Olympic Sponsors Have “Entirely Ghosted” Activists Ahead of the Beijing Games

Once the International Olympic Committee awarded the 2022 Winter Olympics to Beijing more than six years ago, Mandie McKeown and her colleagues at the nonprofit International Tibet Network got right to work. McKeown had already gone through one pre-Olympics cycle of protesting China’s human rights abuses, back when Beijing hosted the 2008 Summer Games. Now, as the ITN’s executive director, she set out to get a meeting with the IOC and the Olympics’ corporate sponsors. 

Instead, McKeown told me, her group was met with radio silence from “basically” every sponsor. As...