Skip to main content

How We'll Be Watching The Games (Pt I )

Pic: upliftconnect.com

As the Rio 2016 Olympics get closer - only 2 more sleeps!! - we at The Kick Project, like most, will be watching for all those great moments and stories.

We hope that, despite all the apparent pre-Opening Ceremony dramas (just like every other Games in the last 20 years), the Games will provide the sense of connectivity and shared celebration it can deliver.

While we are sports fans like anyone and we'll be watching the athletes do their thing, we are always paying attention to the human rights issues surrounding such major sporting events as this .

But, there's two special aspects to this year's Games that make our viewing experience even more focussed.

Both aspects refer to unique, first time ever, factors in the Games and how they are shaped. Here the first (the next will follow in another post soon)

The Refugee Olympic Team

We, not surprisingly, were very happy to see the IOC open up to allow refugee athletes to compete at these Games under the Olympic flag. While there is some related precedent for this, this is the first time a multinational Olympic team of refugees has competed as such.

Given the situation, this is a fantastic concept and has the potential to do a great deal in terms of understanding and education.

We here at The Kick Project feel we can actually take some credit for this as we pitched a similar idea at a high level with the Olympic organisers late last year. We don't know for sure if our input moved the IOC in this direction (we'll take some credit for now!!), but we are obviously really happy this concept has been picked up.

All good. But, we want to be sure that not only the athletes themselves benefit, but that the issues they embody are fairly and appropriately treated.

The Olympics are not noted as a time when context and depth are in evidence. There can be too much OTT flag waving and nationalistic win, win, win.

But, the central point is that selecting a team of refugees is a political act and it should be set, even if only briefly, in such a context.

We wonder how this team will be treated. We are a little concerned after comments we received from the IOC media office as we sought to develop a documentary project around these athletes for The Kick Project and a major network broadcaster (who is not a Games media rights holder).

Based on this correspondence, it looks to us like the Refugee Olympic Team is being tightly controlled for the benefit of the media rights owners for the Games.

Commercialism is part of sport and part of the Games, of course. Accepted. But, we feel the Refugee Olympic Team belongs to more than the corporations who pay for media access for the Games. We feel they should be allowed to speak freely to a wider audience and should not be corralled, or made to be part of a media circus and treated as media "talent".

We reckon this team from no nation belongs to the world.

Further, we are concerned that these athletes will be pressured by the sense that they "represent" tens of millions of asylum seekers and refugees all over the world. Will they be helped through this or just expected to get over it? Will they be allowed to mix with fellow countrymen and women on their national teams? Will they be allowed to speak openly, even politically, to media and elsewhere? And what will happen to them post-Games? Such questions were to be part of our planned doco.

Finally, we hope the refugee issue does not become about these elite athletes and the beneficial actions of the IOC. The issue is bigger than them and bigger than the Games in fact. Rather than caricaturing the athletes or feeling warm and fuzzy about the great stories of these fortunate few, we should be using their profile to humanise the deeper refugee issue and to help breakdown prejudice and ignorance.

We feel - not that we've had the chance to confirm this, although we tried  - these are the issue the athletes themselves are looking at, even as they hope for their own advancement and profile raising (and we wouldn't want to deny them that).

So, we will be watching to see how their story pans out.

We'll also be watching how we watch the Games. More on that in our next post.




Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Post-UNOSDP - Is the IOC fool's gold?

This is a longer version of an article published on SportandDev.org With the United Nations Office on Sport for Development and Peace closed down by the global body, there is undoubtedly a void in this space in which many of us here work. But, for all the high profile oomph the UNOSDP added to the world of sport for good, it’s passing need not be seen as devastating. For one, the work the UNOSDP has already done in its 16 years of life has laid a platform for the development of sport for social justice. While many of us knew for years that sport had a wider purpose beyond mere business or entertainment, the UNOSDP has provided a base of credibility that may have otherwise taken much longer to establish. While much of the work is, in many ways, still to be done, the UNOSDP has left a positive legacy on which we can all build. More problematic is the shifting of the UNOSDP’s brief to the IOC. Obliging the IOC to administer to the peace and development facets

Statement on Funding for the Rohingya Football Club

We are very pleased to announce that The Kick Project has received a $AUD16,500 donation from the Australian Government to fund a pilot soccer program with Rohingya refugees in Malaysia. The funds, coming through the Australian High Commission in Malaysia, will allow the charity to support the Rohingya Football Club which has become a vital part of the exiled Rohingya community in Kuala Lumpur. The program entails kitting out the team, providing transport to games and establishing a sports and community hub where Rohingya people can access sporting equipment and coaching. Young people, and girls in particular, are the long term focus of the initiative. The Kick Project founder James Rose says the Rohingya are in dire need of assistance. "The UN has called the Rohingya arguably the most persecuted group in the world. They've been forced to flee their homelands in Myanmar, where they have been made stateless by government decree, and many have lost their lives

House of Cards: What Might a Post-FIFA World Look Like?

With news that FIFA bigwigs Sepp Blatter, Michel Platini and Jerome Valcke have been "red carded" by FIFA and will have to sit out the next three months, it looks like finally the dead wood is being pruned at the world game HQ. However, worse may be yet come. What can be done to get the people's game back to the people? The current danger is that as the poison is leeched from FIFA, nothing will be left. If corruption is as rife as many - including us here at The Kick Project - believe then more will be shown the door and still more, aware that the gravy train has terminated, will move on voluntarily. The result may well be a vacuum at the heart of the world's most valuable sport. The immediate consequences of this may be no Confederation Championships and no World Cup in three years time or beyond. That's bad enough, but the real concern is who or what will fill this void. There are essentially three likely outcomes. One, would be to hand FIFA over to e