Who doesn’t love an international sporting tournament? Silently, they creep up on us until out of the blue you have to deal with them and make the best of it, like birthdays or tax deadlines. My preferred solution is to entirely dismiss my near-total ignorance of sporting matters and happily posture as an instant expert. Even today, I can still quote you chapter and verse on why Romania was robbed — robbed! I tell you — of the 1994 World Cup, or if you prefer perform world-class mansplaining of Kenya’s middle-distance track strategy. 

Now, it’s curtain up on the Winter Olympics: cue boggle-eyed wonder over all the crazy niche sports (luge rules, anyone?) and archive clips of Eddie the Eagle. Except, this one’s different. The Games are taking place in Beijing, and as such are a showcase for the assertion of state power and prestige by the iniquitous, totalitarian regime that is the government of China.

None of us can pretend we don’t know what’s happening away from the ceremonial glitz and sporting action. From Hong Kong to Tibet, aspirations to democracy and freedom of expression are mercilessly repressed as they so often have been in the bloody history of the People’s Republic. The terror is enhanced with the full power of modern surveillance and communications technology to create a living nightmare far beyond even the bleakest imaginings of George Orwell.

Worst of all are the atrocities being inflicted on the Uighur people, whose desire for autonomy and wish to practise Islam or even speak their own language are brutally stamped out with chilling echoes of the darkest chapters of the 20th century. Children are separated from parents; more than a million people have been herded into “education” camps; women are forcibly sterilised; there are numerous reports of torture, rape, prisoners kept in shackles, and murder, of organs harvested from the living and the dead. 

Uighur campaigners have called for a boycott of the Games. Their cry has been answered with a “diplomatic boycott”. That means Britain — along with the US, Australia, Lithuania and a few other countries — will not be sending government officials, in a play that comes straight out of the dictionary of utterly meaningless gestures.

Meanwhile, the pomp and ceremony and bread and circuses will go on and the corporate sponsors’ brightly coloured logos will be festooned at every venue and press call. On the BBC, the chirpily upbeat Clare Balding and her squad of slick presenters will provide faultlessly professional commentary for hour after hour each day for more than two weeks.

As viewers gorge themselves, the regime can burnish its image and puff out its chest: the international community has fully embraced China even now, amid the worsening crimes of recent years, which it seems we have collectively decided do not warrant meaningful censure. China has hardly been cowed ever since President Xi Jinping took power; but after this the authorities will be emboldened to still greater cruelty and can act in the certain knowledge that the world does not care, or at least not enough to pass up on the entertainment and opportunity for commerce, which is to say: not at all.

These Games are a horror show that taint everything they touch, and the deafening sound we can all hear are the echoes of 1936 rising to the pitch of a klaxon. Six months before the world gathered in the Third Reich’s Berlin for the Olympics and the British team raised their arms in a Hitler salute just to be polite, the Winter Games in Bavaria had already proven that the international order could tolerate Nazism’s evil, so long as a discreet veil was draped over its worst excesses for the duration of the event. 

Signs proclaiming “Fur Juden Verboten” were temporarily taken down; they even found room in the German hockey team for a token Jew, the celebrated star player Rudi Ball (whose reward was to be allowed to emigrate with his family). In the months before, there had been much debate in Britain as to whether our Olympians should be taking part until it was decided to ignore the Jewish community’s call for a boycott and go; in retrospect we look back in disbelief, knowing what was to come in the nine years that followed.

We can only shudder now at the prospect of what China’s regime might do in the years to come, at home and abroad. How will history judge us? How will we judge ourselves, as we look back to 2022 and wonder at how we could gawp at the games, and ignored the pleas of the Uighurs that we should not go?