How realistic is the view that sport can and should remain uninfluenced by politics and politicians?

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How realistic is the view that sport can and should remain uninfluenced by politics and politicians?

“It is hard to believe that anyone will ever be able to say again, with a straight face, that sport is nothing to do with politics.”  (Whannel, 1986, P.2)  This coming after the events of the 1980 Moscow Olympics that saw a boycott by the United States as well as athletes from Britain competing under the Olympic, not the British flag after fighting parliamentary intervention in order to take part.

Up to this period before the early 1980’s, which saw “a considerable growth in interest in the relationship between politics and sport,” (Polley, 1998, P.13) there was a widely held popular belief that sport and politics did not naturally belong together. And even now there are still many, David Coltart being one, who hold this view. Writing for the Daily Telegraph (31/12/2002), he says, “it is entirely correct to keep politics out of sport.”  But whether sport should remain uninfluenced by politics and politicians is an entirely different question to whether sport can remain uninfluenced by politics.  I will first try and answer the question whether or not sport can remain uninfluenced before I deal with whether or not it should.

The view that sport and politics do not naturally belong together assumes, for example, “that sport is a free and voluntary activity that works beyond the constraints of the prevailing political economy; that sport is a private activity in which political agencies have no business; and that when political agencies do get involved, they invariably damage, corrupt, or pervert sport.” (Polley, 1998, P.12) What this view ignores is that sport and political agencies have had a long term, structural relationship at all levels, from local through to international.  This stance also fails to distinguish between political involvement and political intervention, which are two completely separate actions.

Allison (1983, P.17) cites two underlying reasons why sport and politics impinge on each other, in what he called the “considerable and necessary politics of sport.”  The first is that sport “creates politically usable resources,” (Allison, 1983, P.12) such as social order, local and national prestige, and physical health, and “as long as sport is organised on the basis of representation of clearly defined geopolitical entities, from village cricket eleven to national Olympic team, this aspect will be a part of sport.” (Polley, 1998, P.16)  Prestige and an association with success in sport can be an important political resource, and politicians such as Prime Minister Wilson in England and President Pertini of Italy realised this as they tried to associate themselves with their countries success in the football’s World Cup.  Sport often finds itself the subject of political action because of its identification with notions of indecent and uncivilised behaviour and the social order problems it poses.

The second reason why sport and politics impinge on each other in Allison’s general model for state involvement, is because “sport is divisive …. and an agent of social disorder.” (Allison, 1983, P.16)  He claims that group identity, access to resources, wealth, and even problems of individual and public morality, arouses conflict between different interest groups.  The original ‘Derby’ game of football between two parishes in Derby was a constant source of disorder and in many cities during the seventeenth century, football was banned because of the group identity conflict that resulted.  The allocation of resources between different sports in traditional society also was the source of varying degrees of conflict, as is the question of morality concerning some sports, from the debate over the use of animals for human sport, to whether or not boxing should be banned, as it is in Sweden.

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The Leicester Tigers rugby teams proposed tour of apartheid South Africa a few years age caused a disagreement between the local authorities and rugby officials over whether or not the tour was morally right because of apartheid South Africa’s history of human rights abuse.  ‘But it is only sport,’ was the cry of those in favour of maintaining sporting contracts, but as John Williams writing for the Leicester Mercury (2003) points out, “sport does not constitute and entirely different realm, separated from some of the crucial, basic issues which face us all.”  He also argues that the very shape ...

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