The rule on a red carpet or a parti-coloured podium is that none of the victors say anything about politics. None of the surrounding players – the losers, the judges, the spouses, the hangers-on – should say anything either, because it draws attention to the vast lacuna where normal opinions should be. Some people, such as the Olympic committee, have explicit strictures, while other bodies merely create the expectation that nothing will be said, and can I just remind everyone that many years passed when this was no big deal. Politics was 9-to-5 work, and sports and showbiz were weekend-casual work, and nobody expected the two to intersect.
It’s 2026, however, and the outside world intrudes on everything. Prince William said at Sunday night’s Bafta ceremony that he hadn’t seen the winning film, Hamnet, explaining: “I need to be in quite a calm state and I am not at the moment. I will save it.” Look, you could get on your high horse and say: “Mate, you’re the president of Bafta, could you not have found a moment of peace in which to watch the film that was likely to win everything?” Or you could speculate on what, between the arrest of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and the rising swell of voices wanting to know who knew what, when, could have caused William’s disquiet. Or you could say: “Actually, Hamnet would be the perfect film for your troubled mind, being immensely soporific and yet quite forgiving; you can sleep through a large chunk of it and still know exactly what’s about to happen”.
But on balance, William made the right call: there are so many events he could legitimately ignore, being from a dynasty whose highest creed is ignoring things, but if we accept that he couldn’t ignore this one thing that everyone’s talking about, his was a medium-graceful way of acknowledging it. Naturally, it doesn’t say anything. But in the kingdom of the silent, the one-squeak man is king.
The Grammys earlier this month were an object lesson in how times have changed, with so many of the celebrities making overt statements in support of immigrants that what would once have counted as controversial – Olivia Dean’s statement that her grandparents were immigrants – by 2026, was no more than entry-level “I am Spartacus” stuff. Next to Billie Eilish’s “nobody’s illegal on stolen land” and Bad Bunny’s “Before I say thanks to God, I’m gonna say: ICE out. We’re not savage, we’re not animals, we’re not aliens. We are humans and we are Americans,” wearing an “ICE Out” badge was solid but unremarkable.
Going back to that Olympian rulebook, rule 50.2 reads: “No kind of demonstration or political, religious or racial propaganda is permitted in any Olympic sites, venues or other areas.” That wording itself belongs to a simpler time, since it elides “demo” with “propaganda”, as if only a pedant would say those were two different things. This year, to accept that protest was indivisible from propaganda would be to accept that we’re in a world beyond right and wrong, which maybe we are, but I’m not sure I want that handed down by the Olympic committee, especially when it has protest-banned Russia in four consecutive games, so must still know there’s a difference.
The Ukrainian skeleton athlete Vladyslav Heraskevych defied the rule twice, first with a photo of dead compatriots on his helmet, second with a movingly homemade-looking sign that read: “No War in Ukraine”. It felt unpunishable; some of the dead were his friends. But they banned him anyway, and it was sheer luck for the spineless yet not toothless authorities that the Norwegian biathlete Sturla Holm Lægreid chose to reveal two days before, straight after his bronze win, that he’d cheated on his girlfriend. The world’s attention was asked to choose between things that matter and things that are weird, which was a no-brainer. Heraskevych was forgotten. Lægreid was forgiven, though not by his girlfriend.
A handful of US athletes made statements decrying their government, in terms delicate enough but unmistakable. The old curse has been updated: may you live in times when even your awards ceremonies are interesting.
• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
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