Hamburg – The unrest in Tibet took the International Olympic Committee by surprise and it could only react with crisis management to the rising tensions around the Beijing Games, IOC president Jacques Rogge said in an interview.
But the Olympic supremo also told Saturday’s edition of Germany’s Sueddeutsche Zeitung that the Games would have been a disaster had the International Olympic Committee openly criticised hosts China over human rights issues instead of conducting a silent diplomacy.
‘We achieved the maximum. The Games would have been a fiasco if we had dealt more aggressively with China,’ said Rogge four months after the Olympics in the Chinese capital.
‘We believe that we delivered a few very clear messages to the Chinese. They acted upon some and not upon others. That’s their sovereignty.
‘We are no sovereign organisation, but it was clear that the IOC had to deal with China as if it was a government. You you work with a government whose support you need you can’t be in a state of war with it.’
‘There was crisis management … We knew there would be criticism (when the IOC elected Beijing). But no one could foresee the outbreak of violence in Lhasa on March 10.
‘That changed the conditions, set the world against the torch relay and against China.
‘We were surprised that the protests came from the Tibetans who are normally non-violent. You can’t change the course of history and we definitely underestimated the bloody unrest. From then on we were no longer the actors, we had to react,’ Rogge said.
The IOC was criticised for its role around the Games, but Rogge said that he also had a responsibility for the athletes. He named the completion of the torch relay a success as well as China’s new foreign media rules and its environmental improvements.
Rogge said the future of the torch relay remained uncertain due to the protests which also occurred around the 2006 Winter Games relay.
