Five Rings, Ninety-Three Flags: The Diplomatic Games Nations Play

Every two years, the Olympic opening ceremony upholds a familiar illusion. Athletes file into a stadium with their national flags, rivals walk side by side, and commentators repeat an ostensibly reassuring refrain: politics has been set aside. Yet, the Olympic Games have never been neutral ground. 

The power of diplomacy at the Olympics is older than the modern games themselves. In ancient Greece, the Olympics were protected by ekecheiria, the Olympic Truce. First proclaimed in the ninth century BCE, it allowed safe participation in the Games for all athletes and spectators from Elis, Pisa, and Sparta, city-states that were otherwise consistently engaged in conflict with one another. 

From their modern revival, the Games have continued to function as a stage for diplomatic power. Few moments illustrate this more evidently than the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympics, where North and South Korea formed a single women’s ice hockey team to compete under a unified flag. The team’s mere presence enraptured the world, though they finished at the bottom of the standings, prompting chants of “We are one!” from spectators each time they took the ice. The gesture did not resolve decades of hostility, nor did it produce lasting policy change, but the symbolism carried weight, shifting perceptions of both sides’ humanity. 

If unified teams demonstrate diplomacy through symbolism, hosting the Olympics has long offered countries an even larger instrument of diplomatic power: national branding. When Japan organized the 1964 Tokyo Summer Olympics, the Games served as a declaration of postwar recovery and technological modernity, presenting a nation reintroduced to the global order. Decades later, China used the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics to project a different message––one of national assertion. Carefully orchestrated ceremonies and developed infrastructure projected economic strength and political confidence. In both cases, medals were secondary to the meticulously crafted narratives of the respective host nations. Yet, diplomatic power at the Olympics does not belong solely to nations. It is also embedded in the institutions that govern the Games themselves.

At the center of these games stands the International Olympic Committee (IOC), an institution that increasingly resembles a diplomatic mediator as much as a sporting authority. The IOC preserves the appearance of neutrality while arbitrating political conflict. In an attempt to limit political demonstrations, the Committee implemented the Olympic Charter’s Rule 50, a “non-exhaustive list” of actions that could constitute prohibited political expression, including signs, “gestures of a political nature,” and “refusal to follow” ceremonial protocols. 

This year’s Milano-Cortina Olympics revealed how modern Olympics attempt to diplomatically address ongoing geopolitical disputes. On February 12th, Rule 50 was enacted to disqualify Ukrainian skeleton racer Vladyslav Heraskevych over his “helmet of remembrance” depicting athletes killed since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The decisions quickly drew criticism, highlighting the uneasy boundary between athlete expression and political protest. 

Participation in the Games became another site of diplomatic decision-making. Due to their role in the Ukraine war, athletes from Russia and Belarus were barred from competing under their national flags, instead permitted to appear only as “Individual Neutral Athletes” after meeting eligibility criteria. In this sense, the Olympic roster itself became a diplomatic tool to convey international disapproval.

Diplomatic power during the Games also unfolds away from competition venues. While spectators focused on downhill times and figure-skating scores, Swiss Federal Councillor Iganzio Cassis held bilateral discussions with the President of Lombardy and Mayor of Milan, using the Olympic gathering as an opportunity for political engagement on cross-border cooperation. Such meetings rarely dominate headlines, yet they reflect a longstanding function of the Olympics as a temporary global summit, where officials converge in one city under the legitimizing cover of sport and conversations occur without the rigidity of formal negotiations.

Taken together, the events of Milan-Cortina reveal how the Olympics concentrate multiple forms of diplomatic power, from institutional rules to international negotiations, in a single arena. Rule 50 attempted to contain political limits, yet in doing so, exposed how neutrality remains actively enforced. Restrictions on Russian and Belarusian participation transformed eligibility into a geopolitical signal, while meetings among officials demonstrated how the Games continue to function as an informal gathering point for international dialogue. The modern Olympics do not set aside politics for sport. They manage global tensions through regulations and gestures that allow competition to continue despite disputes.

This February, beneath five interlocking rings, flew ninety-three flags, each representing competing interests and ambitions. Some diplomacy unfolded in symbols, some in regulations, and some behind closed doors. The Olympic Games remind us that diplomacy, at its core, is not the absence of conflict, but the art of containing it.