More than 100 conflicts fester around the world. The Middle East teeters on the brink of a regional war. In Ukraine, Russia advances slowly but steadily in the east, reducing towns to rubble.
The “Olympic Truce,” clearly, is not being heeded.
In the run-up to every Olympics over the past 30 years, the United Nations passes a resolution upholding the Olympic Truce, which in theory halts hostilities in the name of granting athletes safe passage and promoting world peace. It's supposed to last from seven days before the Olympic Games begin until seven days after the Paralympic Games end. Not even two weeks into it, the news of missile strikes, annexations and heightened tensions is omnipresent.
“Stepping into the Olympic Village, you realize like generations of Olympians before: `Now I am part of something bigger than myself. Now we are part of an event that unites the world in peace,'” International Olympic Committee President Thomas Bach said to athletes at the opening ceremony. He did temper his usual robust optimism with an acknowledgment that they lived in “a world torn apart by wars and conflicts.”
It's a pitch the IOC has made often enough that it has become part of the brand that the Games project: the Olympics as the great uniter, one that has the potential to transcend all divides.
Reality, though, can interrupt even the tightest messaging.
Good intentions, interrupted by events
By Wednesday, in the wake of the assassination in Iran of Hamas' top leader, the international body had scaled down and adopted a more dejected tone.
“A culture of peace is what we try to create in a very modest way,” IOC spokesperson Mark Adams said at a news conference. “We’re unable to bring peace. We can call for peace, but we probably won’t achieve it.”
For an organization that has often waded into geopolitics — the normally stoic Bach choked up last week while remembering his late friend Henry Kissinger's “invaluable advice” — Adams' remarks seemed to signal a retreat in the IOC's ambitions, at least in the moment.
“We can only do what we can do. We’re a sports organization,” he said. “Our job is to let the politicians, unfortunately, get on with what they want to get on with.”
The Olympic Truce was revived in the immediate post-Cold War era, with roots in ancient Greece.
“We live in a divided world where conflicts are proliferating in a dramatic way. The horrendous suffering in Gaza, the seemingly endless war in Ukraine, terrible suffering from Sudan to the DRC, from the Sahel to Myanmar,” U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said after meeting with Bach before the opening ceremony. “In a moment like this, it is important to say that the first recording in history (of a) real peace initiative was the Olympic Truce.”
Then and now, it's never quite worked. Russia alone has broken the Truce three times, most recently in 2022 with the invasion of Ukraine — a handful of months after the country voted for the U.N. resolution. (This time, it abstained.)
In November, 118 countries voted to adopt the resolution. No country voted against it, although Syria joined Russia in abstaining. In past years, the resolution received more full-throated support — the U.N. has 193 member-states, after all — but among those who voted for “building a peaceful and better world through sport and the Olympic ideal” were Iran, Israel and Lebanon, all embroiled in the latest flare-up.
“When we talk about sports, uniting people and bringing people together, yes, that is an aspirational ideal,” said Lindsay Sarah Krasnoff, a sports diplomacy expert who lectures at New York University's Tisch Institute for Global Sport. “And a lot of that is reality. When you look at, typically speaking, sport does have that power.”
The Olympics, she says, are an implement in the toolbox of striving for peace. “I don’t think the Games themselves can transcend the worlds wars, conflicts, and complex, complicated problems," she said. “But I think what they can do is provide pockets of space for people to have these conversations.”
Can idealism help along a messy world?
Ultimately, the Truce is well-intentioned but toothless. There are no consequences to breaking it, aside from possible condemnation in the court of global public opinion.
For example: Ahead of the Games, French President Emmanuel Macron publicly suggested a cease-fire between Russia and Ukraine during the days of competition. Not unexpectedly, both sides refused, and the war goes on with the same intensity.
Russia and Belarus have been barred from the Paris Games after a lengthy campaign from Ukraine’s Olympic committee, which argued that Russian athletes should not compete even under a neutral flag, while Moscow’s troops persist with their deadly invasion. (Some Russian and Belarusian athletes are still competing as neutrals, approval contingent on not supporting the war. That allowance has not endeared the Games to its erstwhile host country. )
Ukrainian athletes are under no illusion about Olympic idealism. For them, the Olympics are no longer about their achievements but rather proof that their country is still alive despite the war that began while the last Olympic flame was still lit. They do not see the Games as respite from the war; it’s a way to shout loudly about it so the world doesn’t forget.
Zoriana Nevmerzhytska, 31, attended a flash mob in view of the Eiffel Tower to highlight the hundreds of Ukrainian athletes and coaches, both amateur and professional, who have been killed. Participants bore posters that read “world champions in raping,” depicting Russian soldiers, and “unmarked troops,” referring to the neutral athletes.
“For me, it’s not about something that promotes peace,” she said of the Olympics. “It can be about unity, but not this time.”
There will be a next time, though. When asked why the world keeps returning to the Truce for Olympics after Olympics, despite incessant conflict, Krasnoff noted that “we all like the idea that sport in and of itself can be omnipotent, even though we know in reality it is not.”
“I mean, that’s kind of the whole thing about sports,” she said, drawing an analogy. “You don’t dwell on what you haven’t been able to achieve in a given performance. You say, ‘OK, well, that was that game. On to the next.’”
