With the 2022 Olympics coming to a close yesterday, for this show guest host Karma Chávez takes a critical look at the Beijing Games and the Olympics generally with Helen Jefferson Lenskyj, a researcher and longtime critic of what she calls the Olympic industry.

They talk about how sports are political, the Olympics as an occasion for authoritarian regimes to gloss over human rights violations, the extreme exploitation of athletes’ bodies, and why simply reforming the Games won’t work.

Helen Jefferson Lenskyj is professor emerita at the University of Toronto. She has been writing about gender and sports since the 1980s, and her critiques of the Olympics include Inside the Olympic Industry: Power, Politics and Activism (SUNY Press, 2000) and Olympic Industry Resistance: Challenging Olympic Power and Propaganda (SUNY Press, 2008). Her latest book is The Olympic Games: A Critical Approach (Emerald Publishing, 2020).

Cover image: Olympics symbol by Vusi vilanculos, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0 / filter added

 

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