An Immodest Proposal: Trade TV Time for Podium Time in Olympic Protest Battle

In Jonathan Swift’s 1729 satirical essay, he makes a “Modest Proposal” that the children of the poor be sold to their country’s rich as food, thereby relieving their parents and social systems of the burden of caring for them.

Swift’s purpose with his Modest Proposal is meant to mock the way that the rich ruling classes of Britain treated the poor, and especially the Irish, at the dawn of the industrial revolution.

A literary analysis of the work by Louis A. Landa revolves around the 18th-century idea that “People are the riches of a nation,” and that low wage workers would work harder than high wage workers, thereby dehumanizing them into a commodity.

The theme is relevant to the modern Olympic movement, where among billions in revenue, a pittance is distributed to the athletes who make up the lifeblood of the movement. While global sporting officials and bureaucrats fly in first-class accommodations and stay in 5-star hotels, athletes sleep two-to-a-room on cardboard beds and jam their often-substantial bodies into coach flights.

While some athletes do benefit financially from the Olympic movement, the vast majority are left to scrape by. For a long time, Home Depot hung its hat on the fact that it hired hundreds of Olympic athletes who have won hundreds of medals to work in its stores. Offering these athletes employment that accommodates their training needs is a step better than doing nothing, but it certainly is a far cry from the money that the athletes deserve for their share of pushing the Olympic movement forward.

In the backdrop of the ongoing national protests in the United States following the killing of an unarmed black man George Floyd in the hands of Minneapolis Police, the IOC has reaffirmed its decision to disallow podium protests during the Olympic Games.

These aren’t the only protests that exist in sport. We saw at the 2019 World Aquatics Championships two podium protests, where Mack Horton and Duncan Scott, to varying degrees, declined to participate fully with Chinese swimmer Sun Yang. Sun had been cleared for a violation after an incident with anti-doping control staff over 6 months earlier, but was awaiting the results of an appeal to the CAS that would ultimately ban him for 8 years. Sun won 2 gold medals at those World Championships. All of the involved athletes were warned, though ultimately no harsher punishment was awarded.

We’ve also seen Milorad Cavic protest on the podium of the 50 fly at the 2008 European Championship. Cavic, who was born and raised in the US but who represented Serbia internationally, wore a shirt that read “Kosovo is Serbia” to protest the declaration of independence by Kosovo. He was disqualified from the remainder of the meet and his federation was fined almost $11,000.

There is a certain beauty in the podiums at the Olympic Games. Three athletes, representing their countries, standing in solidarity and the unity that the Olympic movement has the potential to bring to diverse populations that otherwise are at conflict. Those moments and what they mean aren’t lost on anybody.

But, those moments are also often an athletes biggest stage to raise their grievances with the world that gains so much from them but often gives so little.

I can understand the desire to protect the aesthetic and the emotion of those moments, but doesn’t the Olympic movement owe its athletes something?

And so, an immodest proposal, in favor of modesty on the Olympic podium

If you want to keep athletes’ protests off the Olympic podium, offer them another opportunity, an equal opportunity, to voice their concerns. If your rallying cry is “the podium is not the time for protests,” then give another time, with equal exposure if less ceremony, for athletes to voice their concerns to the public.

There are a lot of ways that this could be accomplished, and the manner by which it could be accomplished will vary depending on which country the athletes are from.

In the United States, from where the protests are likely to be loudest, the solution is fairly simple: offer them a segment on NBC’s prime time coverage.

There will still have to be bounds placed upon this, of course. An open forum for athletes to raise all grievances with the world will lead to unfocused conversation and meandering messaging.

Instead, have the athletes from a particular nation come together to determine their messaging and what issues are of primary importance to them. Provide them the resources on how to present their case to the wider audience. Support them in their efforts to communicate their message. Work with sponsors who support those athletes’ messages to allow them to use their commercial slots on those issues. Find a way to balance views, via conversations, among athletes who might have differing opinions.

Take those hallmark moments and parlay them into continuing conversations with athletes that extend beyond the two weeks of the Olympic Games.

More importantly, eliminate any restrictions within the IOC’s Rule 40 that would limit the athletes from endorsing any social causes that are important to them. Allow the athletes to grow their independent social followings so that they can feel more like the Olympic podium is not their only opportunity to reach a large audience.

Will this eliminate all podium protests? There will be no guarantee of that, especially given that there is no formal athletes’ union to agree to terms under the form of a contract. This solution works best for domestic politics, as compared to international politics, where there will almost surely be protests over the Israeli-Palestinian conflicts, or Tibet-China conflicts.

But it would be a start, both in repairing athlete-association relationships, and in quelling what would otherwise be a limitless momentum toward protests. It could give athletes an actual voice to be heard.

Perhaps this is something that can start on a small scale, with  a partnership between the US Olympic & Paralympic Committee, NBC, and American athletes. The USOPC seems ready to listen to its athletes where it previously wasn’t, and this could check a lot of boxes in these ongoing battles.

Ultimately the debate is this:

Who owns the podium moments? Are they owned by the IOC, by the sponsors, who value the uniformity and borderline-toxic nationalism created by those moments? Or are they owned by the athletes who earned those spots, who worked for years to perfect their craft that placed them on those podiums?

Frankly, it is a shared right. The people who develop and market the Olympics are not without merit to the movement. The governments that invest in athletes (which happens in most of the world, aside from the United States) should receive a stake in the decision as well.

But if those entities want to, essentially, ‘buy out’ the athletes’ rights to the other portion of the podium moments, they must give something in return.

With some forethought and some conversation, the IOC could accomplish much more toward its goals with a carrot than it would with a stick.