Red cards all round
As Peace News went to press the 2004 Olympics had just kicked off.
Like music, sport is often said to be a great bridger of divides. It can bring people closer, create feelings of togetherness, a sense of purpose and so on. A pity it is also wrapped up in nationalistic nonsense, is negative in its representation of masculinity /manhood, and suggests a seemingly uncontainable desire for dominance.
War minus the shooting
While presented as a positive force in some circles, sport is also frequently presented as an analogy to war: physical, competitive, sometimes brutal, and involving a lot of money. As George Orwell commented "Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play... it is war minus the shooting"
Apparently the first sponsor of the modern Olympics, in the 1928 Amsterdam games, was
Coca-Cola - a trend that has continued ever since. Athens 2004 has half the sponsors of the previous games, but includes several unsavoury megacorporations including oil giants, arms manufacturers and junk food dealers.
Sign of the times
The iconic images of the modern Olympics are a mirror of their political times: from the tens of thousands of Nazi salutes at Berlin in 1936 to the raised fists of Tommie Smith and John Carols in 1968. Meanwhile, the day to day friendly, informal football and basketball games, the anti-fa teams such as St Pauli in Germany, and all the good antirascism and anti-violence work that is being done in many areas of professional sport, is basically ignored. The historic matches - for example the1914 football match that took place between German and British troops during in the First World War, and the 2004 "peace tests" which brought the Pakistani cricket team to India for the first time since 1989 - are quickly forgotten.
Perhaps non-commercial sporting activity can be a positive force, but while it remains intrinsically bound up with politics, money and war, and until we are prepared to examine our own desire for power in an honest way, we will never be able to divorce sport from the negative analogy.
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