By Susan Brownell
Despite the fact that nationalism and national rivalries seem to be the centerpiece of the Olympics, the reality behind the scenes is transnational, now more so than ever before. As a China scholar, I like to surprise Americans about the interconnections between the US and China. For example, NBA basketball player Kyle Anderson was invited to become a Chinese citizen in 2023 in hopes that he could help China qualify for the Olympics (it didn’t). Anderson’s maternal grandmother grew up in Jamaica and had a Chinese father. This “heritage” made Kyle appealing to the Chinese, since China’s citizenship law is very restrictive and gives preferences to ethnic Chinese, making it difficult for China to join the growing global trend of athletic citizenship-swapping until exceptions were made ahead of the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing.
On the other hand, the large numbers of Chinese table tennis players representing other nations spurred the International Table Tennis Federation to create a policy to restrict them. Even so, in Rio in 2016, 38 players born in China represented 21 other countries. A recent tightening of the age limit means that 20-year old Australian naturalized citizen Yangzi Liu, a medal contender, has been banned from this Olympic Games as well as the next in 2028. The US women’s team members are all children of table tennis-playing immigrants, two from China and one from Taiwan.
The Paris Olympics is the third to have a Refugee Olympic Team, allowed because the athletes are “stateless,” and thus (it is claimed) don’t violate the Olympic Charter, the IOC’s constitution, which now requires that national Olympic committees must represent sovereign states recognized by the UN. Fourteen of the 36 members are from Iran (4 are women). Afghanistan, Syria, Sudan, Ethiopia, and Eritrea also have multiple members. There’s even one from Cuba.
Among the 594 US team athletes will be dozens who are foreign-born, such as judoka Maria Laborde (Cuba), or are children of immigrants, such as gymnast Sunisa Lee (Laos). Weini Kelati, who will compete in the 10,000-meter race, sought asylum in the US when she was only 17 and had the rare opportunity to leave Eritrea to take part in the World Junior Championships. Philadelphia 76ers star Joel Embiid, born in Cameroon and holding French and U.S. citizenship, finally decided to play for the U.S. because Cameroon didn’t qualify, and he felt that relationships between France and Cameroon were not good, while he had lived in the U.S. since he was sixteen and his son was born here.
And there will be multiple athletes who are US citizens, most of them born and raised in the US, who will be representing other countries, including 6 female gymnasts and one male, representing Bulgaria, Colombia, Haiti, Syria, and the Philippines (which will be represented by three female NCAA stars). One of the biggest track and field stars, multiple world record-setting pole vaulter Mondo Duplantis, grew up in Louisiana as the child of an American pole vaulter and Swedish heptathlete. He has represented Sweden since he was a youth athlete. He will not get a lot of coverage from US media since he’s not representing the US and so doesn’t count as an “American” athlete, even though English is his native tongue and he had to learn Swedish later in life.
If you peel back the illusion of national identities that pervades Olympic Games, you find that the premier stage for the display of nations and nationalism is actually a wonderful illustration of how blurry the lines between nations really are.
Susan Brownell is a Curator’s Distinguished professor of anthropology at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.