Protests have always been a part of the Olympic Games. Despite Rule 50 of the IOC Charter, which states, “No kind of demonstration or political religious or racial propaganda is permitted in any Olympic sites, venues or other areas,“ contestants and the public alike have participated in Olympic protests since all the way back in 1906. From the increased gentrification, police surveillance, and environmental destruction of the host cities to the global catastrophes happening worldwide that the Olympics attempts to ignore – the Games is a hotbed for political turmoil and demonstration.    

Currently, a number of protests and strikes have been planned ahead of this year’s Paris Olympics. Earlier this week, the Paris Airports Union filed a notice to go on strike on the day of the Paris Olympics Opening Ceremony over pay and pro-Palestine campaigners are also planning to stage a protest at the stands of the Parc des Princes stadium when the Israeli football team play Mali. Additionally, last week, hundreds of dancers threatened to disrupt the Olympic Games’ Opening Ceremony over inequalities in pay and housing conditions, but have now reached an agreement, according to the union representing the dancers.

While many believe the Olympic Games is not a space for politics, the sporting event is not a neutral affair. Here are some of the most significant protests that have happened inside and outside of the Olympics over the last 118 years: 

1906: Track and field athlete Peter O’Connor scales a flagpole to wave an Irish flag

At the 1906 Olympic Games held in Athens, Irish track and field athlete Peter O’Connor entered the games to represent Ireland. However, new rules implemented later that year only allowed athletes nominated by an Olympic Committee to compete. At the time, Ireland did not have a committee. As a result, the British Olympic Council claimed O’Connor as their own, essentially erasing his Irish identity during a time when Irish people were fighting to establish an independent republic free from British rule. 

In protest of this erasure, O’Connor scaled a 20-foot flagpole in the stadium and waved a green flag with the words “Erin Go Bragh”, meaning “Ireland Forever”. His co-athlete, Con Leahy, distracted the Greek authorities. O’Connor was not expelled or put on probation for his act of protest, but it was frowned upon. Two days later, he won gold in three competitions, and after each one, O’Conner waved his “Ireland Forever” flag.

1964: Yoko Ono uses performance art to protest the Tokyo Olympics

While the 1964 Tokyo Olympics is often considered a “watershed moment in Japan’s reinvention of itself” after World War Two, the event had its critics. One of its most famous critics was Yoko Ono, who protested alongside several artists and collectives to disrupt the “superficial peace and happy atmosphere” the government was trying to create in Tokyo.

Despite experiencing economic prosperity after the war, the then-conservative government insisted on enforcing a policy of austerity, leading to a severe housing crisis across Japan. In protest, Japanese artists and collectives staged public events from crawling rituals to naked marching through the city. Ono’s participation in the protests were subtler, laying flowers on the street as a symbol of loneliness and isolation within Japanese society. Nobody picked them up, including a little girl who saw the flowers and returned to step on one. 

1968: Civil rights activists propose the Olympic Project for Human Rights 

The image of John Carlos and Tommie Smith raising their fists in the air while on the first and third-place podiums during the men’s 200-metre award ceremony has come to define the 1968 Summer Olympics, but few are aware that their protest came from a larger initiative: the Olympic Project for Human Rights. Led by sociologist and civil rights activist Dr Harry Edwards, the project’s goal was to protest racial segregation in the United States and apartheid in South Africa. Top atheletes such as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Muhammad Ali were vocal supporters of the initiative.

The project encouraged Black athletes to boycott the Olympic Games until five conditions were met: that South Africa be uninvited to the summer games; that Ali’s world heavyweight boxing title be restored; that Avery Brundage step down as president of the International Olympic Committee; that more Black coaches be hired, especially for Olympics teams; and, lastly, that the New York Athletic Club be boycotted for its membership policy prohibiting Puerto Rican, Black and Jewish members.

A number of their conditions were met in the years that followed. 

1976: African nations boycott the Montreal Olympics to protest South Africa's apartheid regime

25 countries in Africa boycotted the 1976 Olympic Games in Montreal after the International Olympic Committee (IOC) refused to ban New Zealand from the Games. Their outrage originated in the fact that New Zealand’s national rugby team had recently toured South Africa, a country that had been banned from the Olympics because of its apartheid policies.

The IOC did not ban New Zealand from participating in the Games, but the boycott did have a significant impact, with countries such as Kenya withdrawing just hours before the opening ceremony. The mass protest brought worldwide attention to the apartheid policies in South Africa. 

2021: The online Tokyo Olympic protests

Originally scheduled in 2020 but postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2020 Tokyo Olympics took place in 2021. What was presented as a post-COVID celebration was met with backlash by those in Japan as the COVID-19 pandemic was not over (and still isn’t). When the Olympic games came to Japan in 2021, Tokyo was in a state of emergency because of COVID, with only a small fraction of Japan’s population being vaccinated at the time.

COVID was not the only reason people were motivated to boycott the Tokyo Olympics. The government evicted the elderly from their homes in order to build the stadium, new anti-terrorism initiatives were put in place during the games which strengthened police powers, rainforests in Malaysia and Indonesia were destroyed to build sporting venues in Tokyo, and, rather than putting money towards recovering from the 2011 Fukushima disaster, state resources went to the Olympics.

Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, a number of protests (but not all) were conducted online. For example, Japanese nurses took to social media, tweeting with a hashtag that translates to “nurses opposed to being dispatched to the Olympics”, in response to the Tokyo organisers’ request for 500 nurses to assist during the Games. One nurse wrote, “We are not disposable pawns.”