The 5 worst (and sometimes deadly) Olympic PR fails
From removing anti-Semitic propaganda to disappearing activists
Raw sewage isn’t the only problem Rio de Janeiro has with hosting the Summer Olympics. Critics of the city’s preparations have called them “the worst ever,” and they aren’t referring just to organization. Since 2009, over 77,000 citizens have been forcibly evicted to make room for the games. Now, Rio’s become infamous for the construction of an enormous wall, purportedly an “acoustic barrier,” but really a barrier that looks remarkably like a giant screen behind which the poorest neighborhoods of Rio are hidden from public view.
Well, as it turns out, sweeping the dirt under the rug is something of an Olympic tradition.
THE NAZI CLEANUP: BERLIN, 1936
Perhaps the most disturbing Olympic cover up of all happened at the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games, also known as the “Nazi Olympics.” Hitler saw the Games as an opportunity to promote his ideas about racial supremacy, calling for all Jews to be excluded from the Games. Dr. Theodor Lewald, president of Germany’s Olympic Committee, was ousted from his position when it came to light that his paternal grandmother was Jewish; he was replaced by a high ranking Nazi official, who established an Aryans-only policy for Germany’s Olympic athletes. After an international outcry Germany relented and allowed Jews from other countries to compete, promising a tolerant Germany.
When the international community finally came to Berlin, they were presented with an image of a sparkling, clean, falsely tolerant city. “Undesirable persons had been swept off the streets by police and sent to a special detention camp outside the city.” This included a large round up of almost 800 Roma. All anti-Jewish signs had been taken down, as had been the “Jews Not Welcome” notices posted on hotels, restaurants and other public places.
THE TLATELOLCO MASSACRE: MEXICO CITY, 1968
In one of the worst moments in Olympic history — and in Olympic cover ups — military and police killed between 30 and 300 student protesters 10 days before the opening of the 1968 summer games (the death toll remains unclear to this day). Part of a burgeoning youth movement against the government’s repression and violence, the students were protesting the seizure of the National University and the National Polytechnic Institute. Documents that have since come to light have suggested that snipers were installed in the crowd to fire at police, giving them justification for opening fire on the gathering. Some reports estimate casualties at a total of close to 4,000. The “Olympia Battalion,” a group of secret police in the Mexican police force, spent the next night and days going through neighboring streets and houses searching for (and by some accounts, killing) students. Bodies were taken away in military trucks in piles; over 3000 people were rounded up and held in a nearby church. The government portrayed the massacre as a criminal event that had been successfully brought under control by the police: El Dia’s headline read, “Criminal Provocation at the Tlatelolco Meeting Causes Terrible Bloodshed.” The truth didn’t entirely emerge until government documents were released in 2001.
JUST KNOCK IT DOWN: ATLANTA, 1996
Atlanta as an Olympic city called into question a deep, long history of racial division in the American South. Is it problematic when a city at the heart of what was once the segregated South and an epicenter of the Atlantic slave trade tries to present itself as a model of racial diversity and harmony? “The Games pose the question about just which image is closer to the real South,” Peter Applebome of the The New York Times wrote. “The exuberant show of interracial regional harmony and shared Southern culture… or the escalating controversies over the Confederate battle flag and antebellum history that increasingly divides white and black Southerners?”
Also in the grand tradition of razing poor neighborhoods to make room for Olympic infrastructure, the United States’ first ever public housing project was demolished. Techwood Homes, built in 1936 and dedicated by Franklin D. Roosevelt himself, was intended to replace the shantytown known as Tanyard Bottom. Former residents were pushed out and given Section 8 vouchers. The mixed use facility that replaced it, Centennial Place, had far fewer units available for subsidized housing.
DISAPPEARING ACTIVISTS: BEIJING, 2008
Human rights were a major concern when China hosted the Summer Olympics in 2008. Many media figures threatened to boycott the Games due to China’s role in Darfur, Tibet, and Myanmar. Although China had promised to allow free media coverage, visiting journalists were denied access, monitored, given limited Internet connectivity, and harassed. An estimated 50 human rights activists were arrested or banished from the Games, and a few even disappeared. Another activist, Ye Guozhu, was scheduled for release from a four-year sentence in 2008, but his release was delayed so that he — as Amnesty International quoted the Chinese police as saying — “would be kept in detention to keep him and his family out of trouble until the Olympics and Paralympics were over.” There were even suspicions that the Chinese government suppressed news of a melamine milk contamination for months to delay international media coverage of the scandal. The number of babies affected was thought to be nearly 94,000.
FROM RUSSIA, WITH ECOLOGICAL DISREGARD: SOCHI, 2014
Russia promised the world the cleanest Olympics ever. That didn’t happen. “Illegal waste dumps, displacement of residents, harsh retribution against local activists: Sochi has it all,” The Nation reported in January 2014. Construction contracts bloated by corruption created sprawling piles of waste and pollution in neighborhoods, drying up residents’ wells, ruining orchards, and even causing in one case a landslide that destroyed homes. Activists who protested these activities were jailed and harassed. The scores of residents who were forcibly displaced were “under-compensated” for their homes. The cluster of Olympic buildings was constructed along the Imeretinskaya Lowland, a rich and important ecological area known for its bird life. Regulations limiting construction were “eased” in advance of the games and the Olympic stadium was built on the land, filling in much of it with construction waste. Some 1500 illegal waste dumps were also noted around Sochi, and at least four contained Olympic construction materials, as well as 8 illegal quarries supplying materials for construction.
