16 SPORTS ILLUSTRATED | SI.COM
SCORECARDMost disturbing is that Mickelson
knows exactly why and how he is
being used.
“Sportswashing,” Mickelson
called it in an interview with writer
Alan Shipnuck of The Firepit
Collective for Shipnuck’s upcoming
book, Phil: The Rip-Roaring (and
Unauthorized!) Biography of Golf’s
Most Colorful Superstar.
Sportswashing is the use of
sports to present a sanitized,
friendlier version of a political
regime or operation. Mickelson later
apologized for using words that do
not ref lect his “true feelings,” but
that apology was just another form
of sportswashing; he should think
the people funding the new tour are
scary bleeps, because they are. They
are determined to succeed, too: They
just announced a 2022 schedule that
includes four events in the U.S.
The term sportswashing is
relatively new, but the practice
is almost as old as sports.
Paul Christesen, a professor
of ancient Greek history at
Dartmouth, says it goes all the way
back to the original Olympics.
Christesen tells this story:
“There’s a long war between Athens
and Sparta. Athens looks like it’s
getting its ass handed to it. They’re
getting the crap beaten out of them.
And everyone thinks that they’re
down and out. And so an Athenian
politician named Alcibiades
comes to the Olympic Games in
416 [B.C.E.], right in the middle of
the war, when things are going bad
for Athens. And he enters several
chariot teams into the four-horse
chariot race and wins first, second
and either third or fourth place.
And that’s like an F1 racing team—it
was insanely expensive.
“And they all said to him at
home, ‘You’re crazy. We don’t have
those kinds of resources.’ And he’s
like, ‘Listen. Everyone thoughtwe were down and out. I win all
these events at Olympia, and now
everyone in the Greek world thinks
that we’re just fine. And they’re
terrified of us.’ It was a straight-up
geopolitical maneuver.”
Modern sportswashing can take
many forms. Qatar wants the world
to see it as the host of the 2022 men’s
World Cup, not a country where
migrant workers are exploited.
(Including for the competition:
Thousands of workers have died
over the last decade building the
World Cup infrastructure.) Former
Chinese Communist Party leader
Mao Tse-tung once banned golf,
calling it a “sport for millionaires,”
but the game has since become
both legal and popular in China,leading to propaganda that golf was
actually invented there. If you were
to listen to the Party, you’d believe
that everything that happens in
China started in China and belongs
to China.
If you think that kind of silly
nationalistic fable would never f ly
in the U.S., I have two words for
you: Abner Doubleday. Millions
of American kids have grown up
believing Doubleday invented
baseball—a myth that was created
a century ago to distance theFAN FAVORIT E
Competing for China, Gu was
the first freestyle skier to win
three medals at one Games.ER
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