You know how there are certain parts of the world right now that are marching and protesting racism in the west? I would imagine you have probably seen some of that in the news as it is kind of on the front page. Well, here is something that is likely not going to make the papers of most nations because it is taking place in a rather small country south of China.
The organizers of an international event decided that its popular Midnight Marathon in Bangkok will not allow the entrance of anyone who is not Thai.
Myself and my friends joke about how we were "totally going to enter this year but are now not allowed" which of course is ridiculous because if any of us are capable of running a couple of miles in a row I would be surprised, let alone 26 and half of them.
It briefly made international news when the annual event states about 3 weeks ago that all foreigners were banned from entry, citing Covid concerns.
This was quite a ridiculous decision on their part seeing as how there are exactly zero foreigners in the country that weren't already here before Covid even became a thing. The doors have been locked for a long time and with extremely rare and very controlled exceptions (mandatory 14 day isolated quarantine under supervision with multiple tests,) no non-Thais have been allowed into the country at all. This means that anyone who would potentially want to join this race who is a foreigner has been subjected to exactly the same level of lockdown, social distancing, mask and sanitizer requirements that any Thai person has.
The organization decided to not allow them anyway. There were some major problems with this especially the fact that this race was sponsored and certified by the IAAF
One thing that is at the center of IAAF's policy on global events is that it is not allowed for any organization to disallow anyone from entering events based on race, religion, nationality, or really anything at all. They would likely agree that people who are not currently in the country can not participate, but that is not what we were talking about here. The Bangkok Midnight Marathon wanted to ban all non-Thais, of which there are over a million in the Kingdom.
For those of us that live here, we are accustomed to "2 sets of rules" that exist: Non Thais are charged more for things and for the most part, that is something you can either fight (and probably lose,) you can choose to not attend or spend your money at whatever it happens to be, or you can just comply.
Some might say that Thailand suffers from the same affliction that a lot of other countries suffer from and this is a sense of "whatever the problem is, it is easier to blame it on outsiders." This is not Thailand-specific, this happens all over the world.
When Covid broke out in Thailand, despite the fact that a massive majority of the cases were imported by Thai people traveling abroad, the people, for some reason decided to blame it on foreigners even those that had been here for years without leaving before Covid was a thing. This extended to this particular popular marathon race as well.
They made the decision without consulting the IAAF, which if they had that international body would have told them "oh no, you can't do that, you'll have to cancel the entire event" or at the minimum IAAF would have insisted that their name and sponsorship must be removed from the entire thing.
But the organizers, as is quite typical in this country, simply acted unilaterally and simply banned all foreign entry into the event. Backlash from thousands of FB posts soon followed and a weak apology soon followed once the angry expat army was able to get the attention of international media.
After 2 weeks the organization did an about-face and capitulated, allowing expats to enter the race after all.
Their apology was one of kind of a non-apology but I would be willing to bet that thousands of emails were sent to the IAAF who then forced BMM to allow the same qualifications for all people and not allow the organizers to discriminate based on nationality or what the BMM referred to as "travel history."
This isn't anything new in Thailand. You might recall that non Thais were briefly banned from using public transport when Covid broke out, once again completely ignorning the fact that at that point there were no tourists, and almost all of the existing Covid cases in Thailand were introduced to the country by Thais.
So now foreigners are allowed to enter but a lot of people are boycotting the event, including Thai people. On a funny side note I wonder how many of these people were actually going to enter the event anyway or if they are people like me that want to believe they could do it, but actually know very well that they definitely can not.