The symbiosis between sport and politics is as old as, for example, that day when a renamed boxer Muhammad Ali refused to go to the Vietnam War in 1967, with the very hard consequences he assumed: he was deprived of a sports license, and the one that was then the best heavyweight in the world did not fight again up to three years later. “We have been in prison for 400 years. I will not travel to the other side of the world to help kill and burn a poor nation simply to continue the domination of white masters about slave of dark skin. The true enemy of my people is here,” said Ali.
Or as when, a year later, two other black athletes, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, got on a podium in Mexico City with a fist raised in a glove, while the American anthem sounded. The protest, again, had in the background the defense of human rights, where appropriate with a strong racial component, and the scenario could not be more relevant within the sports field: a podium in an Olympic Games. Smith and Carlos paid for years their affront to the political and sports establishment, but the gesture was one of the great resistance symbols.
We could follow and continue, remembering paths as different as a Jesse Owens challenging the Hitler Boicot, the United States boycott to Moscow games in 1980 or sports to Russia for its war against Ukraine; Colin Kaepernick Knee to the ground or LeBron James leading Black Lives Matter’s protests; Terrible stories, such as the Black September attack in Munich games against the Israeli delegation, or wonderful stories, such as the 1995 Rugby World Cup in South Africa, a crucial moment in reconciliation between the black majority and the white minority with Nelson Mandela in the center of the plot. On some occasions it has been individuals who have sacrificed their careers to defend what they thought were fair, and in others the impulse, the pressure, has come from governments or citizen movements that managed to inoculate in sports shows, platforms of almost insurmountable visibility.
These days we have seen again how sport and politics, sport and human rights, they played, melted, with a vain effort to separate them and consider them watertight compartments. We have seen it in the athletes – not all: the same winner of the return, Jonas Vingegaard, showed his respect for the protesters and their motives – and also in journalism, uncomfortable in how to tell a story full of edges, like almost all the great stories. And we have also seen it in some rulers, pretending to create a wall of separation between the competition and the real world, as if the sport was developed in another galaxy. Perhaps the knowledge of history – yes, sport is also history, in addition to education, life and passion, example so many times of effort and solidarity – would have helped these days to understand that trying to perimeter, on the one hand, politics and on the other hand the sport is a recipe dedicated to failure. Even, unfortunately, violence.
