Polish athletes call for return of Olympic commentator suspended over opening ceremony remarks

Almost 150 athletes and staff at Polish state TV have signed a letter calling for the reinstatement of the station’s main commentator for the Olympics. He was suspended on Saturday after saying that John Lennon’s song Imagine, which was played at the opening ceremony in Paris, presents a “communist vision”.

The station’s actions against Przemysław Babiarz, which were criticised on both sides of the political spectrum, have also now led to the country’s broadcasting regulator and commissioner for human rights launching investigations.

In their letter, the athletes and journalists from TVP Sport – the channel Babiarz was working for – described him as “one of the best commentators in Poland”, whose commentary, “even years later, still evokes goosebumps and emotions”.

“It is thanks to his work that viewers following the disciplines he covers choose TVP channels over competing ones,” they added. “That is why we are asking for Przemysław Babiarz to be able to report on the Olympic Games in Paris.”

“Everyone has their own views. Przemysław Babiarz has his own as well,” they added. “You don’t have to agree with everyone. However, it’s good to have an opinion. It’s also good to have respect for the fact that someone thinks differently.”

The signatories include star athletes currently preparing to compete for Poland in Paris – Anita Włodarczyk, Wojciech Nowicki and Natalia Kaczmarek – as well as former Olympians such as Tomasz Majewski, Artur Partyka and Otylia Jędrzejczak.

Meanwhile on Monday, the president of the broadcasting regulator, Maciej Świrski, announced an investigation into the matter that “will clarify whether Polish law has been violated by restricting a journalist’s freedom of expression and opinion, which is explicitly guaranteed by the Polish constitution and other laws”.

The commissioner for human rights, Marcin Wiącek, also wrote to TVP to ask for an explanation. He noted that “freedom of journalistic expression is subject to special protection under the constitution and the European Convention on Human Rights”.

The head of TVP Sport, Jakub Kwiatkowski, however, published a statement on his social media in which he declared that “sport should be free of politics” and that Babiarz had “betrayed the mission entrusted to us as sports journalists on public television”.

But Kwiatkowski’s deputy, Jakub Polkowski, took a different stance. “I fully endorse the letter of the editorial staff of TVP Sport…The voice of my colleagues in the editorial office is, on this subject, also my voice,” he wrote on X.

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During Friday’s opening ceremony, which took place on the River Seine, Imagine was played – a song in which Lennon calls on people to “imagine there’s no heaven…no countries…and no religion, too”.

At that moment, Babiarz said, “Imagine, that is [a call] for a world without heaven, nations, religions, and that is a vision of this peace that everyone is supposed to embrace, that is a vision of communism, unfortunately”.

Lennon himself once admitted in an interview that the song “is virtually The Communist Manifesto, even though I’m not particularly a communist”.

Conservative figures in Poland, which was for decades ruled by an authoritarian communist regime, have long been critical of the song. When Imagine was played at the Tokyo Olympics opening ceremony, a Polish bishop said that it presented a “poisonous utopia”.

The decision to suspend Babiarz prompted criticism from right-wing opposition parties, the national-conservative Law and Justice (PiS) and far-right Confederation (Konfederacja), but also from The Left (Lewica), which is part of the ruling coalition.

Another element of Friday’s opening ceremony that caused anger among conservatives in Poland was the appearance of drag queens in what many viewers interpreted as a recreation of Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper (though the organisers later denied that this is what it was).

On Monday, a protest took place outside the French consulate in the city of Kraków, with participants “demanding respect for Poland and Polish Catholics” and also expressing their support for Babiarz.

Main image credit: Jan Bogacz TVP/Wikimedia Commons (under CC BY-SA 4.0)

Agata Pyka

Agata Pyka is an assistant editor at Notes from Poland. She is a journalist and a political communication student at the University of Amsterdam. She specialises in Polish and European politics as well as investigative journalism and has previously written for Euractiv and The European Correspondent.