As Olympics Approach, Jill Pilgrim Analyzes Sports Protests

Jill Pilgrim, co-founder and principal of the Precise Advisory Group, has been blogging on sports issues at the Precise website. In a recent piece, she focused on the topic of "Run A Mile in Their Sneakers: Olympic Games & Political Protest." Pushing off from an article in The Nation magazine, Pilgrim writes,

The Dave Zirin article, “After 44 Years, It’s Time Brent Musburger apologized to John Carlos and Tommie Smith” —http://bit.ly/NzlD34 — gave voice to a myriad of issues and sub-issues that surround the quadrennial (now bi-annual) celebration of “selected” sports that is the Olympic Games.  These include: the exploitation of athletes’ talent for the financial gain of a small cadre of elite business executives and their business enterprises, the unavoidable focus that an Olympic Games brings to the issues of human rights, discrimination and politic power and, most of all, the failure of international organizations such as the United Nations and the International Olympic Committee to achieve their lofty goals such as “[t]o develop friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples” or to prohibit “[a]ny form of discrimination with regard to a country or a person on grounds of race, religion, politics, gender or otherwise”.