The politicization of sport was always considered a perversion of the virtues that made athletic endeavors special: vigorous, merit-based competition; fair play; old-school sportsmanship; and contests devoid of malign external influences. Hence, the 1936 Berlin Olympics served for decades as a teachable moment about the tragic interweaving of sports and politics.
Generations of sports enthusiasts grew up appreciating that, in a stadium built to celebrate the Nazis’ Third Reich, Adolf Hitler’s leveraging of the Berlin Games to promote Aryan supremacy failed spectacularly. It failed due to 18 courageous black American athletes, led by the legendary Jesse Owens, who collectively won 14 medals.
Fast forward 44 years and the International Olympic Committee’s position was that the American-led boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics, a boycott protesting the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan, was an inappropriate means to achieve a political end. The IOC accurately forecast that the boycott’s victims would be the athletes, themselves.
That seminal lesson about both the inappropriateness and the impracticality of exploiting sport for political ends is completely lost on the bodies that govern sport today.
They currently seek to reduce Russia to the status of international sporting outcast as punishment for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the subsequent humanitarian tragedy unfolding among the Ukrainian people.
These bans and discriminatory actions are misguided instruments enacted by authority figures seeking to punish anyone Russian out of an understandable frustration at the West’s impotent political leadership in the face of Vladimir Putin’s assertive foreign policy and aggressive military actions.
Double Standards
The hypocrisy of the IOC and the IPC appears limitless. Politically blind to the comprehensively documented atrocities committed by the communist Chinese regime against the minority Muslim population, only weeks ago the IOC held this year’s Winter Olympics in Beijing.It should not. The IOC’s previous selection of Beijing as host of the 2008 Olympics overlooked huge numbers of political prisoners and the de facto slave labor that produced the Olympics’ souvenir merchandise.
It is rather telling that the IPC is not cancelling this month’s Paralympic Winter Games in Beijing, but is preventing Russian athletes from taking part. How can the IPC, with a straight face, hold its event in a country whose government, epitomized by its surveillance state, perpetrates humanitarian horrors and uses its military and economic power to intimidate neighboring countries?
In August 2008, Russia went to war with the small Caucasian nation of Georgia, a conflict that ended with Russia in control of the Russian-backed, self-proclaimed republics of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Nevertheless, from the second through the fourth week of February 2014 the IOC still held the Winter Olympics in Sochi. Coincidentally, during that February, Ukraine’s Crimea region was being invaded by the Russians, who formally annexed the Crimea in mid-March 2014.
Russia’s move against Crimea did not surprise anyone closely following international relations and Russian foreign policy. Putin was the same nationalist leader who in 2007 began publicizing his plans for territorial expansion. How could a sporting body as politically sensitive as the IOC allow the Sochi Games to continue given Russia’s contemporaneous designs on Ukrainian territory only a few hundred miles from the Olympic Stadium?
FIFA also applies a political double standard in the application of its alleged principles.
Retrospective Judgment
If the world’s woke sporting bodies are to paint their principles across nations, teams, and clubs with a consistent brush, is not retrospective judgment also appropriate? Inspired by America’s respective race-based reparations and cancel culture movements, should we not retroactively punish those countries and individuals who participated in past sporting events that implicitly endorsed or acquiesced in the promotion of respective regimes and their disgusting behaviors?For example, the 1978 World Cup was won by the host nation, Argentina. From 1976 to 1983, Argentina’s military dictatorship unleashed a “dirty war” upon its political opponents involving tens of thousands of disappeared people and the widespread use of torture. The 1974 World Cup, won by the host nation West Germany, also featured East Germany. The latter was governed by a brutal communist regime that survived, until the Berlin Wall’s fall in late 1989, courtesy of its notorious secret police apparatus, the Stasi, one of the most effective and repressive security services in modern history.
Clearly, both Argentina and East Germany’s participation in those tournaments must be removed from the sport’s official records, YouTube archives, and so on.
North America’s politically correct hockey powers must feel collective shame about the February 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, New York, which was held only two months after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Applied retroactively, the USA’s “Miracle on Ice” win over the Soviet hockey team, and subsequent gold medal victory, should never have been permitted. The current NHL must want those medals returned to the IOC and those iconic games airbrushed, Soviet-style, from the Olympic record.
Identity Politics
Banning and discriminating against Russian athletes is simply identity politics on steroids. Identity politics targets voters based upon their race, gender, class, religion, etc. because the notion that our group identity determines our individual political attitudes is the pseudo-intellectual foundation upon which identity politics rests.Although identity politics may at times be good politics (see: the 21st century American Democratic Party), rarely does it make for good policymaking. In this vein, the actions taken to date by the world’s leading sporting bodies and federations set a very dangerous precedent.
Freedom of Expression
Recent political developments can blind one to the fact that freedom of speech includes the freedom to be silent, too. Clearly, such a freedom, which is central to true freedom of expression, is now unacceptable in sporting circles.The freedom to be silent is no longer to be tolerated. Recent days are littered with institutional, corporate, and media criticism of Russian athletes who either have remained silent about the Ukraine invasion or have not sufficiently denounced, according to their self-anointed betters, Russia’s government.
Inspired by American political discourse over the past two years, these critics wrongly equate an athlete’s silence with support for and endorsement of any and all transgressions and evils perpetrated by the Kremlin. Social media’s legion of keyboard warriors targeting their thesauruses at Russian athletes choose to ignore two realities.
First, any Russian athlete who denounces the invasion may expose him or herself, and their immediate and extended families, both in the West and in Russia, to retribution at the hands of the Russian State. Second, in a civilized, truly liberal society, everyone has the right to be political, that is, to be active or expressive in the public sphere. But everyone also has the fundamental right not to exercise that particular right.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a geopolitical nightmare awash with a humanitarian tragedy. Reasonable people may disagree whether or not, and how, the invasion may have been prevented. Going forward, they may disagree about how best to support Ukraine and to deter further Russian aggression.
But, when it comes to painting, and thereby denormalizing, all Russian athletes with the same illiberal brush, the reasonable response is to resist such an impulse. Instead, reasonable people should implore the sporting authorities to do better. With apologies to Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall (Part II),” one could begin by telling them, “Hey, FIFA—and the IOC, IPC, NHL, and F1—leave them Russians alone.”
