Sport and Politics

A few years ago, I was teaching a Year 7 class, and the lesson started with the question ‘Politics is…?’ on the board. Almost immediately, the brightest girl in the class raised her hand and replied ‘boring’, to much mirth and laughter. It was this that gave me the idea that the role of politics needed to be shared, to show that it wasn’t just conventional government and select committees, but that politics is everywhere. A few weeks later, I gave an assembly on the theme of politics and sport. The idea was to take one topic that is universally loved and one that is not, and combine the two to show how interrelated they are.

So, this PRESC post will take a few iconic events from history and summarise how politics shaped them.

Empire and Politics

As a cricket fan, I’m going to start with Tony Greig, a white South African who captained the England cricket team. In 1976, he was asked how England were going to fare against the West Indies, and he used the rather unfortunate phrase of ‘making them grovel’. Now, I’m going to give Greig the benefit of the doubt and not cast him as a racist. However, as a man who had grown up a beneficiary of apartheid, and given the Black opposition he faced, it was certainly a clumsy and naïve choice of words. The result was one of the fiercest bowling assaults ever witnessed in the game, led by the supreme athleticism of Michael Holding and Andy Roberts, and a 3–0 series win for the West Indies. For those inclined, the highlights are available on YouTube. It makes for uncomfortable viewing! What is the political link here? The West Indies are a disparate set of nations in the Caribbean who band together to form a cricket team that competes on the global stage. They lay claim to being the greatest sporting side in all of history. Under the captaincy of Clive Lloyd, petty island squabbles and rivalries were cast aside to project the Caribbean as the dominant force in world cricket. It is important to note that the relationship between West Indies cricket and Blackness is deeply intertwined with the history of colonialism, racial identity and cultural pride in the Caribbean. Cricket, the quintessential English sport, became a symbol of resistance, empowerment and a way of expressing Black identity, both in the region and on the world stage. In 1984, eight years after Greig’s comments, the West Indies won every Test Match against England and took the series 5–0. An apocryphal story of the era has Viv Richards (one of the greatest players of all time) being asked whether they had ‘whitewashed’ England, the term for winning every game. He is said to have replied, ‘Nah, we blackwashed them.’ Apt.

Racism and Politics

Most people are aware of the story of Jesse Owens and the 1936 Olympic Games. A quick reminder, however, is necessary. Owens won four gold medals (100m, 200m, long jump and the 4x100m relay) at the Berlin Games, held three years into the reign of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, and is famously said to have been snubbed by the Führer, as a Black man winning at the ultimate sporting event didn’t sit neatly with his belief in a superior Aryan master race. Furthermore, two years later, the German boxer Max Schmeling (who was branded the Nazi boxer but didn’t share their views or join the party) lost his rematch to the African American boxer Joe Louis in front of a sell-out Yankee Stadium, in what was again a blow to those who believed in the Social Darwinist theory of racial superiority. However, what is less well known is the treatment each man received on his return to the USA (in the case of Owens) or as he carried on his career (in the case of Louis). Owens received little fanfare on returning home: President Franklin D. Roosevelt never invited him to the White House or even sent a telegram. ‘Hitler didn’t snub me,’ Owens later said, ‘it was our president who snubbed me.’ He continued to face racial discrimination and struggled to find opportunities in a country that was still deeply segregated. Louis, despite his fame and success, was often treated as a second-class citizen, encountering segregation and prejudice in many areas of life. Being a Black sporting hero did not exempt him from the harsh realities of racism in America at the time. A previous post explored the realities of the Jim Crow laws but, to quickly recap, it was a legal system that separated white and Black Americans into living ‘separate but equal’ lives, yet in reality ensured that entrenched racism and racial inequality pervaded all aspects of American society.

Communism and Politics

We live in an era of unprecedented advances in sports science and technology. Yet there are a number of athletics world records that have remained untouched since the 1980s. The Czechoslovakian runner Jarmila Kratochvílová ran the 800m in 1:53.28 in 1983, and the East German athlete Marita Koch ran the 400m in 47.60 seconds in 1985. Just for reference, at the 2024 Paris Olympics, Keely Hodgkinson won gold in the 800m in 1:56.72 and Marileidy Paulino won the 400m in 48.17. The problem with some of these records is that they come with a huge asterisk next to them, because the athletes competed for regimes where state-sponsored doping was the norm.

Why? Sportswashing. Both Czechoslovakia and East Germany were communist client states of the Soviet Union. The USSR and the USA were engaged in a PRESC battle from 1945 until the former’s demise in 1991, and one way of showing your ideological dominance over your hated foe was defeating them on the sports field. Which brings us to the ‘Miracle on Ice’. At the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, New York, the Soviet Union had the most dominant ice hockey team on the planet. They had won gold at the previous four Winter Olympics (1964, 1968, 1972 and 1976), their players were full-time professionals in all but name, and they had thrashed the Americans 10–3 in an exhibition game just before the tournament. The U.S. team, by contrast, was made up mostly of amateurs and college kids. On 22 February 1980, the Americans took a late 4–3 lead and clung on in the final minutes under immense pressure. As the clock wound down, broadcaster Al Michaels delivered his famous line: “Do you believe in miracles? Yes!” This was far more than a sports win. At a time of heightened Cold War tension, it was hailed as a triumph of American grit and teamwork over the Soviet machine.

Chess and Politics

During the Cold War, chess became one of the most intense and symbolic arenas of competition between the United States and the Soviet Union: a proxy battleground for the intellectual and cultural superiority of each side. The Soviet Union invested heavily in chess from the 1920s onwards, seeing it as proof of the intelligence and strategic thinking of the Soviet people. Chess schools were established, and the best players were supported by the state. The results speak for themselves: from 1948, when Mikhail Botvinnik became world champion, until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, Soviet players held the world title for all but three years.

Those three years belong to one man. The 1972 World Chess Championship, held in Reykjavík, Iceland, was one of the most iconic sporting confrontations of the Cold War. Bobby Fischer, a chess prodigy and maverick from Brooklyn, challenged the reigning world champion, Boris Spassky, who was backed by the entire Soviet chess establishment. This was never just about chess. Fischer represented the West’s emphasis on individual genius; Spassky represented a Soviet system built on collective effort and state-sponsored success. Fischer won, becoming the first American-born world champion, and the victory resonated far beyond the chessboard. Covered extensively by the global media, it was hailed as proof that America could beat the Soviets at their own game.

Sportswashing Today

Sportswashing isn’t restricted to a bygone era either. In recent years, Saudi Arabia has looked to recast its image from a Wahhabi-dominated theocracy to a global travel destination by investing in nearly every mainstream sport, including golf, boxing and WWE. A story that shows the power of politics, economics and sport can be found in its takeover of Newcastle United. When the Premier League stalled the deal in 2020, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman reportedly messaged Boris Johnson urging him to ‘correct and reconsider’ the ‘wrong’ decision, and Johnson asked a senior adviser to look into it. Downing Street insisted it never intervened, and the takeover finally went through in October 2021. With billions of pounds of Saudi trade and investment at stake, draw your own conclusions. Realpolitik at its finest!

Final Whistle

I still fondly remember delivering the assembly. I’d combined it with mass corruption in Southeast Asia, in particular the kleptocratic regimes of Ferdinand Marcos and Suharto, which got me some irate messages from the local Filipino and Indonesian communities. But, as we say, facts not feelings! To finish, politics and sport cannot be separated. The examples and anecdotes here are but the tip of the iceberg. Future articles will explore this theme further but, this weekend, when you sit down to watch a game of football, rugby, NFL or the like, peek behind the curtain and look at the murky fingers of politics that permeate every sport.