Nearly a year after the initial incident, the Danish women’s national football team are still waiting to find out who it was that spied on them in a Chinese hotel room at the 2007 Women’s World Cup. Despite protests by the Danish players, FIFA are refusing to investigate claiming the incident is not a sporting matter, while the IOC cites a lack of jurisdiction prevents its Ethics Commission from probing further.

Already, the forthcoming Olympic Games have become a media event without parallel, though probably not in the way the organisers had envisaged. Across the world, a discussion is now rolling on the relationship between sport and politics, between China and the West, and between gala ceremonies and human rights.

German Willi Lemke has been appointed as the new United Nations special adviser on sport. Lemke’s first act as adviser will be to visit Tibet, where violent confrontation between proponents and opponents of Tibetan autonomy has sparked fierce debate over a boycott of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games.

With less than six months to the start of the Beijing Olympic Games, the Chinese government is failing in its pledge to allow free access to foreign journalists.

China is yet to live up to its Olympic pledge of free media access. Findings from a survey by the Foreign Correspondents Club of China show that government interference is still commonplace for overseas journalists, while Reporters Without Borders, the Committee for the Protection of Journalists and other rights groups, all highlight the dangerous position of domestic journalists.

Since China was awarded the Olympic Games in 2008, human rights organisations and politicians have applied pressure on the International Olympic Committee to use the Games as a lever to improve China’s human rights record. But what is the rationale for regarding the Olympics as a source for political and social change?

Organisers of the Olympic Games in Beijing have promised that foreign journalists can travel freely around China, interview who they want and enjoy uncenscored access to the Internet during the Games. New freer regulations on reporting in China up to and during the Olympics came into force on 1 January 2007 but the application of the new rules show that there is still some way between promises and reality.

Intense criticism has surrounded China’s planned route for the Olympic Torch relay prior to Beijing 2008. Human rights groups have also slammed China’s human rights record, their voices joined by US politicians who oppose China’s alleged sale of arms to Sudan.