Sport and politics – a consistent global theme
When then president of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), Juan Antonio Samaranch, first visited St Vincent and the Grenadines, it was 1988. With boycotts of the Summer Olympics of 1976 (Montreal, Canada), 1980 (Moscow, USSR) and 1984 (Los Angeles, USA), Samaranch and the IOC sought to engage in a global initiative to dissuade National Olympic Committees (NOC) from joining any boycott of the Summer Olympics of Seoul, South Korea, in 1998.
Samaranch’s visit to SVG, facilitated by the Olympic Committee, then headed by Aubrey Burgin, saw him meet the Parliamentarians during a respite and a full meeting with the Prime Minister at the latter’s office.
While Samaranch was clear that there should be a clear distinction between sport and politics, Prime Minister, James Mitchell, had to point out to him that he was spending much of the time together speaking about politics rather than sport.
The reality was then, as it is now, that while international sports organisations insist on a separation of sport and politics, the conduct reveals that there is as much politics in the practice of sport as there is in other aspects of life in countries around the world.
The fact is that our understanding of politics is all about decision-making, how they are made and who gets what. In this regards, there can be no separation of sport and politics.
What we have, however, is the reality that all international sports organisations have a tendency to bury their heads in the sand, pretending that a separation exists, while knowing that this is ridiculously untrue.
Aspects of football history
While many critics have always thought there were aspects of sport that suggest the absence of a level playing field anywhere, sport leaders, like athletes charged with doping offences, have held fast to a response to all accusations that consistently denies any wrongdoing. They deny right through to the point where, once found guilty, they simply fade out of existence.
Earlier this week, for example, we had articles spread around the world claiming that the Department of Justice of the USA, has finally declared FIFA officials had been bribed in exchange for their support of the bids of Russia and Qatar, for the World Cups of 2018 and 2022 respectively.
Of course, for all the years of investigations of the accusations against the FIFA officials, there were denials everywhere, especially from the winners of the aforementioned bids.
U.S. Says FIFA Officials Were Bribed to Award World Cups to Russia and Qatar
For nearly a decade, Russia and Qatar have been suspected of buying votes to win hosting rights for the 2018 and 2022 World Cups. On Monday, for the first time, the Department of Justice put things in black and white.
According to reports in the New York Times, updated 6 December 2022, “Prosecutors made the accusations in an indictment charging three media executives and a sports marketing company with a number of crimes, including wire fraud and money laundering, in connection with bribes to secure television and marketing rights for international soccer tournaments….The U.S. prosecutors on Monday explicitly revealed details about money paid to five members of FIFA’s top board ahead of the 2010 vote to choose Russia and Qatar as hosts.”
The New York Times identified South American officials, Julio Grondona of Argentina, Nicolás Leoz, and Ricardo Teixeira, as having received bribes to vote for Qatar, while Trinidad and Tobago’s Austin ‘Jack’ Warner, “received $5 million through a string of shell companies to vote for Russia.
We have always expressed in this Column, the fact that for all the talk of ethics and integrity by international sports bodies, not a single sponsor walked away from FIFA as a result of the scandals that should otherwise have rocked the sporting world.
While the IOC has been engaged in addressing thorny issues in respect of boxing and weightlifting, it appears to have had little to say about FIFA, especially with regarding to the sport’s pride of place in the Summer Olympics.
It therefore seems that there may well be a different set of parameters being used in international sport politics. This may otherwise seem unacceptable, but not in any way surprising.
Closer analysis suggests that at work is the same old khaki pants of politics.
Qatar 2022
With the Russian edition of the FIFA World Cup now history, it is most interesting that some have only now found it acceptable for them to jump to Qatar’s defence, as the World Cup either drew closer or after it began. But much of it may well be playing to the gallery as global emphasis and interest on the event are at their highest.
From the very beginning, some international agencies were quick to point to the anomalies inherent in the award of the bid for the Cup of 2022 to Qatar.
Many pointed to the ‘integrity of the vote to award the event to the country. Others pointed to the weather expected at the time of the event. Yet others pointed to issues of human rights.
On the eve of the World Cup, it therefore came as no surprise who have been following the crass hypocrisy of international sport, FIFA President, Gianni Infantino, sought to criticize the hypocrisy of European governments and agencies that had earlier and consistently disparaged Qatar’s human rights record and the impact of the construction of the stadia on immigrant workers working under near inhumane conditions.
Infantino’s own display of crass hypocrisy would have left many Caribbean sports analysists insisting that his speech was an abominable case of ‘the pot calling the kettle black.’
But it serves all right to have Infantino behave this way in the international sports arena. He and his sport are the beneficiaries of the despicable consequences for several workers who have died in Qatar as a result of their engagement as labourers on construction sites during the preparation exercises for the World Cup.
A Guardian story noted, “In 2021 the Guardian published research that showed that more than 6,500 migrant workers from five countries – India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka – had died in Qatar between the start of 2011, the year after country won the right to host the World Cup, and 2020.
While the Guardian’s figures showed the total number of deaths from all causes and in all locations, activists have always argued that the World Cup caused an increase in the number of migrant workers travelling to the country. At the time McGeehan said: “A very significant proportion of the migrant workers who have died since 2011 were only in the country because Qatar won the right to host the World Cup.”
The Qatari government did not dispute the Guardian’s figures, but said that “the mortality rate among these communities is within the expected range for the size and demographics of the population”. The official figure of three stadium work-related World Cup deaths was repeated by FIFA and used in a speech by its president, Gianni Infantino, in an address to the European Council this year.”
In the more recent past, November 2022, The Guardian read, “The Qatari official responsible for delivery of the 2022 World Cup has said the number of migrant workers who have died on World Cup-related projects is “between 400 and 500”.
Hassan al-Thawadi, the secretary general of the Supreme Committee for delivery and legacy, made the admission in an interview but said a precise figure for the number of fatalities was still “being discussed”.
“The estimate is around 400,” Thawadi told the TV show Piers Morgan Uncensored. “Between 400 and 500. I don’t have the precise number, that is something that is being discussed”.
While the likes of our own Vincentian Prime Minister has found it appropriate to chime in the international discourse, the whole debacle needs significant review.
Now that Qatari officials are openly declaring and discussing deaths in a manner that was not done prior to the just before the commencement of the World Cup, says volumes of the way politics in sport continues to hold sway.
The power of money in sport is much the same as it is in national and international politics. We all need to stop fooling ourselves.
Gonsalves seeming defence of Qatar has missed the point being made by many critics.
He is quoted as having said, “The truth is that Qatar is an amazing country that is soaring to higher heights…Indeed, the unjustified and jaundiced criticisms of Qatar as hosts of the FIFA WORLD CUP land the critics at a place where they seem to think that the only countries to be eligible to host the WORLD CUP are those which have a watered-down Christian heritage or no religious core values whatsoever, and which subscribe to a universal culture of atomised individualism (as distinct from that of an uplifting social individualism), nihilism, and a globalised culture of neo-liberalism amidst all its malcontents/discontents.”
Gonsalves’ salvo appears as much as or perhaps worse than those he referred to as jaundiced. His seeming anxiety to sing the praises of Qatar at this particular juncture came across almost as an ode to the country more aimed at hoping for prospective assistance going forward than a case in pursuit of truth. But we should expect this from politicians from small countries, possessive of open and vulnerable economies, and whose ethos appears hinged to a sort of hapless mendicancy.
Epilogue
Qatar has long since been thrust in the global limelight. Like so many of its oil-rich neighbours, the country has acknowledged, much better than the small island political entities that constitute the countries of the Caribbean, the immeasurable value of sport to supporting the nation’s economic well-being and international branding.
Sport leaders allow themselves to too often appear as anxious to become world leaders, in much the same way that this happens with political leaders across the globe. Aspirations to lead has led many sport administrators to impose themselves, ideas and ambitions, on the organisations they lead.
Those who are committed to an insistence that sport engenders unity and enhances the well-being of a nation, will nonetheless remain bothered by the significant loss of life in Qatar, all linked, directly, to the ambitions of the political leaders. In much the same way that oppressed peoples of today so often chant, ‘At what cost, freedom!’ so too we must all chant, ever so feverishly, ‘At what cost the Qatar World Cup 2022!.
