Friday, February 21, 5:30 to 7 pm.  Skylight room

The Olympic Games have become the world’s premier multi-sport event, a jamboree of athleticism and international goodwill. Yet the Olympics are not only the apex of global sport, but also a corporate leviathan, with commercial sponsors lining up in hopes of benefiting from the Games’ glow. The International Olympic Committee boasts an Olympic Charter rippling with lofty principles, while behind the scenes it choreographs pitiless politics and brute economics.

The 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia—which run from 7 through 23 February—present a special set of circumstances. The Games are Russian President Vladimir Putin’s pet project. Putin and the Duma have passed an array of laws designed to squelch dissent. Displacement, environmental destruction, LGBT persecution, and worker exploitation have been rampant. Meanwhile, the five-ring price tag has spiraled from $10.3 billion to more than $51 billion, making Sochi the most expensive Olympics ever. The Games are taking place in a geopolitical tinderbox, with terrorism a persistent threat and cries of genocide from the Circassian population (Adyghes) that was displaced 150 years ago by Tsar Alexander II.

In the jaunty hubbub of the Olympic moment, the people actually affected by the Games—workers, city residents, taxpayers, LGBT people in Russia—are often brushed aside and ignored. In this panel, Jules Boykoff and Jane Buchanan re-focus our attention on the grizzled underbelly of the Sochi Games. They will also consider how one can appreciate the grace, power, and beauty of high-level sport while simultaneously critiquing the political-economic and anti-rights edifice that has grown around it. The Olympic Movement can do better—this panel will discuss what can be done to help the International Olympic Committee live up to the high standards it lays out in its own Charter.

Jules Boykoff is the author of Activism and the Olympics: Dissent at the Games in Vancouver and London (Rutgers University Press 2014) and Celebration Capitalism and the Olympic Games (Routledge 2013). His writing on Olympic politics has appeared recently in the Guardian, New Left Review, the New York Times, Al Jazeera, and Dissent Magazine. He represented the US Olympic soccer team in international competition, and currently teaches political science at Pacific University in Oregon, USA. www.julesboykoff.org