COMMENTS
Some argue that sports are not politics, and that, for example, gay celebrations do not belong in the world of sports. Nonsense and sausage tissue.
A POLITICAL EXPRESSION: The Olympic flame has reached the Beijing Olympics, which will open in just over six months. Photo: AP / NTB
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Internal comments: This is a comment. The commentary expresses the writer’s attitude.
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The ball can probably be round, although the utterances may be sharp. Take, for example, the Austrian football player Marko Arnautovic, who is originally from Serbia. During a match against Northern Macedonia during this year’s European Football Championship, he scored the last goal when Austria won 3-1. And to celebrate, he shouted, “I’m going to fuck your Albanian mom.” He shouted in a language all ex-Yugoslavs understand, Serbo-Croatian. And he shouted it to players on a team where 30 percent of the population are ethnic Albanians. It can thus be assumed that up to several in the opposite half of the court had reason to be bloody offended on behalf of their mother. And that was exactly what was meant. For sports is also an extension of politics, by other means.
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And even if the wounds from the Yugoslav civil wars 20-30 years ago, are still open cracks, so we in this country also know what it’s really about. For “the most important thing is not to win, but to beat the Swedes”. As is well known, Petter Northug knows most about this, and that is because all sports are also a kind of mobilization of the “tribe”, of the clan, of the local community, of the city, of the district, of the nation. Just think of how football fans feel, where they suffer through season after season with teams that never win, but the fans still persevere. It’s about loyalty, commitment, think of the match song of the football club Liverpool: “You’ll Never Walk Alone”. It is a political, ideological, yes, existential, utterance. Which goes straight to the heart of the brutal British class society.
Burning settlement
The essence of sport is political. It’s because it’s about competition, about being the best. And sport is used for everything it is worth politically and ideologically. Is China’s eagerness to host the Olympics random? Is the Russian state-organized doping program an expression of something other than that sporting results are politically important in a competition that is even bigger than the sporting one? Was not sport during the Cold War also an ideological contest, in which socialism stood against capitalism, collectivism against individualism, and to show the whole world which system was best?
Stop the World Cup in the morgue!
Sports became politics showcase and surrogate. And there were apparent paradoxes, such as that Das Mannschaft, the West German national football team, which politically represented the individualism of the West, but which nevertheless played as a good collective, and therefore “always” won. And it was Soviet and East Germans – socialist stars – who were as selfish and individualistic as their Western competitors. So the ideologies were scenery, but what scenery!
And sometimes was the more than scenery, as when the Western world boycotted the Summer Olympics in Moscow in 1980 after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and Russian dissidents agreed to this humiliation of the aging and already senile Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev with a joke about the opening ceremony. It was the 22nd Olympic Summer Games, the XXII Games with Roman numerals. In Russian, the letter x is pronounced as kha, the same as ha, ie as to laugh. And the anecdote was that the senile Brezhnev read stiffly from his manuscript: “Hereby I open the Olympic Games, ha, ha”. For the laughter in sports is also political. Scornful, and effective. And sport is not a miss-sport, sorry, and for younger readers, it means pings, and is a fixed expression from the time it was possible to say something like that.
Desperately supports coach
In just a little while over two weeks, the postponed summer games open in Tokyo. In an attempt to keep up with the times, the International Olympic Committee, IOC, has softened the regulations, and for the first time allows markings with political content. This means that participants can mark their attitude to racism by kneeling down, or raising a clenched fist in connection with the opening and closing of competitions.
Gloomy report before the 2022 Olympics
But the IOC emphasizes that this only applies to the Olympics in Tokyo. But what about the Winter Olympics in just a little over half a year a stone’s throw away, in Beijing. For what is a stone’s throw geographically, in another galaxy is political. In European Championship matches in Budapest, Hungarian organizers seized gay flags, after the government recently banned gay speeches against minors. What will the Chinese do with gay statements that will be perceived as scratching the paint on an experimentally flawless facade in Beijing? Or worse, how will statements of support for the oppressed Uighurs in Xinjiang province, or support for the shattered democracy in Hong Kong, be received?
Sports are not politics? Nonsense and sausage tissue.
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