I’m a big track fan, which is why one of my all-time favorite sports memories is watching from a nose-bleed seat at the Los Angeles Coliseum as Britain’s Sebastian Coe won the 1984 men’s 1,500-meter Olympic finals. But I also recall my excitement being dampened just a tad by knowing that Coe’s win was diminished by the absence that day of world-class Soviet bloc runners.

You’ll remember that President Jimmy Carter had pulled the United States out of the 1980 Moscow Olympics to protest the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (sadly, almost 40 years later Afghanistan remains an open-ended U.S. foreign policy concern). More than 60 other nations joined the U.S.-led boycott.

As payback, the USSR pulled its athletes out of the following Summer Olympics, the Los Angeles games. More than a dozen other communist nations joined that boycott, hence the absence of many quality athletes and, in my mind, the need for an asterisk next to Coe’ name. (Ironically, Coe also won the 1,500 meters in 1980, which probably warrants a second asterisk.)

Jump forward to the present, which finds the U.S. and Russia, the rotting core of the old USSR, still at odds. But unlike the 1980s, China — then just a hint of the economic powerhouse it would become — is arguably as bad an actor today and at least equally as problematic for the U.S.

Guess what? The 2022 Winter Olympics is scheduled for China.

Given how horribly Beijing has persecuted its Muslim Uighur minority (plus the Tibetan Buddhists, underground Christian churches, and others, including ordinary citizens who disagree to any degree with the government’s heavy-handed policies), might another boycott of Olympic proportions be due?

The odds of that are long, for reasons I’ll enumerate below. But that doesn’t mean the boycott question shouldn’t be asked by religion, sports, business and other reporters.  Because China, it’s relationship with the U.S., and its treatment of the Uighurs won’t disappear anytime soon. 

So why not pursue the issue, which will probably receive more attention as 2022 nears.

While it received little elite media coverage, one American Muslim organization recently called for just such a boycott. One outfit that did cover the announcement by the advocacy group Emgage Action was The Huffington Post.

Emgage, a group dedicated to increasing Muslim American involvement in politics, called on the U.S. Olympic National Committee to boycott the 2022 Winter Games in Beijing over the Chinese government’s mass detention and repression of Uighur Muslims.

“The Olympic Games are a showcase of what is best of humanity and a celebration of our differences,” said Emgage CEO Wa’el Alzayat. “The mass incarceration of Muslim minorities in China and the intentional attempt to erase their identity are anathema to the Olympic spirit. 

“We cannot as Americans participate in good conscience in these Games as long as these concentration camps are operational,” Alzayat added.

Emgage called the Chinese government’s internment and abuses of Uighurs a “campaign of ethnic genocide,” and many Uighur activists and human rights groups have employed similar language to describe the government’s conduct.

More recently, VICE News ran a piece focused on a second organization’s (No Rights, No Games), effort to pressure the International Olympic Committee to, in turn, pressure China to end its harsh treatment of Uyhgurs.

NRNO is not calling for a boycott. It argues instead that should Beijing not reverse course it should lose the 2022 Winter Olympics altogether and that the event be transferred by the IOC to another nation.

Should you need a refresher on the dire situation facing China’s Uighur community  here are two recent reports to get you abreast. The first is from the international TV news platform France24. The second is from Germany’s Der Spiegel.

In a bylined column, Fred Hiatt, the Washington Post editorial page director, labeled the Uighur persecution “perhaps the greatest crime against humanity of our young century.”  

Also, the U.S. Congress just passed legislation that would apply sanctions against Chinese officials in response to the situation. A House version must now be reconciled with an earlier Senate-approved bill.

Obviously, there’s much international handwringing over Beijing’s mass incarceration of ordinary Uighurs. But boycotting the 2022 Winter Olympics? That’s a whole other level of action that, given the world’s capacity for greed and hypocrisy, I’d be surprised to see happen.

Here’s why.

For starters, let’s not forget that we’ve sort of been here before — in 2008 when China hosted the Summer Olympics soon after cracking down on rebellious Tibetans. Earlier this year Foreign Policy published a piece that recalled that occasion —and the crass, materialist nature of the international Olympic movement. 

The story’s subhead read: “The 2008 games were supposed to help liberalize China. Instead the party learned it could get away with anything.”

The piece went on to note that:

Historically, the Olympics have always turned a blind eye to atrocity, most infamously with the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin.

The Dachau concentration camp was opened in 1933, and the Nuremberg race laws, which set the legal framework for anti-Semitism, were passed a year before the Olympics. Germany’s growing terror was so well known that there were strong calls for the United States and other nations to boycott the games. Despite this, in the end, a record number of nations—including the United States­—attended.

A second reason is that the Muslim world seems not to give a crap about the Uighurs, even if they are co-religionists. The above cited France24 piece — here’s the link again — spells out in sad detail the lack of even verbal support for the Uighurs from the leaders of Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Egypt, Qatar, Turkey and other Muslim leading nations.

Why is that so? Because of the third reason I don’t foresee a 2022 boycott. Money.

China’s is an economic powerhouse. And it uses its power to reward those nations willing to bend to its heavy-handed ways with loan and investments, and to punish those that challenge it. Plus, the IOC has repeatedly shown itself to be more concerned about its finances than human rights.

So too bad bad for the Uighurs.

There’s just too much cash in trade and loans and Olympic sponsorships and merchandising on the line. And no matter who wins the 2020 American presidential election, I just don’t see the U.S. going to the mat over the fate of a group of ethnic Turkic Muslims living in a remote area of northwest China. 

But again, that does not mean a boycott call is not a story worth investigating. As I recall, one news media function is to raise pressing moral issues for discussion and to keep them in the public eye.

If the Uighur question is not a moral issue with strong religion-news hooks, then I don’t know what is.