18 SPORTS ILLUSTRATED | SI.COM
SCORECARDnational pastime from its foreign
antecedents, cricket and rounders.
“It is a proven fact that the
game now designated ‘Base
ball’ is of modern and purely
American origin,” insisted one of
the game’s first power brokers,
Albert G. Spalding, in his 1911 book
America’s National Game.
There is a hint of sportswashing
every time a U.S. president throws
out a first pitch or a college
president talks about football as the
“front porch” of a university. Sports
seem like they aren’t political, which
is precisely why they are so often
used for political purposes. The
drama seduces us, and our passions
distract us, and so we swallow
whatever government officials feed
us without even realizing it.
After Russia invaded Ukraine, the
International Olympic Committee
and FIFA moved to ban bothRussia and its ally Belarus from
competition. That might not seem
like much of a penalty for Russia’s
atrocities in Ukraine, but don’t
think of it as a punishment. Think
of it as taking away a weapon.
President Vladimir Putin has long
used sports to shape Russia’s image
as both powerful and reasonable.
Shortly after delivering a
famously blistering anti-West
speech in Munich in 2007, Putin
successfully lobbied the IOC to
award the ’14 Winter Olympics to
Sochi, a one-two punch that made
Russia seem like it (and its leader’s
views) belonged on the world stage.
Russia kept using sports to look
strong (instituting a state-sponsored
doping program to increase the
country’s medal count) and friendly
(Putin opened the ’18 men’s
World Cup by welcoming spectators
and journalists to “open, hospitable,friendly Russia.”) Earlier this year,
he attended the ’22 Winter Olympics
opening ceremony and appeared to
fake falling asleep as the Ukrainian
delegation entered the stadium, then
invaded Ukraine shortly after the
Games ended.
The modern Olympics, like the
ancient ones, have often been a
political tool. When Nazi Germany
hosted the 1936 Summer Olympics,
it saw the event as a pep rally
for the Aryan race. The Games’
slogan was “I Call the Youth of
the World!” Adolf Hitler built the
Olympiastadion in Berlin, which
supposedly seated 100,000 people,
and the Nazis paid for propagandist
filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl to make
a documentary about the Olympics.
The Nazis also took down signs
banning Jews from public places,
in an effort to seem...well, open,
hospitable and friendly.
“People take sports super
seriously,” Christesen says. “And
as soon as people do that, you
can leverage it for geopolitical
purposes. My students are like,
‘Everyone’s too cynical [for it to
work now]. Of course it works. It
always works. In some ways, it
works better now, because you’re
so bombarded by it all the time
that you can’t escape from it.”
A PR tactic that has been
successful for more than 2,000 years
is probably not going away anytime
soon. But sports fans and journalists
can at least call sportswashing what
it is, and athletes should show some
self-respect when tyrants come
calling. There are plenty of ways to
host games without being part of
such a dirty one.MA
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“People take sports super seriously,”
Christesen says. “And as soon as people
do that, you can leverage it for
geopolitical purposes. It always works.”
MARCHING ON
Qatar has let nothing stand
in the way of stadium
construction for the 2022 Cup.