We found the line
It's dasvidaniya to the Russians and Belarusians from international sport, for a while at least.
Welcome to the latest edition of SSWOS, the Sick, Sad World of Sports, where sports is the mechanism by which we learn about the depths of shithousery and assholery and dipshittery of the human soul.
I hope you find it fun or informative but not both. If you want more of this particular species of brain worms, follow @scksadwos.
I also write exclusively about rugby league on pythagonrl.com and @pythagonrl.
(Apologies for the missed week, I have crested the NRL season preview mountain and am close to finishing that off)
We found the line
There’s a bit going on at the moment. Eastern Australia has successfully pivoted from bushfires to the pandemic and then back to flooding in the space of three years. Nature is healing.
The Winter Olympics wrapped up under a doping cloud. The Saudi golf league is more or less dead after Phil Mickelson unsuccessfully tried to use it for leverage. Cycling’s promotion and relegation system has been under scrutiny. There’s disruptions in world padel. Russia invaded Ukraine.
I’ve thought long and hard about the invasion and decided this is Not Good. What’s surprising to me is how surprised everyone - including me, lest you think this is some smarmy take about how smart I am - that it actually happened. Russia and Putin have typically not been tagged with the same maniacal dictator brush as, to borrow a 2000s-ism, the Axis of Evil.
On the contrary, Russia was the R in BRICS, the countries whose favourable demographics and economic growth was going to see them surpass the West as the dominant powers of the 21st century. Liberalism would inevitably follow their capitalist liberation (read: access to debt markets), which is considered axiomatic if you have a particular species of neoliberal brain worms. Western columnists are scrambling to figure out exactly why this is happening and why now. I don’t have any particular insight to offer here, other than to hope this doesn’t end in our nuclear annihilation and if Ukraine somehow “wins” this war, then so much the better.
Also, don’t believe literally anything you see on social media. Treat it like you would the propaganda of your own government.
But we’ll move on to the sporting impacts. It took a few days of people being really angry online but eventually the IOC, which notably has no major events for another two years1, took the lead and punted Russia and Belarus2. This seemed to give permission to the other major sports bodies to do likewise.
FIFA finally yielded to pressure from UEFA, led primarily by Poland, Czechia and Sweden, who share both a World Cup qualifying group with Russia and a nuclear blast radius of Ukrainian cities. Why it took FIFA so long is a mystery. It’s not like Russia is a significant buyer of broadcast rights in the grand scheme of things or even a particularly important football nation. UEFA had more on the line, with a Champions League final moved from St Petersburg to Paris, and acted sooner. Instead, Gianni Infantino’s relationship with Putin has come under the microscope.
A slew of three letter abbreviations of sporting federations have cut ties with Russia. Biathlon, luge, skating, both rugbys, athletics, teqball, shooting, cycling, baseball, baminton, skiing, pentathlon, canoeing, triathlon and others have all imposed sanctions. These include banning Russian and Belarusian athletes or teams, removing Russian and Belarusian flags, cancelling events in Russia, removing Russian executives from power and/or ending sponsorships with Russian businesses.
Judo hilariously stripped Putin, a famous judoka, of his honorary black belt. F1 has cancelled the Russian GP (for now) and the sanctions on Russia put Haas in particular, whose main sponsorship3 comes courtesy of sexual assaulter and Russian, Nikita Mazepin, in a difficult position.
The UCI’s involvement with Igor Makarov has come back into the spotlight. Chess is so heavily dominated by Russians that removing them might bring the viability of the highest level of the sport into question. And tennis did the most tennis thing imaginable:
It’s certainly going to be easier for some sports than others to make a statement about the unacceptability of invading another nation without simultaneously killing the sport itself. There’s also the question of whether these bans are legal, in the sporting sense, given most democratically-run organisations do not have rules allowing for a unilateral expulsion of members because of something more or less out of their control. Whether Russia bother testing this in court is a different matter.
There’s two ways to see this series of actions by international sport in response to the Russian invasion.
The first is that this is the final straw, breaking the camel’s back. World sport has been incredibly tolerant of Russians, giving them untold chances to use sports as a means to launder the reputation of Putin’s Russia, especially in the face of state-sponsored systematic doping. With increased media pressure around sportswashing following the Beijing Olympics4, if all this appeasement and cooperation was just to see Russia burn that goodwill it had accumulated (if any) to cinders by invading another country, then international sport is collectively done being a tool of the Russian state.
There’s been plenty of bullshit that should have seen the Russians dropped from world sport long before this. One would think that the doping program at the Sochi Olympics would have been sufficient in and of itself. Never mind that the Russians already invaded Ukraine in 2014 and the collective response from the world was to shrug their shoulders.
The second way to look at this is that the invasion of another nation is the line that international sport is willing to draw in the sand. Of course, the United States didn’t suffer any consequences for invading Afghanistan or Iraq. Nor did the UAE and Saudia when they bombed Yemen. Nor did Israel, whose own sportswashing program to present itself as a hub of tech and innovation is almost never remarked upon, occupied Palestine or invaded Lebanon in 2006. Or when Russia invaded Georgia in 2008. Or when, again, Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014.
In the context of this second way of looking at this, what makes this conflict different? The only two factors I can surmise are 1) the people being invaded are predominantly white and Christian and therefore, to western observers, European and therefore civilised5 and 2) the scale of the invasion is much larger than a bombing or shelling campaign or walking into Crimea to reclaim a previously-occupied naval port. This action by Russia shatters certain neoliberal views of the world’s operating order and that is part of the problem (see earlier re: surprise).
It’s the shock, the scale and the targets of the invasion that perhaps make this conflict different. If you think of international sport as one means of exercising soft power and one that has been traditionally used to uphold a sense of western supremacy over international affairs6, then this picture starts to resolve into clarity. Consider the major sports are British in origin, the many international federations that have French names because the French started them and the cultural and military dominance of the United States is reflected in so many aspects of our day-to-day life that it would be exceptional if sport did not reflect this in its organisational structures. Consider that countries outside of Europe and the English speaking world don’t seem to engage with sport in precisely the same manner as Anglophones and Europeans do, and when they do, its a cultural import they’ve decided to adopt, willingly, knowingly or otherwise.7
The bug, or the feature, of this implicitly pro-western system is that anyone with enough money can bend the system to their will. The irony that the great sportswashers of our time - Russia, China, the Gulf States - are all enabled by western economic policies. That is, policies that configure the entire economy around having fossil fuels as the basic energy input, despite the national security and environmental impacts, and to export all manufacturing to cheaper locales in a never-ending quest to suppress domestic wages.
A pivot away from oil to renewables and other forms of energy and a focus on maintaining a domestic manufacturing infrastructure would have completely undermined the power these states have in global affairs because they’d still be poor and no one cares what the poor think. But the rich can buy access and hosting rights and insert professional teams where they weren’t any previously and enjoy the resulting prestige. Of course, the money also buys fighter jets and missile systems and other forms of power.
The reaction from the world’s sporting communities is a reflection of how deeply felt this attack is, not on the Ukrainian people, but on the established order. Consequently, the collective ego has lashed out, finally freed from its obligatons to Putin’s Russia with no World Cups or Olympics in the near future8, to do what it can to save face to preserve the existing order.
It’s a highly specific set of events that seem unlikely to be replicated in any other time or place, so it remains to be seen if this is a one-off or if we will see something similar if/when China invades Taiwan.
The grace, the beauty of sports
Very normal things (slightly stale)
That this can be organised in four years, compared to the seven traditionally given to Olympic hosts, is telling. That the Comm Games seems destined to alternate hosting responsibilities between England and Australia, with an occassional New Zealand or Canadian host, is also telling. That major sports like athletics are going to be farmed out to regional areas, like Ballarat, is telling. The fact that no one seems to care is damning.
I’m not going to be the first point this out and I don’t know when the breaking point will come but surely the entire enterprise is on its last legs.
Continuing the NFL’s international series as a means of soft expansion, we’ve got four games in Munich and Frankfurt over the next four years. American football is relatively popular in Germany, thanks to military occupation introducing the sport, perhaps moreso than it is in Britain. I have no doubt it will succeed and fuel thoughts about how the NFL expands into Europe properly.
Dumb.
Next time: Saudi golf league failing, the fracturing of Australian ice hockey, padel breakaway, the MLB lockout, cycling pro-rel and whatever other incredibly stupid stories develop.
Thanks for reading. If you liked what you read, use the Share button above. If you really like what you read, you can get every update delivered to your inbox using the Subscribe now button below.
The Paralympics will have Russian and Belarusian athletes but, rightly or wrongly, it hardly attracts the spotlight of the Olympics. Disregard
Belarus have skated through this whole thing without copping anywhere near enough flak for their facilitating the invasion.
Good luck getting that sponsorship money out of a frozen Russian banking system!
And albeit about twenty years too late but that’s the media for you.
To be clear, this is not my opinion but what I’m seeing in the way people, the media and sports organisations have responded. Several reporters said the quiet part out loud, which I think is both horrific and instructive. There is a lot of baggage to be sorted through with these terms that I am not qualified to do but that hasn’t stopped others from invoking these identities.
Go google all time Olympic medal tallies. Of the fourteen countries with more than 100 Summer gold medals, only Russia/Soviet Union, China and Japan are from outside the West. Worse, only South Korea and Russia/Soviet Union are in the equivalent part of the standings for the Winter Olympics.
Hopefully this is vague enough to avoid cancellation. I’m not trying to deny the agency of the non-European/Anglophone world but there’s also something in the fact that the nature of attendances for grands prix are different in China, Russia and the Gulf States when compared to the US, Britain and Australia, as is the framing around these attendances by the media. We must also consider that the sports that have spread beyond the Anglosphere - e.g. soccer, cricket, baseball - have spread, along with speaking English and other cultural accoutrements, with occupying military forces.
Events awarded before the federations realised exactly who they were getting into bed with. No matter how regretful they were though, they have (or had) lost the ability to say no.