winning press freedom conference

What I Learned About Press Freedom at the Olympic Games
By Henrikas Yushkiavitshus

Even though the IOC claims that the Olympic Games are not political events, they do usually have political connotations. My first Olympic Games were Mexico in 1968. Already, during the year leading up to those Games, I discovered that some broadcasters were more welcome to the Olympic venue than others.

I was then the Director of the Technical Center of the International Radio and Television Organization in Prague and needed to go to Mexico to sign an agreement with the Mexican Organizing Committee for Intervision, the international TV organization of the Warsaw pact countries, on broadcasting of the Games to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.

I was told at the Mexican Embassy in Prague that with a Soviet Diplomatic passport, it would take six month to get a visa, and then only after giving my fingerprints.

The signing ceremony together with Eurovision was scheduled for a week later. So I answered that there was no need for fingerprints and called Henry Haar, the Secretary-General of the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) in Geneva, asking him to sign the agreement also on behalf of Intervision. I said I would mail him the necessary powers of attorney.

To my astonishment, the next day, an employee of the Mexican Embassy turned up at my office with my visa and no further reference to fingerprints.

That was the result of a most impressive lesson in professional solidarity. I found out later that the President of EBU and Director-General of the BBC, Sir Hugh Green, had telegrammed the Mexican Organizing Committee informing them that if within 24 hours Mr. Yushkiavitshus did not get his visa, the Eurovision delegation would not go to Mexico either, meaning that nobody in Europe would see the Mexico Olympic Games.

The good cooperation between Eurovision and Intervision, lasted for many years, despite the Cold War.

In Mexico, things were not going smoothly either. A week before the Olympic Games, more than 200 demonstrators were killed by the police, and ABC did not know, until the very last moment, if it could cover the Games or not.

And during the Games, two American sportsmen were punished for giving the Black Power salute at an award ceremony.

The Czech gymnast Vera Caslavska, who won four gold and two silver medals, would turn her back on the Soviet flag during the award ceremony in protest against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968. She was given a very difficult life after her return home.

The tragedy of the Munich Olympic Games is well known. There were also political overtones before the Olympics. I was negotiating the license fee and technical facilities for Intervision. We had only $300,000 to pay for everything. Even though the dollar was then much stronger than today, it was still very little money, compared, for example to the $10 million that Eurovision was paying.

West Germany’s Chancellor Willy Brandt was promoting his policy of “Opening to the East,” and I told my German colleagues that if they wanted to change the image of Munich in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe from that of the city of Hitler in beer halls to that of an Olympic city, it was they who should be paying us to promote that new image, not we who should be paying them.

My German colleagues were thunderstruck by those arguments, and we settled on a price of $300,000. And the cooperation we got from the German side was excellent.

Twenty-six nations boycotted the Montreal Olympic Games after New Zealand, whose national rugby team had recently played in South Africa, was allowed to compete even though the Apartheid regime of South Africa had been banned from the Olympics since 1964. Another small incident: a Soviet diver fell in love with an American girl and did not return to the Olympic village. Excited Soviet officials came to me and asked that I get the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. to air an appeal from the diver’s mother. We had very good cooperation with CBC and the appeal was broadcast, but the lovestruck Soviet diver returned to Russia much later.

I got my white hair from the Moscow Olympic Games of 1980. I was then the Vice Chairman of the Soviet State Television and Radio Committee, Gostelradio, and was given responsibility for the media coverage of the Olympic Games. I was made responsible for everything -- the construction of a new Olympic TV center, the development and production of color TV and radio equipment (we could not buy it because of the embargo over Afghanistan), and reaching agreements with foreign companies on the world coverage of the Games. It was a project for more than $1 billion.

Let’s focus, however, on the issue of freedom of the press before and during the Olympics. In Moscow, we could not use foreign producers and cameramen, but we tried to train our people and, to that end, we organized many meetings and seminars for our staff, inviting foreign television journalists and producers.

It was not easy to persuade the Soviet authorities to issue the necessary visas without delays. Once I was told that an Israeli journalist, Alex Gilady was categorically denied a visa. I called the Foreign Office and they told me that it was not them but the KGB who denied the visa. I called the KGB General Ivan Pavlovich Abramov who was responsible for journalist visas. The general told me that there was no question of giving a visa to Alex Gilady because he was from Mossad, the Israeli secret service. I replied that if Gilady was indeed from Mossad, he should be their target and they, the KGB, should invite him to dinner and pour vodka into him. But if he was not, then it was our business. If Gilady was denied a visa, I said I would have to resign, and I told the KGB general my Mexican visa story.

Alex Gilady got his visa. Today, he is a member of the International Olympic Committee. The biggest headache was the boycott of the Moscow Olympics because of the Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan. It was a disaster both for the sportsmen and for world television. We had prepared, for example, excellent technical facilities for NBC. It had paid us $87 million but never got to use them.

Sixty teams boycotted the Moscow Games. Of the Western countries, only Britain, France, Italy and Sweden participated. When some American athletes challenged their President’s decision, Jimmy Carter threatened to cancel the passports of any of them who went to the Games.

NBC did have some regular news staff in Moscow but the US rules meant they could only broadcast general news, not sports events. During the preparation of the technical facilities that NBC wound up not being allowed to use, the staffs of Soviet television and of NBC had in fact developed not only close cooperation but real friendship.

During the Olympic Games, there were some problems with the Soviet security people. In the TV centre, they set the metal detectors to such a high degree of sensitivity that an alarm would go off even if somebody had one metal tooth. The first three days, this resulted in endless queues trying to enter the TV Centre.

Just an hour before the Opening Ceremony, the Head of the Eurovision team called me saying that security would let only one person per media outlet in as a sports commentator, even if the plans called for three.

The situation improved only after I threatened the Minister of Interior that the Eurovision commentators would not cover the Opening Ceremony and he would have to explain to the world audience why that was.

There was no censorship. It was technically impossible anyway because foreign broadcasters could produce programs themselves and go directly on the air from their studios in Moscow, and also from Estonia, where the sailing events took place.

The boycott of the Olympic Games in Moscow had a negative impact on the Olympic Games in Los Angeles. The Soviets decided to boycott the L.A. Games. I participated in the meeting of the Soviet Olympic Committee when that was decided. Vitaly Smirnow, a member of the IOC, and I voted against the boycott, but the Soviet press reported that the decision was unanimous.

The Central Committee of the Communist Party explained that it was not revenge for the boycott of the Moscow Olympic Games but that emigrant groups in Los Angeles threatened terrorist attacks against Soviet sportsmen. There were indeed letters with such threats, but I’m not sure that they were not “arranged for” from Moscow. As a member of the IOC Television Committee, I had visited Los Angeles and had met with the local security services. They were well prepared to protect the Soviet team.

Of course, there were fools on both sides. One Los Angeles newspaper published an article saying that most Soviet sportsmen were KGB agents. Some real KGB officers used that assertion as an added argument to justify the boycott of the L.A. Olympics.

I suggested that it would be very easy to solve the problem: The young gymnasts upon landing at L.A. airport could leave the airplane with the slogan on their Olympic uniforms -- “I am a KGB agent.” My humor was not appreciated.

I will not talk about other Olympic Games. Let me just mention Seoul as an example that the Olympic Games can promote the opening of a country to the outside world.

Since the protests have erupted in Tibet on 10 March, Chinese authorities have attempted to prevent information about that development from reaching both domestic and international audiences. Journalists have either been expelled from or denied access to regions where protests happened.

There have been statements by public figures calling for a boycott of the Beijing Games.

If you really want human rights and press freedom in a given country where in your opinion there are problems, do not remember to call for rights and freedoms just before Olympic Games, but fight for them every day, as so many journalists in China and elsewhere have been doing for years. Some of them like Burmese journalist U Win Tin have been in jail for many years, losing their health in the process, but politicians in the world outside have been silent about it.

Very often today, human rights and press freedom is much less important to politicians than selling Boeings, Airbuses or MIGs.

In my opinion every Olympics is a chance to reinforce press freedom and human rights in the
country where the Games take place, but calls for boycotts of the Olympic Games are cheap
ways to seek publicity at the cost of the sportsmen.

Media professionals of the host country are caught in a bind -- under pressure from their own government and politicians on one side, and from the world press, their colleagues, on the other. Clever cooperation between host media and visiting media seems to me to be the most productive way around the issue.

The host country media must have enough courage to explain to their politicians that the only way to counteract any negative publicity resulting from press freedom is to give media more freedom. An atmosphere of real freedom is in and of itself good publicity.