By Mary-Anne Toy
Beijing, August 6 – THE head of the Australian Olympic Committee has pledged that Australian athletes at the Beijing Games next year will be free to express their opinion on sensitive topics such as China’s human rights record and Tibetan independence.
The assurance from John Coates followed a report that athletes would be gagged from making political comment.
Under the committee’s Olympic team agreement – which is compulsory for all 500 athletes to sign if they want to compete – athletes are permitted to comment only on their own events and sport. A separate International Olympic Committee bylaw, included in the Australian team agreement, bans any “kind of demonstration or political, religious or racial propaganda at any Olympic sites, venues or other areas”.
Mr Coates, speaking in Beijing yesterday, denied there was any attempt to gag athletes.
Mr Coates said the AOC’s guidelines limited athletes to commenting only on their own performance and not on others’ performances “but they are all entitled to their opinions”.
“Certainly what we will be saying to them is that it’s best to concentrate on your competitions, and any major issues, you leave them to me as spokesman for the team,” Mr Coates said.
“But they’re entitled to have opinions and express them.”
Mr Coates said the IOC also required that no athletes be involved in any political demonstrations or protests about politics, religion or race.
Asked if any action would be taken against athletes who did speak out on political issues, Mr Coates said there would be no retribution. “I imagine you’ll all be very keen to obtain the views of our athletes and if they want to proffer those, so be it. They’re free to speak.”
Mr Coates said that if the IOC, as recommended, allowed athletes to blog on the internet for the first time at the 2008 Games, it would be pointless to try to censor athletes. The IOC Press Commission chairman, Australian Kevan Gosper, has called on the IOC to overturn its ban on blogging
Mr Coates, who is in Beijing to attend the chef de mission meeting tomorrow ahead of the one-year-to-go countdown, said Beijing’s pollution and respiratory illnesses remained Australia’s biggest concern.
