure, passing her century bursting with a rare energy and unquenchable zest for...
The Olympics and Euros will likely take place in pared back form, but the overall landscape is looking a lot more like it was in 2020 than we were expecting just a month agoDo you know how many days there are until the Olympic Games get under way? Precisely 200. Imagine it. The darkness of the Tokyo skyline. A lone runner scampering up a giant staircase, torch in hand. A roar from the 60,000 fans inside Japan’s National Stadium. Then raging illumination. It will be some sight … if it happens. Meanwhile this year’s other sporting mega-event, football’s European Championship, is barely five months away, but still there remains an expectation that millions of fans will be able to travel...
Cas leniency is like Great Train Robbers getting community service, but a lesson in realpolitik may concentrate mindsHere is a question you may not expect to find in a sports column. When a journalist is assassinated, do financial markets care? The answer, according to new research in the journal Applied Economics, is a resounding yes. And there is more in the detail. If the murdered journalist was an editor or worked in television, stock prices of companies with headquarters in that country declined on average by 2.18%. However, if they were tortured beforehand, they fell by 3%. And if they were killed by military officials, prices went down even further by 4.62%.This awful set of statistics tells us that the...
Fifty-two years after Tommie Smith and John Carlos used the Olympic podium to protest against racial injustice, a new documentary examines the legacy of the gestureChaos on the streets. Poison seeping into minds. Athletes speaking out against racial injustice being vilified as villains by those in power. Right now 2020 looks a lot like 1968, recast and rebooted.Certainly when LeBron James and other NBA stars went on strike last week, they were standing on the shoulders of giants of that era. And two in particular: Tommie Smith and John Carlos, whose podium protests at the 1968 Olympics are the subject of a timely and vital new film, The Stand: How One Gesture Shook The World. Related: Most Australian athletes believe...