Early on, athletics were used help prove the evolutionary superiority of the white race. The self-evident prowess of boxers of African descent was explained away as “animal strength”, while only whites were supposed to fight strategically. In baseball the problem was solved by segregation – by not allowing Black athletes to compete.
Hitler tried to use sports to illustrate his racial theories. It didn’t work, however, as his ubermenscher were beaten by the likes of Jesse Owens and Joe Lewis. Worse, sports eventually proved that talent, determination and hard work are distributed pretty equally among races and nations.
Nevertheless, something of that original idea endures. Despite high-minded Olympic principles, sports remain inextricably linked to politics and nationalism. Moreover, the way different nations play their games tells us much about national character and the way societies are organized.
England’s defeat at the hands of upstart Iceland is the most recent example of soccer mirroring life. At first glance, there is no connection there with Brexit: Roy Hodgson’s team had problems long before the UK voted to leave the EU. But it is hard not to link the two events. Later this year England will celebrate the 50th anniversary of its victory over Germany in the final of the 1966 World Cup. It will be a bittersweet occasion because it also marks the half-century of futility for a nation that invented the sport and has the world’s best soccer league.
But the Premier League, which is chock-full of multimillionaire international stars, is very much like London, one of the world’s most exciting – and overpriced – cities and the home of the UK’s glittering financial services industry. In fact, seven clubs from London regularly play in the Premier League. The rest of the country, meanwhile, mirrors the performance of the England national team – lower middle-class at best, with large swathes of sizeable pockets of postindustrial blight. This year’s surprise first place finish by Leicester City was the forerunner of the Brexit vote, “Little England” sticking a finger in the eye of fancy London.
Leaving the EU won’t improve the lot of the average Brit – rater the other way around. But it has surely churned up nationalism and racism, which would have come out in a variety of ugly forms had England won Euro 2016. So thank you Iceland for knocking it out.
And thank you Belgium for knocking out Hungary. Its right-wing leader Viktor Orban, himself a former player, has been pining for his country’s imperial past – and he is starting by rebuilding Hungary’s erstwhile soccer greatness. Their national team also exited after the round of 16, but for the Hungarians it has been a big achievement, loudly cheered by the nationalists.
Ukraine did poorly in France, but that may have been for the better: its failure showed the Ukrainians how much they need to rebuild in their country – including soccer – while also hinting that symbols of national greatness, such as soccer victories, may not be the topmost priority.
And then there’s Russia. No need to gloat over its players’ failures. Rather, they should be pitied. Not only were they defeated by lowly Slovakia and dismantled by Gareth Bale, but they – along with millions of Russian fans – were promptly and humiliatingly disavowed by their national leader. Vladimir Putin, his spokesman announced, had better things to do than to root for Russia.
Putin acted like some foul-tempered sultan who walks out of his harem when his wives bore or displease him. But the use to which sports are put in today’s Russia – and how it has changed over time – is a fascinating subject.
Stalin liked sports as a way to prepare young people to fight his wars and to impose discipline and uniformity, but he was slow to realize its potential to showcase the achievements of socialism. Perhaps he was too keenly aware of the dangers of breaching the Iron Curtain. A similar attitude was adopted by China under Mao and it changed only after the dictator’s death.
Stalin’s successors, while keeping the Soviet Union isolated, started in the 1960s to milk the achievements of Soviet athletes for their propaganda value. The Soviet sports industry grew swiftly, dedicated to winning medals in international competitions. The 1980 Olympics were supposed to showcase communist athletics in the Potemkin village settings of Moscow, which Brezhnev had turned into “an exemplary communist city”. The Western boycott of the Games, to punish the Soviet Union for invading Afghanistan, genuinely rankled.
Putin’s Russia has no ideology to promote, but Putin is eager to show the world that Russia is a great power once more, rising from its knees and recreating the Soviet Union – including its athletic glory.
In at least one way, the Putin regime has already matched and even surpassed the Soviet Union: it lies and cheats at least as shamelessly as the communist state did. Russia has been accused of state-supported doping of its athletes at the Sochi Olympics, its track and field team has been banned from competing in Rio de Janeiro this summer and now doping scandals are affecting other sports, as well. Whether or not the Soviet sports establishment was doping its athletes is an open question – their East German clients certainly were, in a big way. But the Soviets certainly were cheating: they pitted their professional athletes against amateurs in the Olympics, in world hockey championships and elsewhere.
However, there is a key difference in today’s Russia compared to Soviet times. The Soviet Union at least tried to build things. The system was horribly inefficient and nasty, but at least there were efforts to improve education and healthcare, and to build a genuine professional sports industry. The system worked from the bottom up, selecting and coaching athletes. In addition to several genuine international stars, there were thousands of kids who played sports while getting an education.
Today’s Russia is mostly coasting on the fraying achievements of its predecessor – and supplements with lies and propaganda what it can’t achieve in reality. It goes well beyond sports: it has no resources to wage a new Cold War, so that much of the supposed life-and-death confrontation with the West is taking place in virtual reality or in the hybrid, asymmetrical form.
Sports has a special, nuanced place in this struggle. Victories, when they come, are celebrated: e.g., the trashing of Team USA at this year’s world hockey championship. But victories are harder and harder to come by, whereas cheating – including bribery of venal functionaries at the IOC and FIFA – is being exposed more easily than before. So events taking place on the sidelines of major competition – the allegations of doping and bribery, the bans, the expulsion of Russian hooligans from France – are increasingly used to reinforce the siege mentality and to claim that the West is picking on little innocent Russia.
Appropriately, the Ministry of Culture has just announced a competition to show how “Russophobia” is spreading around the world.
Putin’s latest disengagement from the Russian soccer team may be very important. It suggests that the President no longer expects Soccer World Cup 2018 to benefit Russia. The team is likely to do poorly, while building stadiums and transportation and tourism infrastructure in an economic crisis and under international sanctions is a very difficult task. It might be best for Putin’s regime to have it moved or boycotted – so that it could become yet another example of Russia’s victimization.
