Sports and Politics

I was talking to a couple of people about the immorality of having the World Cup Finals in Qatar, a country that is openly misogynistic, homophobic, patriarchal and with a population of less than 400,000. In addition, during the period of 10 years of construction, it resulted in the death of some 6500 migrant workers. Qatar implemented a Kafala system, a type of indentured labour which in effect removed all labour rights for the hundreds of thousands of migrant workers. Add to this, the sheer amount of money spent by the Qataris some $300 billion which is mind-blowingly immoral and as an added extra they have got away with sports washing on a gigantic scale.  These are the reasons why I haven’t been watching the World Cup. The scale of money spent could have transformed 100,000 lives on a neighbouring continent that is suffering from famine, drought and displacement of thousands from the climate crisis and war.  Allah might be great but unfortunately, some of his followers are self-centred narcissists with a moral compass that points only in one direction and that is directed towards them.

My response to, we should keep politics out of sport, was that when you sing a national anthem under a national flag, unfortunately, and not surprisingly it is political. Now, if you want to suggest that sporting events should not be held in authoritarian countries that do not respect basic human rights principles, such as free speech, freedom of assembly and freedom of expression, on that we can agree and therein lies the contradiction. The world has seen sporting events in countries with authoritarian governments from Italy in 1934, Russia in 2018, Argentina in 1978, the former Soviet Union in 1980 and in more recent times China. So, whatever way you slice it, sport is highly political. Also, note that sporting boycotts played their part in the overthrow of apartheid in South Africa.

Let’s start with the Olympic games in 1936. In Nazi Germany, Hitler used the Olympics as a showcase to highlight the superiority of the Aryan Race. That bubble was burst by Jessie Owens, a black man who went on to win 4 golds and instantly disproved the pseudo-science of eugenics. Then there was Mohammed Ali who won Olympic gold for the US then was refused entry into restaurants in the segregated South. When drafted to fight in Vietnam, he refused, on the basis that no Vietnamese had ever lynched a black man. He was stripped of his heavyweight title for three years in the prime of his boxing career. 

There were also Tommie Smith and John Carlos who at the medal ceremony at the 1968 Olympics raised their fists taking the black power salute in solidarity with the civil rights struggle. They were banned from the US Olympic team even after winning a gold medal. The moral courage shown by Smith and Carlos contrasts with the England team and others who after coming under pressure from FIFA, did not wear the armband in support of the LGTB community, why because they might get a yellow card.

Colin Kaepernick an NFL star footballer “took the knee” to show his solidarity with the murdered George Floyd and other African Americans who were being brutalised by the police, on a daily basis. This initiated a worldwide response with sportsmen and women doing the same right across the globe in support of equality and racial justice. Again, this contrasts with the lack of moral courage shown by footballers in Qatar, for Kaepernick this was career-ending.

All this is further exacerbated by the corruption of sporting bodies such as FIFA which are devoid of values and whose only god is money. Giovanni Infantino’s rambling speech in which he said “Today I feel Qatari, I feel Arab, I feel African, I feel gay, I feel disabled, I feel a migrant worker” what he left out was, I feel I am an asshole and as my name implies, I am mentally too young for this job.

 Finally, trying to take politics out of sport is like trying to take cumin out of an Indian curry.

Let me know what you think in the comments below 👇

Suneil Sharma

5^th December 2022