Proponents say the Games help create mutual understanding and international peace. Our willingness to accept this lofty idealism is one reason why recent corruption scandals, doping controversies and rampant commercialism have done so little to dent the popularity of the Games. Critics, on the other hand, claim that contests such as the Olympics exacerbate conflict. In reality the Olympics, in their own small way, do help promote peace. But defenders too often cite the wrong reason.
Proponents say the Olympics create international harmony because the Games are apolitical.
But the Games aren't apolitical at all. Politics are inseparable from the Games, and nationalism is a big part of what has made the Olympics such a huge global success. For defenders of the Olympics, occurrences such as the American-led boycott of the 1980 Moscow Games and the murder of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Games are rare political intrusions onto the terrain of sport. But politics have pervaded the Games from the beginning. It's a myth that Pierre de Coubertin, the French aristocrat who founded the modern Olympics in 1896, intended to have athletes participate as individuals, not as representatives of their nations.