Rejecting Sport Hypocrisy
My article dated 6 April 2023, carried the title, Democracy and the Global Sports Movement.
I mentioned then that “In today’s world many enthusiastic sport analysts find much interest in trying to determine the extent to which the concept of democracy has anything to do with the ways sports are governed, whether at the domestic or international level”.
I also found it necessary to insist that, “It is easy to boast of the written commitments that international, continental, regional and national sports associations, make in their respective constitutions, policies, and guidelines. It is another thing, altogether, when one examines their practices in reality. Often times, what is written as a commitment is not so much reflected in the general mode of operations of sporting institutions. This contradiction is the major cause of the challenges facing sport today.
“Some institutions have seemingly imposed upon themselves the role of benevolent dictators in a rapidly changing global sport environment”.
I have also often made the claim that the world of sport is fraught with as much political intrigue as is the case in national and international politics. This is best explained by reference to the fact that sport is an integral component of society and hence, as one of the latter’s several social institutions, we can expect it to be decidedly reflective.
Small countries are expected to have small sports organisations. These institutions seek to engage the populations in which they exist and at the same time, aspire to join the rest of the world in their sporting endeavours. After all, nations are part of global society.
The reality, however, is that the presence of small nations, and, by extension, the small sporting organisations that emerge within them, are often the object of much derision by their larger, more financially secure counterparts. It is often the case that the larger sporting organisations associated with more wealthy countries, do not see the smaller institutions as ever being their equal, regardless of their performances on the field of play.
A recent article, published in Inside the Games, dated Thursday 26 October 2023, carried the caption, ‘The system of one country, one vote has helped make world sport more corrupt’. The article was attributed to Helmut Digel, a former president of the German Athletics Association and Vice President of the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF), now called World Athletics.
Digel’s thesis
In the article attributed to Digel, we have it written, “In the past, all Olympic sports controlled by Europeans as the vast majority, such as hockey, equestrian, handball, athletics, or swimming, had for decades been practiced predominantly in Europe or in the United States.
“It was customary to observe a principle of delegation to the governing bodies of the sport in which the interests of the athletes were primarily represented. Countries that had many active athletes therefore had more influence compared to today.
“Today, that is not really the case. It can still be found in elections in some Federations of European nations, including Germany. In the elections to the German Olympic Sports Confederation (DOSB), for example this principle of vote distribution is still followed. At the Annual General Meeting of the DOSB, the German Football Association has considerably more votes than an organisation with comparatively few members”.
We are therefore being led to believe that the foregoing, which allowed for weighted voting, was somehow related to democracy, as he sees it. There was apparently nothing wrong with the system as he described it.
He noted then that “This principle of democratic delegation was increasingly called into question at the international level in the 1960s and 1970s when no longer the number of active members should be the basis of the democratic structure within a governing body.
“As a democratically superior principle, the maxim “one country – one vote” became the demand, which remained unheard in International Federations for a long time.
“The decisive factor for the change was the fact that increasingly power-hungry Europeans took advantage for this new democracy movement in order to secure their power for as long as possible”.
The point seems to be that allowing for all members of an international organisation to have equal vote somehow translates into the corruptibility of these latter institutions.
But Digel does not stop there. He grows all the more specific with his claim, “In the past decade, almost all Olympic International Federations have increased their membership to more than 150 countries, with the vast majority of members often having only a very few athletes practicing the sport in question.
“Some of these members exist only on paper but their representatives enjoy the benefits of being part of the International Federation, even though the sport itself is almost hardly practiced in their country.
“An even more far-reaching consequence of this system is the emergence of leaders from emerging nations coming to power with the help of other emerging countries.
“It has been observed for quite some time that in this way certain regions of the world are gaining an extraordinary power in terms of leadership decisions, which is hardly theirs in the first place”.
The application of our own research on the topic leads to an admission that while sport often appears to be a harbinger of individuals who recognise it as being replete with opportunities for those who crave power and status, this is not new. The reality is that this has always been the case with sport.
Are we being led to believe otherwise?
Are we also to accept that only wealthy Europeans and Americans have enough of an understanding of sport that they do not use it for self-aggrandisement, power and social status?
Where is the evidence that sport has, at any point in its history, been bereft of much of what Digel may well now be blaming on ‘authoritarian personalities’?
One may get the impression that for Digel, ‘emerging countries’ may well have no right to be producing a cadre of new leaders who challenge the status quo in sport. Societies have gone through several periods of change, some particularly revolutionary while others have been gradual, some by social movements, others by individuals.
Particularly disturbing is Digel’s statement, “An even more far-reaching consequence of this system is the emergence of leaders from emerging nations coming to power with the help of other emerging countries”. This brings to mind the reaction of some of the major advanced industrial nations to leadership of international organisations by individuals from ‘emerging countries’. They are often treated with suspicion, as though they lack the relevant expertise even when they have the academic requirements. They are apparently not expected to succeed because they are deemed not to have had the right skin colour, ethnicity, country of birth.
Somehow, the current thesis compels us to recoil just as much as the historically despicable pseudo-scientific justification, decades ago, for while people of the darker hue supposedly had less grey matter that allowed for intelligence. The current thesis must therefore be readily debunked and comprehensively rejected.
People from emerging countries are not to be blamed for the persistence of wealth, colour and class domination in sport leadership. The time has come for the protagonists of this type of sordid thinking to desist from seeking to perpetuate an archaic, abhorrent thesis.
A Caribbean response
Countries of the Caribbean may well be amongst those referred to in Digel’s piece. If this is indeed the case, and we have every reason to believe that it is, there is more than reason enough for us in the Caribbean to understand and respond vociferously to it. To be merely content with turning the other cheek will not be enough.
Discrimination has been an integral part of international sport, often without acknowledgement until decades later, if at all.
Digel and others of similar thought must surely be aware that it is not the one country one vote that exposed the underbelly of international sport. Indeed, evidence suggests that it is, for the most part, the covering up of much of the dark side of sport’s history that has forced leaders from emerging countries to unearth truth and insist on a path to and through change, appealing each step of the way for social justice to prevail.
Was Richard Lander’s piece in citywire.com dated 22 April 2010 that insistent that in respect of former IOC President, Juan Antonio Samaranch, the international sports fraternity did not pay “very much attention to the man’s hideous politics as a dyed-in-the-wool supporter of Spanish dictator General Francisco Franco and a member of his totally undemocratic and unelected parliament”.
As Caribbean people we must be ever conscious of the struggles in which we have been forced to engage to get to the podium. The struggle is far from over.
The challenges experienced by Trinidad and Tobago’s Paul, at the Tokyo2020 Olympics should serve as an important reminder that we are not yet out of the woods.
Ahead of the recently concluded Rugby World Cup, South Africa’s first black Rugby team captain, Siya Kolisi, observed, reminded the world that the final match against New Zealand was immensely important because, “So many lost their lives for me to be free…So many people fought to try and wear this jersey and they didn’t get the opportunity to wear it. For me not to give my best and give everything would betray those people…The one that brings us together is the 62 million people from our country…It is South Africa who goes through a lot of different challenges in a year, and we are one of the people who can actually control how they feel with their mood”.
Importantly, Kolisi concluded, “We can put a smile on their face, but it is not always winning most of the time, it is the effort we put out there. It is how we carry ourselves on and off the field”.
Like Kolisi, Caribbean athletes must be ever cognizant of our history in its totality, not segmented. We are not to fall prey to compartmentalization in any form when it comes to the foundations upon which Caribbean society has been established and continues to thrive.
We are still emerging nations, but we are ever conscious of the persistent attempts by advanced industrial nations to repress our efforts at advancement at every turn and in every field of endeavour.
Despite all the odds working against us, this Caribbean has produced Nobel laureates and remarkable scholars in several different fields. We have world and Olympic champions in sport. Our sport leaders stand with confidence amongst those from other parts of the world, demanding an end to weighted voting at the level of Centro Caribe Sports (CCS) and Panam Sports, insistent that the continuing practice is undeniably undemocratic, discriminatory and oppressive.
