The Olympics’ Toughest Act: Balancing Sports and Politics

The athletes had lost. Their time in Paris was over. And they were, in this moment of defeat by a team from a political rival, not even allowed the comfort of their homeland’s name and flag.

To be an Olympian from Taiwan is to not exist, at least not officially. To placate China, the island competes at the Games under the awkward designation of Chinese Taipei. The intrusion of politics into sports forces the island’s athletes to engage in the kind of rhetorical gymnastics that might trip up a champion tumbler, and which bring a particular sting when you are a table tennis player who has just been beaten by Team China.

“I’m only fighting for myself, through my own hard work,” said Taiwan’s Chen Szu-yu, substituting self for state on the Olympic stage.

Her teammate Chien Tung-chuan sidestepped the political discussion entirely, refraining from comment on Taiwan’s status at the Olympics.

“I cannot answer that question,” she said. “May I go?”

There is no arena more international than the Olympics. The United Nations General Assembly, that other grand global endeavor, excludes the territories, the itty-bitty islands and the not-quite nations that get to go to the Games. Puerto Rico, Palestine, Chinese Taipei — they all marched in the Olympic parade of nations, as did a refugee team whose 37 members were forcibly displaced from some of the very countries that competed alongside them in Paris.

But to accommodate such a diversity — North Korea and South Korea, Israel and Palestine, Armenia and Azerbaijan, China and Taiwan — the Olympic masterminds mandate that athletes should refrain from taking political stands. They imbue in a single sporting moment, the flight of a woman propelled by a springy pole or the revolution of a wheel in a velodrome, an inspirational expression of international unity. They romanticize an Olympic truce in which competitors lay down their weapons for the duration of the world’s greatest athletic contest.