Congressman John Lewis and the 2022 Winter Olympics

For decades, the Olympics has been an informal contest between democracies and dictatorships. Sometimes dictatorships win more medals than democracies, but that is not the only point to the Olympics.

When Nazi Germany won the Summer Olympics in 1936, it did not improve their appeal in the slightest degree. From 1952 to 1988, the Soviet Union won the most gold medals in the Summer Olympics seven times and another seven times in the Winter Olympics.

Even the People’s Republic of China won the most gold medals once in the 2008 Summer Olympics. The United States has won the most gold medals 18 times in the Summer Olympics.

The importance of this global event provides people in closed societies a chance to see the world. When Chinese athletes compete abroad, at a minimum, they can tell their stories of what it is like to visit a free country.

Athletes from communist countries have viewed the Olympics itself as a golden opportunity to defect. Any time prominent athletes in communist countries defected, it was powerful blow to the communist system.

Here are just a few examples.

At the 1948 Summer Olympics, the coach of the Czechoslovakian gymnastic team, Marie Provazníková, defected to the United States. The Czechoslovakian team won the gold medal, but their coach won her freedom.

When the Soviets invaded Hungary in 1956, approximately half of the Hungarian Olympic team defected to the West at the 1956 Summer Olympics. During the 1964 Winter Olympics, East German Ute Gähler defected.

Not every Olympic competitor could defect during the Olympics.

For example, Oleg Protopopov, and his late wife Ludmilla Belousova, won the Olympics twice (1964 and 1968) in figure skating in the pairs skating. They defected to Switzerland in 1979.

Perhaps the most famous defector to compete in the Olympics was Romanian gymnast Nadia Comăneci. In 1989, Nadia and six other Romanian athletes fled across the border between Hungary and Austria.

Her coaches Béla and Márta Károlyi had already defected to the United States in 1981.

Visiting places that have more freedom does not just inspire people to leave. It can also inspire people to go into politics and advance human rights in their own country.

I was recently reading John Lewis’ memoir Walking with the Wind. He explains that his political awakening occurred during his first trip to Buffalo, New York, in June 1951.

This was his first trip outside of the South. John Lewis was only 11 years old.

John Lewis’ mother had two brothers who moved to Buffalo. His Uncle Otis drove him from Troy, Alabama, to Buffalo.

Having grown up in the South, John Lewis already knew that most of the hotels and restaurants would not serve his family.

His uncle and aunt had to pack their car with tons of food for the trip knowing that they could not just stop for dinner anywhere they wanted. Congressman Lewis wrote in his memoirs:

“Arriving in Buffalo – seventeen hours after we’d left the front yard of my Alabama home – was like stepping into a movie, into a strange, otherworldly place. It was so busy, almost frantic, the avenues filled with cars, the sidewalks crowded with people, black and white alike, mixing together as if it was the most natural thing in the world. What a contrast to sleepy, segregated little Troy. When we reached my uncle O.C.’s and Dink’s house, I couldn’t believe it – they had white people living next door to them. On both sides.”

This would inspire John Lewis to work with Dr. Martin Luther King in the civil rights movement and he even worked on Bobby Kennedy's campaign for president in 1968.

In an interview, Lewis said that he was talking with Bobby Kennedy in his room on the fifth floor of the Ambassador Hotel just a few minutes before he was assassinated. They were discussing the election returns.

At Bobby Kennedy’s funeral, Sen. Ted Kennedy invoked idealism of the '60s in his eulogy to his brother, “As he said many times, in many parts of this nation, to those he touched and who sought to touch him: ‘Some men see things as they are and say why. I dream things that never were and say why not.’”

The Olympic games were designed to inspire people to believe that human beings can do extraordinary things. They have also inspired people to believe that they deserve better.

If these games can inspire a Russian or Chinese version of John Lewis, we can describe these games as an extraordinary success. Putin understands the power of the Olympics.

It is no coincidence that Russia sent troops to Georgia around the 2008 Olympics and Ukraine right after the 2014 Olympics. That pattern has held in 2022.