ABSTRACT

The chart below illustrates some of the key risks and security challenges that have faced Olympic planners since Munich, 1972. It represents the synopsis of a more expansive and detailed investigation into Olympic threats presented in Fussey et al. (2010). Debates inevitably occur over which activities are ‘terrorist’ and to what extent they are ‘Olympic-related’. This picture is further complicated by the IOC’s insistence that the Games are free of politics (for example, Rule 51, section 3 of the IOC’s Olympic Charter compels host cities to prevent protests of any kind near Olympic cities) – an initiative that may render any political statement a simultaneous act of Olympic resistance. For the purposes of the chart below, protests that may have drawn the attention of security planners – such as those surrounding the aboriginal Lubicon land claims during Calgary, 1988, protests over socio-economic inequality and the diversion of public monies to the Salt Lake City Olympics in 2002, or the ‘No Olympics on Stolen Land’ campaign at Vancouver, 2010 – are excluded. Instead, the focus is on actors and groups whose primary objective is an act of violence or sabotage in the first instance, rather than more legitimate protest movements that may become vehicles for more physical confrontations. So what constitutes an ‘Olympic-related’ threat? In many ways this is an impossible question to answer. Complicating factors include events that have taken place in a host nation prior to a Games that have no apparent connection to the event yet still occupy their related security planning and threat assessments. The impact of attacks on two Air India flights, both originating from Canada on 23 June 1985, by extremist Sikh nationalists operating from British Colombia on security planning for the 1988 Calgary Games is an example of this dynamic. Another definitional difficulty relates to the proclaimed goals of terrorist actors. Some groups, such as the Catalan nationalists Terra Lliure or Greek leftists Revolutionary Struggle articulated clear hostility to the Olympics, whilst others were less explicit, yet had exerted a similar impact on security planning. Finally, given the importance of projecting carefully managed brand images of host cities to their global audiences, Olympic organisers have consistently downplayed any connection between the Games and those that may resist them. For example, as competitors, spectators and officials filed through Tokyo’s

Narita airport five days before the opening ceremony of the Nagano Winter Olympics, 1998, left-wing extremists fired three home-made rockets into the complex’s cargo area. Whilst Japanese authorities were quick to highlight that the perpetrators, the ‘Revolutionary Workers Association’, were protesting against Narita’s expansion and therefore not committing an Olympic-related attack (and tarnishing the Games accordingly), its temporal proximity to the event guaranteed a level of global exposure that would have been difficult to otherwise achieve. In sum, in an attempt to avoid becoming mired in definitional debates over the nature of terrorism (which are ably addressed elsewhere, for example, Silke, 2004; Hoffman, 2006) and what constitutes an ‘Olympic-related’ threat, what follows is an outline of resistance activity that gives primacy to the application of violence as first resort and was of significant concern to Olympic security planners. Aside from the prominent and much-discussed attacks at Munich and Atlanta, almost all terrorist activity surrounding the Olympics has occurred outside the

time and place of the Games, thus illustrating the importance of the spatial and temporal displacement of attacks. Amongst these, it is argued that the Seoul and Barcelona Olympiads have probably experienced the most significant intensity of displaced terrorist violence. Also notable is the diversity of groups who have used the Olympics to project their aims more broadly and increase the potency of their threat. Despite the propensity of different terrorist ideologies to influence a varied selection of targets (inter alia Drake, 1998; Fussey, 2010), the Olympics provide a ready and consistent symbolic target for a variety of groups, regardless of their ideological, operational and tactical diversity, as illustrated above. Finally, in taking a broad view of terrorist threats to the Olympics over a long period, it can be argued that, with notable exceptions, many of the groups that target them originate from the local socio-political contexts of the host nations. This marks an interesting contrast to the conspicuous internationalism of the Olympic Games. Moreover, for many, such as Euzkadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA) (targeting Barcelona, 1992, and Madrid’s bid to host the 2012 Games) and Eric Rudolph (Atlanta, 1996), the Olympics was only one episode that punctuated a much longer campaign. These threats are presented as follows: