Let me start by saying that for many countries especially dictatorships, hosting an Olympiad as in Berlin 1936 or Moscow 1980, is often more about national prestige and global standing as actually winning sports medals. In fact many states who have hosted the games sought to gain gold medals in global PR biathlon as much as in track, sailing or swimming. Yet this is really the sport of fencing, political fencing , where in a deft dance of polemics, nuance, and thrust, the Beijing Games have gained new attention, if only through the grey haze of China’s pollution.

Earlier this year, the overseas route of the Olympic Torch, meant to be a warm-up for the Games, turned out to fizzle as human rights demonstrations along the route very nearly blew out the flames and the enthusiasm. Here in Paris, pro-Tibetan protesters literally assaulted the torchbearers and fanned the support for the embattled Tibetan minority in Mainland China. The overseas route of the Olympic torch resembled the path of the mythical Flying Dutchman, condemned to endlessly sail in search of a safe port of call.

At the same time many world political figures, besides ritualistically condemning China’s ongoing human rights violations, vowed to either boycott or simply avoid visiting the Summer Games. Now it’s August, and politicians being politicians, have changed their tune despite new concerns not about Tibet, but of Internet censorship! Should anyone be even remotely surprised that the Chinese communists are censoring foreign journalists and blocking internet sites? Are the Rights of Man after all, practiced by the Politburo?

France’s President Nicolas Sarkozy, one of Beijing’s bigger critics earlier this year during the Olympic Torch fiasco, will despite everything, be at the Olympic opening ceremonies, not in his capacity as President of the French Republic, but in his Euromode as President of the European Union (EU). Germany’s Angela Merkel, Britain’s Gordon Brown, and Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi will be absent from the opening extravaganza. Berlusconi stated playfully if somewhat seriously “They told me that it is 100 degrees F in Peking with lots of humidity. I’m not going.” Better the Riviera than the political haze of China?

President George W. Bush will attend the opening ceremony and spend a few days watching the sporting spectacles. While this first-ever visit of an American President to a foreign Olympiad has generated appropriate criticism, there’s also the glaring reality that for the USA to directly boycott the Games, would be a slap in the face to China, specifically the Chinese people who are nearly unanimous in their justified nationalistic pride of hosting the Games and grandstanding their country.

But before arriving in Beijing, President Bush will stopover in South Korea for an important visit aimed at closer ties between Washington and Seoul. Interestingly it’s in Seoul, the modern and prosperous South Korean capital, that there is a true Olympic saga which I personally recall so well.

In 1988, Seoul hosted the Summer Olympics. Without question the Seoul Olympics served as a grand debutante ball for the birth of a new, confident, prosperous, and increasingly democratic South Korea. The Seoul Olympics became a socio/political midwife to wider Korean democracy. Though I don’t for a moment feel the same is transpiring in Mainland China, the Games have focused global attention, and conversely forced the PRC regime, to confront its world-class pollution, allow some religious freedoms, and be on better political behavior towards the Republic of China on Taiwan.

For politicians the Olympics has all the elements of political fencing. There’s a very thin line indeed for foreign leaders to go to Beijing and seemingly kowtow before the political regime’s Marxist Mandarins and only then to carefully raise the issue of human rights. Still to actively snub the Games and insult the nationalist pride of the Chinese people, would appear even more counterproductive. Yet, given the pollution and the haze there’s always the Riviera.