The White House’s announcement of a diplomatic boycott of the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing follows a long tradition of countries boycotting the Games for political reasons.

       In Monday’s announcement, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said the United States will not send a diplomatic delegation to the Beijing Olympics, citing the “ongoing genocide and crimes against humanity in Xinjiang.”

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       There are many reasons China hosting the Olympics can be deemed as problematic in the eyes of Western democracies that champion human rights and individual liberties.

       When tennis star Peng Shuai disappeared after accusing a high ranking communist official of sexual assault, global outrage put a spotlight on the Winter Games. (Jason Aldag/The Washington Post)

       In addition to the persecution of Uyghurs, which China denies, President Xi Jinping’s tightening grip over Hong Kong and the recent mystery surrounding Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai, who allegedly disappeared after announcing that she was sexually assaulted by a former Chinese official, have given more grounds to human rights advocates to raise their voices in alarm against China.

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       Although the U.S. choice of a diplomatic boycott might be something novel — President Biden’s decision means no U.S. government official will be present at the Games, while U.S. athletes can still compete, a move that is being followed by the United Kingdom — the Olympics have often been tangled up with politics and have been the subject of numerous boycotts.

       Below is a non-exhaustive list.

       The 1936 ‘Nazi Olympics’ and the boycott that didn’t happen

       In 1931, the International Olympic Committee chose Berlin as the host city of the 1936 Games, a welcoming gesture toward Germany, which had been badly bruised after losing World War I. Two years later, Adolf Hitler seized power, launching his campaign of persecution against German Jews and other minorities.

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       “After the Nazi takeover, U.S. and international Olympic officials expressed concern about Germany’s treatment of Jews and other minority groups, especially in sports,” Frederic J. Frommer recently wrote for The Washington Post in an in-depth look at the boycotting efforts.

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       Human rights advocates pushed for a boycott, putting pressure on Black athletes to skip the Games. But many pointed to hypocrisy in the U.S. stance, singling out the persecution of minorities in a foreign country while Blacks were still the victims of Jim Crow laws in the South and other forms of discrimination.

       In the end, the Amateur Athletic Union, or AAU, narrowly voted to attend the Games, and other nations who were considering boycotting — Canada, Czechoslovakia, Britain, France, Sweden and the Netherlands — followed the United States’ lead. Jesse Owens became one of the stars of the Games, winning four gold medals and dealing a very public blow to the Nazi belief in the superiority of the “Aryan” race.

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       Still, the Olympics were a propaganda boon for the Nazi regime, which was on its best behavior during the Games. Frommer writes that a New York Times story published in August 1936 with the headline “Olympics Leave Glow of Pride in the Reich” lauded the Berlin Games, its attendance and organization, with the Times adding that they “made the Germans more human again.”

       The Olympic boycott movement that failed

       The U.S. boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics

       On March 21, 1980, President Jimmy Carter announced that the United States was boycotting the Summer Olympics to be held in Moscow in response to the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan on Dec. 24, 1979. The boycott was accompanied by other measures, among them a grain embargo. Britain and Australia initially supported the boycott but ended up sending delegations to the Games.

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       The move accomplished little in persuading the U.S.S.R. to leave Afghanistan. Soviet forces would stay in the country until 1988, when they started withdrawing under Mikhail Gorbachev’s leadership. A group of U.S. athletes sued the government seeking permission to compete, but they were unsuccessful.

       Forty years have passed since a group of American athletes were forced to skip the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow because of the U.S. boycott. (Jorge Ribas, Rick Maese/The Washington Post)

       The memory of the 1980 boycott and what it failed to achieve is probably why the campaign to opt out of the Beijing Games hasn’t been as strong as the effort against the Berlin Games of 1936, Jeremy Schaap, author of a book on Owens and the Berlin Olympics, said in a recent interview with Frommer. While the boycott accomplished little to nothing politically, it seems clear now that those who suffered the most were the U.S. athletes who could not compete.

       On July 19, 2020, on the 40th anniversary of the Moscow Games, the chief executive of the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee, Sarah Hirshland, posted a letter on Twitter addressed to those athletes. “It’s abundantly clear in hindsight that the decision to not send a team to Moscow had no impact on the global politics of the era and instead only harmed you — American athletes who had dedicated themselves to excellence and the chance to represent the United States. We can clearly state you deserved better.”

       Forty years later, the U.S. boycott of the 1980 Moscow Summer Games still resonates for the athletes

       The U.S.S.R.’s boycott of the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics

       In a tit-for-tat, the Soviet Union decided to boycott the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles in response to the U.S. decision four years earlier to boycott the Moscow Games.

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       On May 8, 1984, a few months before the Games, the Soviet government issued a statement announcing that the Soviets would not be attending. “It is known from the very first days of preparations for the present Olympics the American administration has sought to set course at using the Games for its political aims,” the statement said. “Chauvinistic sentiments and anti-Soviet hysteria are being whipped up in the country.” The Soviet Union said it feared for its athletes’ safety in Los Angeles, wary of potential anti-Soviet protests that might erupt.

       The administration of President Ronald Reagan responded by saying the decision to not attend the Games was “a blatant political act for which there was no real justification.”

       Thirteen communist nations followed suit, issuing similar statements and refusing to attend the games. The boycotting nations organized a parallel event, the Friendship Games, in the summer of 1984.

       The 1956 Summer Olympics in Australia

       The 1956 Summer Olympics in Melbourne, Australia, were the subject of two simultaneous boycotts prompted by different events.

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       Spain, Switzerland and the Netherlands boycotted the Games in response to the U.S.S.R.’s invasion of Hungary after the Hungarian Revolution, while Lebanon, Iraq and Egypt withdrew their athletes to protest the Israeli takeover of the Suez Canal in what became known as the “Suez Crisis.”

       The Games, the first to be held in the Southern Hemisphere, were not a success in participation, with fewer than 3,500 athletes from 67 countries competing. For reference, 4,955 athletes participated in the Helsinki Games of 1952, while 5,338 took part in the 1960 Games in Rome, according to official Olympics data.

       correction

       An earlier version of this article misidentified Xi Jinping as Xi Xinping. The article has been corrected.