After the World Athletics Championships ends in the United States city of Eugene, Oregon, on Sunday, among the things that must be urgently on the agenda of the sport’s governing body, World Athletics, is a serious consideration about whether the United States should be allowed to host future games, and under what conditions. This should be part of a broader review of the obligations of the countries that agree to put on international events, to ensure that participants have relative ease of entry into those states, including being awarded travel visas on a timely basis.
Getting American entry visas has been a big problem for many athletes at these games. In Jamaica, we are aware of the case of Chad Wright, the discus thrower, who, after a frustrating circle around the mulberry bush, only on Friday, the day the games opened, received a visa to enter the United States. Gregory Prince, a 400-metre runner, received his visa only two days earlier. He was similarly on a mad dash to Eugene.
But these are not the only, or even the most egregious, cases of America’s drip-and-dab doling of visas to foreign athletes after their countries selected them as national representatives. There was the embarrassment of the mere en passant mention by US television commentators, during the heats for the men’s race, that Kenya’s Ferdinand Omanyala, the African record holder, and the third-fastest man over the distance so far this year, arrived in Eugene just three hours before he had to hit the tracks. Mr Omanyala received his visa at the last minute. He had contemplated missing the games.
Other big names, such as the Côte d’Ivoire’s Marie-Josée Ta Lou, complained of the frustrations of applying for visas and having to wait for late or last-minute responses from US authorities. “How did they expect the athletes to perform well?” Ms Ta Lou asked in a tweet.
‘COMFORT’ LETTER
At one point, South Africa had 10 athletes stuck in Italy, who, eventually, travelled to the United States under a ‘comfort’ letter, with a promise that they would be issued visas when they arrived in America. Indian athletes, too, had visa problems.
US officials have not spoken definitively to the issue, although there are suggestions that a major part of the problem was the backlog of the visa applications because of the COVID-19 pandemic, when countries shut down international travel. That, however, is not a sufficient excuse. Nor is it enough for athletics officials and other apologists to claim that the issue affected less than one per cent of the more than 5,500 athletes and officials attending the games.
“We’ve battled to do as much as we possibly can,” said Sebastian Coe, the president of World Athletics. “And we’ve been doing this now for some months. And, of course, there are political complications about nations being able to travel and nations coming into the United States.” This, too, is inadequate.
Most of the cases were not akin to what would apply to athletes from, say, Russia, which, as a country, was rightly or wrongly excluded from these games. And it is especially noticeable that the athletes who had problems were primarily from developing countries, and mostly people of colour.
Moreover, this problem, the denial, or grudging award, of visas to members of sport teams from developing countries of colour is not new. It happens across a range of sporting disciplines. In Jamaica, it is a case not infrequently faced by footballers. Basketball players, too, have been affected.
LACK OF TRANSPARENCY
What is particularly frustrating is the seeming arbitrariness, and the lack of transparency, in the decision-making of American consular officers. Usually, the athletes themselves, and the sporting bodies that select them in good faith and as the best performers in their disciplines, are given no reasons for visa denials. There is often a sense of grovelling when athletes and their sporting associations have to appeal the decisions.
We appreciate America’s right to determine who crosses its borders, and to be careful in the protection of its security. However, if the United States wants to host global sporting events, its sporting associations have to ensure that participants have a reasonable expectation of entry, and that their visas will be processed in a timely and orderly and non-discriminatory manner, taking into account the timing of national selection processes for participants. This might require greater coordination between America’s sports organisations and their foreign policy, border and homeland security apparatus. And have a clear criteria for entry. It might help, too, if the Americans, as part of their outreach in other countries, provide national sporting bodies with a transparent process for the issuing of visas.
Or perhaps we should all just play golf – or tennis.
