Sachin Nakrani
Friday February 22, 2008
The Guardian
The 2008 Olympics take place in Beijing this August. Photograph: Guang Niu/Getty Images
A large majority of the British public believe it would be wrong for sportsmen and women from this country to boycott the Beijing Olympics despite China’s human rights record and links to Sudan, according to a Guardian/ICM poll published today.
Of the 1,003 people surveyed, 72% agreed the Great Britain team should attend this summer’s Games;
only 19% said there should be a boycott. The remaining 9% expressed no opinion.
Calls for competitors to stay away from the event were first made after Beijing was awarded the Olympics in 2001 and gained prominence when Steven Spielberg announced last week that he was giving up his post as the Games’ artistic director in protest to China’s diplomatic and economic backing of the Sudanese government, which has overseen the conflict in the country’s Darfur region which has killed more than 200,000 people in the past five years.
The former Olympic champion Linford Christie has made clear his opposition to a boycott, believing it is an unfair demand to make on those who have dedicated their lives to competing in Beijing. “Athletes have one chance every four years to compete at the Olympics and they should be allowed to do that,” said Christie, who won 100m gold at the 1992 Barcelona Games. "People are very hypocritical on this issue; we condemn China but then we all use Chinese electrical goods. "
No Britons have said they will boycott the Olympics although Richard Vaughan, a medal contender in badminton, has joined Team Darfur, a group of competitors who will campaign throughout the event for international action to be taken in the region.
Despite calling on China to review its “poor and disturbing” record on human rights, the British Olympic minister, Tessa Jowell, has refused to back a British boycott. She is supported by the British Olympic Association and the foreign secretary, David Miliband.
The last time there was an Olympic boycott by major nations was in 1984 when 16 nations, led by the Soviet Union, refused to attend the Los Angeles Games.
ICM polled a random sample of 1003 adults aged over 18 from around Britain