Foreign ministry spokesman Zhu Bangzao chided those people who opposed the Beijing Olympic bid in 2001. "Their behavior runs counter to the spirit of the Olympic Games."

One thing is for sure: For the next few months, you'll be hearing these pieties as often as the dawn chorus.

But ponder the following:

In the 1936 Berlin Olympics, U.S. sprinter Jesse Owens won four gold medals. Hitler wouldn’t shake his hand or hand him the medals. Later on he said that it was "unfair to have a negro in the Olympics, because negroes were technically not human. They were animals."

The Nazi party exploited the Games to project an image of a peaceful, tolerant Germany. The United States and other democracies rejected the idea of a boycott.

At the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City, black athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their gloved fists in the Black Power salute at the medal stage in Mexico City.

Before the Games, the Olympic Project for Human Rights organized a boycott and demanded the return of Mohammad Ali's title, the removal of Avery Brundage as head of the IOC and the ban of South Africa and Rhodesia from the games.

The IOC did disinvite Rhodesia and South Africa, against the protests of Brundage.

In the 1972 Summer Munich Olympics, according to Time Magazine’s Mark Goodman, a Yugoslav sportsmen whose team lost a water-polo match spat on the Cuban referee and beat up his brother. Wehn Pakistan's field hockey team was beaten by West Germany, 1-0, Pakistani players then ridiculed the awards ceremony and roughed up a doctor at the doping tests. Eleven members of the team were forever banned from Olympic competition.

These incidents pale when compared tothe massacre of 11 Israeli athletes by the Palestinian terrorist group Black September. Ironically, security at the Olympic Village was lax, because the organizing committee wanted a friendly environment. The terrorists demanded safe passage to Cairo, and the rescue attempt at the airport was botched. All nine of the kidnapped Israeli athletes were killed in a gun battle.

Twenty-five African countries withdrew from the 1976 Summer Olympics, because they were protesting New Zealand's sporting links with South Africa.

The United States boycotted the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow in protest against the December 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Japan, West Germany, China and Canada went along with the Americans. Great Britain, France, and Greece supported the boycott but allowed their athletes to participate if they wanted to. In all about 50 nations supported the boycott.

The Soviet Union boycotted the 1984 Summer Olympics along with 14 Eastern Bloc countries and allies. The USSR government said it was concerned about security and "chauvinistic sentiments and an anti-Soviet hysteria being whipped up in the United States." Most people, not unreasonably, thought the decision was a payback for the boycott of the Moscow Games.