Sports lovers have waited patiently for the 2024 Paris Summer Olympics. But as many have noticed, there is a distinct political undertone — really now an overtone — that taints all that the Olympic Games represent and have stood for. The occasion has lost a lot of its luster as a result.

The modern Olympics were restarted in 1894, and with the exception of pauses during the two world wars, as well as boycotts by the Americans and Russians during the Cold War, the Games have continued to be a touchstone and a symbol of the peaceful coming together of otherwise divergent countries. However, in the past decade, the Games have been overtaken by political maneuvering.

The Russians and the Chinese have used the Games to increase their power and influence, while simultaneously trying to subvert the International Olympic Committee’s rules and standards for fair play. Their athletes are encouraged to cheat via doping. They routinely ignore the Olympic Creed, which states, “The important thing in life is not the triumph but the fight; the essential thing is not to have won, but to have fought well.”

Then the West began to regress in earnest. In the U.S., former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick started an unpatriotic trend of kneeling for the national anthem. Subsequently, many athletes have forgotten that the purpose in showcasing their skills isn’t about activism for a pet cause.

COVID-19 caused the Olympics to be thrown off schedule, and the 2022 Beijing Winter Games were a dystopian nightmare of authoritarian overreach by the Chinese government.

The Olympics are no longer an event in which countries can set aside politics and just play sports. Gone are the days when sports legends like basketball player Michael Jordan explain why they remain publicly apolitical. “Republicans buy sneakers, too,” he once said.

Today’s charged political climate has the beautiful city of Paris awash with police, military, and other counterterror measures to prevent an opportunistic terrorist attack. The issue of mass migration (mainly illegal) poses this particular threat. Another political torpedo is that the International Olympic Committee has released a new set of standards for gender-confused men to compete against women.

The politics surrounding both the Russia/Ukraine war and the Israel/Hamas war also add to the tensions. Russia has been banned from this Olympics for trying to claim Ukrainian athletes who hail from recently conquered territory. And the apparel company Adidas made an irresponsible blunder by hiring model Bella Hadid — a half-Palestinian who supports the anti-Israel movement — to represent a new shoe that commemorates the 1972 Olympics in which 11 Israeli athletes were killed by a Palestinian military group.

Then there are the ratings, which have been dropping since the mid-2010s. According to The Washington Post, “NBC, which has the U.S. rights to the Games through 2032, saw ratings for its prime-time telecast in Tokyo drop 27 percent from the Rio Olympics in 2016. Months later, the tumble in Beijing was worse, a 42 percent decline from the 2018 Pyeongchang Games.”

The Olympics have become more of a battleground for power and influence than about the love of the individual sports and the opportunity to see the best of the best compete. How does one fix this fracturing of the Olympics and all that they stand for? It starts with countries and athletes deciding to dignify the prestige of the international stage, setting aside their power trips and focusing on their sports.