Olympics chief Thomas Bach pleaded on Wednesday for politics to be kept out of the Games, saying they would otherwise become as divisive as other areas of society. 

The Olympic movement needs to be kept neutral and cannot be expected to solve civil liberties issues that politics had failed to fix, Bach said in a video message to the UN Human Rights Council. “The Olympic Games are the only event that unites the entire world in peaceful competition,” the president of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) said.