In Olympics past I’ve written and reported on the notion of an Olympic Truce. I consider myself a peaceful guy. Some organizing committees have taken the ancient concept seriously.

BOCOG and its backers in the Chinese government don’t seem to. Nor, apparently, has Russia. With its recent assault on neighbor Georgia, the Russians shattered the traditional, dreamed-for Olympic peace.

Athletes are talking about the Russia-Georgia conflict even as they face each other on the field of play, even as the IOC urges not to mix politics and sports.

Wednesday morning, a Georgian beach volleyball pair beat a Russian pair as many eyes watched. There was no apparent tension and Cristine Santanna, one of the Georgia players, who is a Braziliam émigré, even embraced the Russians after the match.

“I wanted to show that the Olympics are above politics,” she was quoted by the Olympic News Service as saying. “I wanted to display a sign of peace.”

But Around the Rings, the Olympic insider newsletter, quoted her as also saying, ““I really felt like a Georgian . .  I don’t want to get political, because this is Olympic Games, but in my heart, I wanted to beat Russia for sure.”

I remember that at the Lillehammer Winter Games organizers were quite committed to a truce in the Yugoslavian war during the winter of 1994. They didn’t succeed.  But there was a U.N.-sponsored one-day stoppage of hostilities in the war in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina. On that day, 10,000 children were vaccinated.
Then the war resumed.

In 2004, Greece, with its traditional ties to the original Olympics, set up an office and appointed a high-ranking government official to lead its effort to promote piece during the Games.

“You can’t fight and play at the same time,“ Stavros Lambrinidis, the then-director of the International Olympic Truce Center, told me in 2004 in Athens. “You shouldn’t send some of your youth to play and some of your youth to die.“

According to Tony Perrottet, author of “The Naked Olympics: The True Story of the Ancient Games,“ the Olympic truce of antiquity - known as “ekecheiria” in Greek - banned military attacks, judicial cases and executions during the Games and for as much as two months surrounding them. The goal then: safe passage for athletes and spectators.

Generally, during the 1,200 years of the ancient Olympics, the truce held.

But times have changed. In July, activist/speedskater Joey Cheek called for a 55-day Olympic truce in Darfur. The UN had passed its obligatory Olympic Truce resolution last fall. China backed it. Cheek wanted China, which is supplying weapons to the Sudan regime that is periodically attacking people in Darfur, to do more.

Coincidence or not, two weeks after Cheek made his plea, his visa to China was revoked.

And Wednesday, after a Georgian defeated a Russian in judo, an IOC media officer prohibited reporters from asking “political” questions.

I remember something that Lambrinidis told me four years ago about leveraging the Olympics to facilitate world peace. He used, of course, a sports analogy.

“This is a marathon,“ he said of the end to war. “It’s not a 100-yard dash.“

Posted by Jay Weiner, Olympics correspondent in • Olympics
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