Olympic swimmer Valerie Tarazi is slated to compete in the 200-meter individual medley next week in the Paris summer games. After that, she plans to get a tattoo.

Tarazi has been experimenting with temporary tats, an exercise in trial and error to determine the best place for the permanent ink. She can’t get the tattoo until she actually competes because, as she told me, “That’s when I consider myself an official Olympian.”

It’s a longstanding tradition for Olympians to get a tattoo of the iconic interlocking rings, a mark of joining an exclusive club of the world’s best athletes. But as one of eight competitors representing Palestine this summer in Paris, Tarazi has already attained a different distinction.

“I’m one of the very few Palestinians in the world that people are listening to right now,” she said.

Taking full advantage of the Olympic pulpit, Tarazi has pledged to bring attention to the crisis in Gaza, where her paternal grandfather lived until he moved to the United States in his early 20s.

“I’ll take every interview and every opportunity to speak to the media,” Tarazi said on a video call Sunday, shortly after she checked in at the Olympic Village.

People are apparently taking notice: Tarazi said that her Instagram account has gained 8,000 new followers in the last week.

“I’m here to bring awareness to what really is happening because I’ve said it a million times, people are getting censored,” she said. “They can’t speak on their story. They don’t have a voice.”

Born and raised in Chicago, Tarazi, 24, swam for five years at Auburn University, where she will pursue a doctorate in humanitarian supply chain. Hailing from one of the oldest Christian families in Palestine, Tarazi had long dreamed of representing the country at the Olympics.

“I’ve always felt a very strong connection to my Arab roots,” she said. “I just wanted the opportunity to honor my family.”

Tarazi’s desire to represent Palestine only intensified after Hamas’s attack on October 7 unleashed a monthslong Israeli assault that has left nearly 40,000 people in Gaza dead.

“People think that was the start of the war,” she said. “The Palestinian people have been suffering for as long as anyone can remember. So to go back to my roots and honor my family, my grandfather—and especially now, honor the entire country—is just such a special thing. I feel like it means a lot more being able to represent a small country and to highlight what’s really going on there.”

Tarazi and more than 10,000 other athletes have descended upon Paris amid a turbocharged political climate that may rupture the spirit of neutrality Olympic organizers have long strained to preserve.

Ahead of the Opening Ceremony on Friday, some Olympians have already found themselves ensnared in the geopolitical tensions of their home countries. The Ukrainian National Olympic Committee issued guidance instructing its athletes to avoid contact with those from Russia and Belarus, both of which are sending small teams that will compete under a neutral banner as a consequence of Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine. (Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Russian president Vladimir Putin both rejected French president Emmanuel Macron’s proposal for an “Olympic truce” between the two countries.) Israel’s Olympic team will be given 24-hour protection after a French lawmaker said that neither the Israeli delegation nor its athletes should be welcome in Paris.

Security is tight and law enforcement is on high alert to prevent a violent incident during the 17-day festival of sport. After arriving in Paris on Wednesday, Israeli president Isaac Herzog and his delegation were reportedly held in their plane for 40 minutes over a security concern—a “false alarm” caused by an “airport staffer without the requisite safety vest,” according to The Washington Post.

Herzog was on hand for the Israeli men’s soccer team’s opening match Wednesday against Mali at Parc des Princes stadium, where pro-Palestine activists planned to stage a protest in the stands. Israel’s national anthem drew loud jeers prior to kickoff, but there was no major disruption during the match.

It remains to be seen whether the white-hot political atmosphere leads the athletes themselves to engage in any sort of demonstration, something the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has traditionally barred.

Tarazi, for her part, said she is not there to protest or “point fingers.”

“My way of fighting for my country is through sport,” she said.

Everything feels a bit 1968 these days, with Democrats preparing to nominate a new candidate at a Chicago convention, and the United States hurtling from one political crisis to the next.

The summer Olympics were held that year in Mexico City, where the political tension of the moment punctured the IOC’s cocoon of peace and neutrality. Ten days before the opening ceremony, Mexican authorities killed hundreds of student protesters, according to eyewitnesses, in what has become known as the Tlatelolco Massacre.

The Mexico City games would also produce one of the most indelible moments of sporting activism when a pair of African American sprinters defied the IOC’s strict prohibition against protest. After winning the gold and bronze medals in the 200-meter dash respectively, Tommie Smith and John Carlos each raised a black-gloved fist while standing atop the podium in protest of racial injustice in the US. The gesture infuriated the late former IOC president Avery Brundage, who said that Smith and Carlos had “violated one of the basic principles of the Olympic games: that politics play no part whatsoever in them.”

At Brundage’s behest, the two were expelled from the Olympic Village.

John Hoberman, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin who specializes in Olympic history, said that Brundage was a fierce champion of the idea that “sport must remain absolutely separated from politics.” Decades before the Mexico City games, Brundage was instrumental in getting the US to forgo a boycott of the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, widely remembered as a propaganda victory for Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime.

Brundage, then serving as president of the American Olympic Committee, argued that the “Olympic Games belong to the athletes and not to the politicians,” and that US athletes should not become entangled in “the present Jew-Nazi altercation.”

History has not reflected kindly on Brundage, whose legacy is marred by his antisemitic and racist views. But his insistence on keeping politics out of the games still animates the Olympic ethos. In a speech last year, current IOC president Thomas Bach urged politicians to “keep politics and sports apart.”

Bach hit that same note at a press conference on Tuesday while responding to the Palestinian Olympic Committee’s call to bar Israel from the Paris games.

“We are not in the political business, we are there to accomplish our mission to get the athletes together,” Bach said.

Hoberman said that Bach is relying on the same doctrine of Olympic neutrality formulated by Brundage nearly a century ago. “It’s clearly expressed that, for the good of humanity, sports and politics must not be mixed up,” Hoberman said.

The neutrality of the games was later codified in Rule 50 of the Olympic Charter, which states: “No kind of demonstration or political, religious or racial propaganda is permitted in any Olympic sites, venues or other areas.”

That prohibition has come under fire in recent years. In 2021, a group of more than 150 academics, activists, and former Olympians—including Smith and Carlos—signed an open letter calling for changes to Rule 50.

The IOC reviewed and ultimately opted to uphold the rule, but the governing body also issued new guidelines allowing athletes to “express their views” on the field of play prior to the start of a competition, so long as the expression isn’t disruptive or targeted “against people, countries, [organizations] and/or their dignity.”

That opened the door for some previously forbidden displays at the COVID-delayed Summer Olympics in Tokyo, where a number of women’s soccer teams kneeled prior to their matches as a statement against racism. But organizers were wary of other gestures. Raven Saunders, who won the silver medal in shot put that year, formed an “X” with her wrists while on the podium in Tokyo, prompting an investigation by the IOC. Saunders, who is Black and gay, said that the gesture represented “the intersection of where all people who are oppressed meet." (The IOC dropped its investigation after Saunders’s mother died two days following the event.)

Molly Solomon, the executive producer and president of NBC’s Olympics broadcast, said the network covered all of those moments in Tokyo, and that there are no rules to avoid political topics when reporting at the games.

In Paris, Solomon said, NBC plans to spotlight athletes from Ukraine, and that the network will be “watching for Israeli and Palestinian athletes,” but those stories will be told “through the prism of sports.”

After all, she said, the Olympics provide a detour from the political arena.

“We’re just a few months before what looks like the most divisive presidential election,” Solomon told me. “I’m looking forward to the 17 days in late July and early August when, in my mind, all of that takes a back seat.”

Solomon said she doesn’t expect much in the way of political statements from the athletes in Paris. Neither does Hoberman, though he suspects Bach is “worried” there will be.

“Don’t expect political activism from high-performing athletes. It rarely happens,” Hoberman said. “The reason why Tommie Smith and John Carlos are immortal is because what they did was foundation-smashing.”

Tarazi, meanwhile, said she has no interest in doing anything that violates the Olympic charter. And despite her commitment to highlight the deteriorating situation in Gaza, she believes sports and politics should be separate.

“At the end of the day, we are all just athletes here. We just want to play our sport,” Tarazi said. “Yes, of course, I want to use my platform and spread the message, and I do believe it’s my responsibility to do that. But I’m here to swim. I’ve been training 20 years of my life for this.”