above Japanese
players celebrate their
gold medal baseball
win at the 1994 Asian
Games in HiroshimaChinese representation at the Games after
its athletes’ stellar performance at the 1979
Olympics secured majority IOC votes, forcing
Taiwan to change its name, flag and anthem to
continue participating.
But this wasn’t the end of the Asiad’s
political entanglements. In 1982, political
moves to permanently ban Israeli participation
saw the use of Arab oil money to buy votes for
the creation of a new organising committee,
the Olympic Council of Asia (OCA), and
create a “sporting ghetto” using votes to decide
which states could participate, Vyv Simson
and Andrew Jennings claim in their 1992
publication Dishonored Games: Corruption,
Money & Greed at the Olympics.
Sheik Fahd, president of the Kuwait
National Olympic Committee, was elected
as OCA president. But his failure to develop
the Asiad during an eight-year term, the
expulsion of Iraq from the Games for its
invasion of Kuwait, and the controversial
election of Fahd’s son as OCA president –
using, Simson and Jennings suggest, purchased
votes – proved too much for the East Asian
states, which created an independent East
Asian Games in 1993 to avoid “unjustified
domination by the Arabs”, general secretary
of the South Korean National Olympic
Committee, Man Lip Choy, said in an
interview with the authors. “[The OCA] is just
a monarchy now, that’s exactly what it is,”
Man adds. “This is the dirty business of
power politics.”
Eventually, the Kuwaiti government’s
interference in sport matters earned it a similar
fate to Indonesia in 2015: suspension from the
Olympic movement, including the Asiad, and
the right to house OCA headquarters. The
following year, five regional OCA offices were
opened in Thailand, Kazakhstan, India, China
and Switzerland. Negotiations between Kuwait
and the OCA are still in progress today, though
its athletes may participate in the upcoming
Asiad as Independent Olympic Athletes – the
same treatment given to Russian athletes
after the country was banned following an
investigation into state-sponsored doping.
Exactly 56 years have passed since Indonesia
last hosted the Asian Games. And in Gelora
Bung Karno Main Stadium come August,
Jakarta’s athletes will rise to take the Olympic
Oath at the start of the Games, just like in- At that moment, will the political players
shaping the Games behind the scenes also
remember their obligations to honour the
Olympic charter and separate geopolitics from
sportsmanship? One must hope so. Otherwise,
the Asiad will never reach the simple – but
politically difficult – goal the founder of the
modern Olympics, Baron Pierre de Coubertin,
set in 1919: “All sports for all people.” ag
PHOTO © THE ASAHI SHIMBUN/GETTY IMAGES