news-record.com

Even as the rest of the sports universe seems endlessly tangled in scandal and greed, Joey Cheek keeps about the business of hope.

The Greensboro native and Olympic speedskating gold medalist began advocating for strife- and violence-torn areas barely seconds after his Olympic heroics last year granted him the international stage. Cheek immediately gave his Olympic winnings to humanitarian aid efforts in Darfur. Then he gave that cause his heart and soul.

Cheek continued those efforts two weeks ago by delivering in person to the Chinese Embassy an arm load of petitions seeking the nation's support in stemming the slaughter of innocents in the Darfur region of Sudan.

"My name is Joey Cheek," he said when someone answered the door at China's embassy in Washington on July 25. "I am on the U.S. Olympic team. And I am here to deliver petitions that we have collected over the last week imploring China to continue to act strongly to protect the civilians in Darfur."

China's role is crucial. It is Sudan's largest foreign investor. Its money and its opinions matter there.

Thankfully, while China hasn't brought all the influence to bear in Sudan that it obviously could, it at least has agreed not to get in the way.

The U.N. agreed last week to send a peacekeeping force of 26,000 soldiers to Darfur, a move China has endorsed.

Better late than never. More than 200,000 civilians, many of them women and children, have died in grisly waves of mass murder by an armed, government-backed Arab militia.

The targets have been whole villages of black Africans, thus the killing accurately has been called genocide. (The U.N. insists on the term "war crimes.")

As for what the blue-helmeted troops' presence will really mean, who can be sure? U.N. troops were present when similar bloodletting occurred in Rwanda and Bosnia. They did little to prevent it.

U.N. soldiers have been made toothless in such settings partly by design. A U.N. Security Council resolution forbids its troops in Darfur from seizing weapons from the Janjaweed militia and binds its forces to respect the sovereignty of the Sudanese government. It calls for no economic sanctions if that government continues to balk at calls to end the carnage.

If and when they arrive in Darfur, those troops' hands will be tied by those restrictions.

For his part, Joey Cheek keeps doing what he can, using his celebrity, which he knows will be fleeting, for every ounce of leverage it is worth. He has proposed that a joint contingent of U.S. and Chinese athletes visit Darfur. He disagrees with calls for a boycott of next year's Summer Olympics in China.

Instead, he says, he'd like to see other athletes use the Olympic spotlight to press for more change in Darfur.

In other words, which he modestly wouldn't use, to help preach what he is practicing.