Boycotting China

After events concerning the Olympic torch relay in London, Paris and today in San Francisco, China can be in little doubt what the World thinks of it's decision to host the Olympics this summer.
My sympathy goes to the torch carriers, nobody wants to see an innocent person in one of the greatest moments of their life terrified by protesters but the message is loud and clear, we don't approve of the IOC's choice of host after recent events.
With less than four months to go before the opening ceremony in Beijing, the previously whispered word "boycott" is being mentioned more confidently.
The Europeans are contemplating sending their athletes but keeping their heads of Government at home on the opening night formalities but some people are calling for a complete boycott to drive home the message.
As numerous other Olympic boycotts have previously shown, they achieve nothing except penalising the athletes. If a nation's leadership is prepared to cut short the highlight of an athletes career, then they had better be prepared to take a long hard look at their economic relations with China afterwards and take other measures that indicate their stand is not just political posturing and they really are concerned with human rights in that part of the World.
With China poised to become the global power, it is proving a real headache for some Premiers who will go all out not to upset the Chinese and would rather not have to deal with such potentially thorny issues and the UK has the added tricky situation of hosting the next Olympic games and know that any action by Britain will be greeted by likewise retaliation in 2012.
The best people to pull a boycott would be the likes of Olympic sponsors Coca Cola, Kodak, Adidas and McDonald's but we all know how likely that is so the next best option is to keep the leaders away from the opening and closing nights, don't stop the athletes doing their stuff and keep the politics in the political arena, not in the sporting one.