Opinion | The World Is Sliding Toward Authoritarianism. So Are the Olympics.

“It is clear that the staging of the Olympic Games will do a lot for the improvement of human rights and social relations in China,” stated Jacques Rogge, then-president of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in 2001, when Beijing was vying to host the 2008 Summer Olympics. He echoed Beijing’s deputy mayor who claimed, “By applying for the Olympics, we want to promote not just the city’s development, but the development of society, including democracy and human rights.” Even neutral observers hoped that despite China’s questionable track record, awarding it the Olympics could be a small step toward “open doors, open windows, open Internet, open discussion.”

What a difference two decades makes. With the 2022 Beijing Olympics underway, no one is making grand promises about the Games jumpstarting democracy in China. Beyond a diplomatic boycott by the U.S. and some allies, and demands for a full boycott that didn’t gain much traction, no major protests are expected, at least not within China itself. And the IOC, which in 2001 touted the Olympics’ ability to push China toward reform, now sings from a different hymnal. In the face of criticism of its decision to choose Beijing as host, IOC president Thomas Bach emphasized “the political neutrality of the IOC and the Games” and deflected responsibility by insisting, “The Olympics cannot solve problems that generations of politicians have not solved.”

Of course, the IOC isn’t alone in being unwilling to take on China. In the years between the two Beijing Olympics, China has become significantly more authoritarian, repressive and powerful. Countries and corporations have financial incentives not to make too much noise.

But the difference between Beijing 2008 and Beijing 2022 says something else about the modern-day Olympics. For decades, the Games have been a venue for progressive activism, both against the political practices of the host country and against the IOC. The IOC has long been critiqued as a cabal of elites who have failed to address the cost overruns, environmental damage, forced eviction and police militarization that frequently accompany the Olympics. Instead of responding to the calls for reform, the IOC has in recent years become less responsive, less democratic and more opaque — making more decisions behind closed doors, closing ranks around an unusually powerful leader, fending off allegations that its members engaged in bribery and corruption, and — most recently — turning a blind eye to political repression. Indeed, the committee has started to resemble the authoritarian governments it’s unwilling to criticize.

The authoritarian challenge to democracy and human rights is arguably the defining geopolitical story of our time. Rather than oppose this trend, the IOC seems to be participating in it. Bach says his group’s primary “responsibility is to run the Games in accordance with the Olympic Charter.” But that charter speaks of “promoting a peaceful society concerned with the preservation of human dignity” — goals that feel impossible to square with the IOC’s unwillingness to engage with critics and call out human rights violations. Faced with an opportunity to align their sentiments and actions, the overlords of the Olympics have instead accelerated the Games’ years-long shift into an economic juggernaut and ideological black hole with sport appended to its flank.

Though host countries have long used the Olympics to push national goals, grassroots activism and the Olympics have also long gone hand in hand. Ahead of the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics, staged amid the Great Depression, activists chanted “Groceries not Games! Olympics are outrageous!” In the 1970s, dissidents in Denver — a coalition of fiscal conservatives concerned with the misuse of public funds and liberal environmentalists alarmed by potential ecological damage — forced the IOC to move the Olympics to Innsbruck. The three most recent Olympics, in Tokyo, Pyeongchang and Rio de Janeiro, all saw significant protests over issues like cost overruns and displacement.

The 2008 Beijing Games generated activist pushback, too, with global human-rights voices using the event to point a finger at China’s growing authoritarianism. Archbishop Desmond Tutu urged a global boycott of the opening ceremony. Celebrities like Mia Farrow and Richard Gere advocated boycotting as well, and Steven Spielberg eventually withdrew as an artistic adviser to the Games because of China’s policy on the Darfur conflict. When the Olympic torch relay zigzagged across the globe, protesters in London, Paris, and San Francisco bellowed pro-Tibet chants and wielded signs excoriating China for its human-rights abuses.

The human-rights opening that Beijing and the IOC pledged never arrived. In fact, Sophie Richardson, China director at Human Rights Watch, asserts that the opposite happened. Hosting the Olympics in Beijing, she writes, was “a catalyst for abuses, leading to massive forced evictions, a surge in the arrest, detention, and harassment of critics, repeated violations of media freedom, and increased political repression.” China used the Olympics not only to intensify domestic surveillance of targeted groups, but also to market newfangled surveillance systems to the world.

As Yaqiu Wang, a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch, told me, “In 2008, much of the international community still believed that giving China the Summer Olympics would facilitate it to become a more liberalized, human rights-respecting country. Obviously, this didn’t happen, and few believe this for the Winter Games today.”

Fast forward to 2015. Beijing was bidding for the 2022 Winter Olympics alongside winter sport powerhouses like Oslo and Stockholm as well as upstarts like Lviv, Ukraine and Almaty, Kazakhstan. The bid came amid an upsurge in disgruntlement against the Olympics, with other bids kneecapped by public referenda and anti-Games groups popping up in nearly every prospective Olympic city. The idea that hosting an Olympic Games could be a catalyst for positive change was quickly becoming a distant memory. Public plebiscites torpedoed prospective bids in Krakow, Poland as well as in Munich and Graubunden, Switzerland. Voters were put off by sky-high Olympic costs, intense security demands and an increasing sense that the Olympics would do more harm than good for their cities.

With basically all democratic bidders having bailed, the IOC ended up with only two choices — Beijing and Almaty. The lords of the Olympic rings chose the entity they knew better: China.

Were the IOC to use its leverage over autocratic hosts to push for change, or if it simply used its own behavior to set an example, some critics might be more forgiving. Instead, the group itself appears to be sliding deeper into an opaque, autocratic approach.

Jens Weinreich, a German investigative journalist who has been tracking Olympic powerbrokers for three decades, told me, “The IOC itself is a totalitarian system. More than ever.”

Part of the story, critics argue, is a change in leadership. When Beijing was bidding for the 2022 Games, the IOC was centralizing power under its new president Thomas Bach, a German lawyer and 1976 Olympian in fencing, who was first elected in 2013. Last summer, when Bach announced he’d pursue another term as president, he reportedly went around the virtual room and called on committee members as they heaped over-the-top praise on Bach. “We have one captain, and that captain is you,” one IOC member said, according to the New York Times. Bach was reelected with straight-up dictator numbers: 93-1 with four abstentions.

To be sure, the IOC’s problems didn’t begin with Bach. Still, under his leadership, the organization has doubled down on an iron-fisted approach. Bach has changed the rules surrounding the bidding process multiple times. The actual IOC has become a rubberstamp organization while the real power has been amassed in smaller “future host commissions” of less than a dozen IOC members. The group’s lack of receptivity to athlete dissent is well-documented, as is what the Times called a “culture of deference” to Bach. Olympic bidders avoid public referenda, and discussions now occur behind closed doors. Last summer the IOC handed the 2032 Summer Olympics to Brisbane despite very little public discussion of the bid – let alone a referendum, which critics had pushed for to allow the city’s residents to weigh in.

During the 2022 bidding process, Norwegian and international media reported that the IOC issued a list of highfalutin demands — including a private meeting with the Norwegian king, separate entrances and exits for IOC members at the Oslo airport, and meeting rooms that maintained a precise 20 degrees Celsius at all times. The IOC denied making such demands, calling the reports “half-truths and factual inaccuracies,” but the damage was done. Norway pulled Oslo’s bid amid growing concern, and the IOC was made to look more like a band of grifting princelings than a serious sport bureaucracy.

Weinreich, the German journalist who has written extensively about Bach’s tenure, told me, “The IOC has never been as authoritarian as it is under Thomas Bach.” He added, “No IOC president ever had such absolute power.”

The IOC has willingly hitched its wagon to China while showing gullibility every step of the way. The committee has consistently deflected demands to address human-rights abuses in China. When the Coalition to End Forced Labor in the Uyghur Region, an alliance of more than 300 groups, tried to meet with the IOC, they were initially stonewalled. Eventually, the committee agreed to meet — but not to engage. The IOC wouldn’t share any information with its critics; the meeting would merely be an “active listening exercise.” The IOC declined to provide comment for this article.

With the recent rise in athlete activism, one might think Beijing-bound Olympians would jump at the chance to speak truth to power. However, athletes are proceeding with extreme caution. The progressive athlete-led group Global Athlete is advising against activism in Beijing. Noah Hoffman, a two-time US Olympian in cross-country skiing, told me, “I have thought a lot about whether I would speak up in Beijing if I were competing in these Games. I don’t think I would. … The upside of speaking out doesn’t outweigh the risks.”

Hoffman says he wouldn’t ask those who are competing to take a risk he wouldn’t. “Therefore, I am advising athletes to stay silent while in China. It pains me to do so because … I believe that athletes should use their platforms to stand up for the things they believe in and that they can be powerful forces for positive change. I never want to advise an athlete to stay silent but in this situation I feel that I have no choice.”

There is no question that China today is much more powerful than the previous time it hosted the Olympics. Between 2008 and 2021, China’s Gross Domestic Product more than tripled. Its economy has evolved from primarily export-driven to one where domestic consumption comprises around half of all economic activity. China has wielded its domestic consumer demand as a weapon, targeting textile behemoths H&M and Nike with a boycott after the firms raised concerns about forced Uyghur labor in Xinjiang. Unsurprisingly, the International Olympic Committee says it cannot guarantee that its official uniforms are not made by forced labor.

Close observers of China see a clear turn for the worse with these Olympics, even since 2008. Teng Biao, a Chinese human-rights lawyer living in exile in the US, told me, “Before these Winter Olympics, the Chinese government violated human rights and suppressed freedom much more blatantly than in 2008. Worse, Xi Jinping and the Chinese leaders don’t pretend to be open to the world this time. They have expelled foreign journalists, enforced more censorship, intimidated athletes, shut down foreign NGOs, and sanctioned critical voices.”

The IOC has largely shrugged this off, insisting it must remain politically neutral in the face of China’s gross human-rights violations. But in the current political climate, “neutrality” isn’t the virtue they pretend it is. The committee would do well to consider Desmond Tutu’s stance: “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.”

Not everyone plans to remain silent, of course. Activist groups are already planning demonstrations around the world to draw attention to the toll the Olympics takes on host cities and the people who live there. But they have good reason to be pessimistic about the Olympics themselves. For 15 consecutive years, according to Freedom House, countries experiencing a decline in their overall freedom outnumbered those experiencing gains. The IOC isn’t a country, of course. But it’s clear what side of that ledger the organization is on.