Teepen: Human rights and Beijing's Olympic hustle

Those were some swell Olympics in Beijing. There was much exciting sport. Records were broken; many records. The opening ceremony was about as spectacular an event as you are likely ever to see. China got every bit of the public relations boost that it spent $40 billion for.

Of course, even the greatest of accomplishments and moments turn up a few soreheads at their margins. Thus the case of Wu Dianyuan, 79, and Wang Xiuying, 77.

Wu and Wang have had a beef with the Chinese authorities ever since the government took their decidedly modest homes in 2001 for a redevelopment scheme near the Olympic venues. The women were promised either apartments in new buildings or financial compensation.

Neither, they say, has materialized, and the two are living in ramshackle quarters on the capital city's shabby fringe. They decided to take their complaint to the world. To secure the Olympics, Chinese authorities promised the International Olympic Committee that they would lighten up.

Oh, China would keep good civic order, of course, but the usual political repression would be lifted, at least for the duration. And, in fact, three protest sites were set aside for demonstrators and a simple permit process was set up.

Seventy-seven permit applications were made. None was granted. At least six of the applicants were arrested. Others – no one seems to know how many – simply disappeared, for how long or where to are anybody's guess.

The police and courts were especially fed up with the two old women, who had been pestering them for years. The two were sentenced to a year of punishment labor, by way of their "re-education." Both walk with canes. Wang is blind in one eye.

At last report, the sentence was being held in abeyance, on condition of the women's good behavior, but with the international press decamping and the world's attention turning elsewhere, who knows what is in store for them. Probably not apartments in new buildings.

IOC President Jacques Rogge has pronounced himself disappointed that China didn't live up better to its pledge to greatly improve its human rights demeanor for the games. Disappointed, but probably not very surprised. The Olympic committee is an old hand at living with such disappointments.

The 1936 Berlin Olympics proceeded untroubled that Hitler was obviously rearming for another war, that the Nazis had enacted their anti-Jewish Nuremberg Laws the year before and that the world had seen, in the classic, chilling propaganda film "Triumph of the Will," the German fascist mania in full strut and rant.

The 1980 Moscow Olympics paid no official heed to the Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan the year before. To their credit, some 60 nations did sit those games out, in a boycott promoted by President Jimmy Carter by way of rebuke to the Kremlin. The IOC deplored their gesture.

The committee that holds the Olympic franchise loves to rattle on about "Olympism," which means – well, healing the world through sport, or something like that.

In truth, the Olympics are a huge money hustle, with corporate and national recognition and apparent prestige on the block and the bidding in billions of dollars. By all means, let the games go on. They do no obvious harm. The athletics are terrific. And the Madames Wu and Wang were past competing age anyway.

Tom Teepen is a columnist for Cox Newspapers. He is based in Atlanta.