Regimes have been using sports to burnish their images or distract from their problematic behavior for centuries.
Competitive sports are built on the concept of fair play, which helps explain why so many oppressive regimes see value in games. Any form of good, wholesome fun can seem like it is presented by good, wholesome people, even when the facts say otherwise.
China, with its appalling human rights record and opposition to an independent Taiwan, hosted the recent Winter Olympics with the strategically peaceful slogan Together for a Shared Future. One of the stars of those Games was Eileen Gu, a California-born skier who chose to compete for her mother's homeland of China, implicitly embracing the government of China rather than the U.