Sportspeople must stand up too
We live in a world that is proving increasingly dangerous because of its sheer callousness.
The recent unwarranted slaughter of 19 children and two teachers in an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, USA, has brought us once more face to face with the changing face of humanity.
Here in St Vincent and the Grenadines we have had to deal with the continuing disgraceful and despicable murder rate that seems leave us all at risk.
Following the Easter Weekend’s killings we heard it said that despite the number of murders in St Vincent and the Grenadines, the crime rate is down. What an amazing piece of trite!
The recent killings in St Vincent and the Grenadines leaves us in no doubt that we continue to exist in the midst of a chronic social malaise and from which we seem incapable of extricating ourselves.
We are urged to pray while those in authority continue to twiddle their thumbs, eagerly feeding the nation with one distraction after another about how well we are doing to save the national economy. We seem to ignore the fact that majority of the people are the victims of the social and moral intransigence of those who lead us.
One of the disturbing features of today’s Vincentian reality is the deafening silence of those in sport. Only a few dare speak up and are calumniated for doing so by the very authorities who do nothing to ese the psychological trauma that is increasingly becoming normative in Vincentian society as one senseless murder is committed after another.
The international scenario
In the international arena there has always been an aversion to having athletes getting concerned and making statements on issues that impact people’s lives in society. The old adage, ‘be seen and not heard’ was in vogue. There are many who would wish that the old adage remain in place but an ever-increasing number of sportpersons are changing and rapidly.
Muhammed Ali was made to pay a heavy price for daring to stand up for what he believed to be a just cause. Several athletes have since suffered the same fate.
The Colin Kapernick debacle is of great interest. He stood up for justice and had been joined by a number of sportpersons. However, most importantly, he has not been gainfully re-employed by any of the major clubs, all of which are very much aware of his immense capabilities as a player.
The treatment of Kapernick seems to suggest a sinister-like plot amongst the club owners in the NFL that he is trouble and that giving him free reign would only lead others to adopt the same manner of behaviour and ultimately, challenge their monopoly of the sport.
There are yet others who would readily point an accusing finger at the International Olympic Committee (IOC) for behaving in a manner that many could compare with the aforementioned analysis.
The leaders of international sport have equated themselves a sort of self-righteousness that often defies logic. This is all understandable since they inevitable come across as if they are political leaders for whom this is normative.
One has only to listen how leaders of international sport conduct themselves and it becomes possible to understand the contents of the original critically acclaimed, ‘Lords of the Rings’. Many are simply dictators.
The truth is that the more money an international sport organisation generates by its activities the more despotic, it appears, the leadership become.
It is also not in any way surprising that alliances are quickly formed between such sport dictatorships and the wealthy entrepreneurs around the world.
Close analysis of those who readily expend significantly large sums of money to purchase influential football clubs and athletes are hardly evaluated for the source of their wealth or for their historical behavioural habits.
Football may well be described as a sort of abomination.
From the FIFA leadership through to its smallest affiliate, the substantively pervasive ideology is money.
The sport of football continues to prey on young athletes from Africa and South America in particular, many of whom have been taken from their homes to football academies in Europe. Once they failed to make the cut to get into a professional club, may have been turned out onto the streets and a life of begging and debauchery.
An article in The Observer, dated 10 June 2007, “Inside the football factories that feed the beautiful game”, written by Dan McDougall, noted, “Boys as young as nine are being exploited by businessmen who hope to profit from European clubs. Dan McDougall reports from Abidjan, the Ivory Coast capital.”
He further wrote, “Children who have not even finished primary education are being scouted by the major clubs from France, Belgium, Morocco and Tunisia”.
The author cited an investigative study undertaken by The Observer found, “Lebanese businessmen in Abidjan, an entrepreneurial community once preoccupied with diamond and timber smuggling, are turning their attention to football, establishing illegal training schools across the country in an attempt to farm the best talent out to some of the Middle East and Europe’s largest clubs”.
“The children’s parents and the youngsters themselves dream of success, but it is a process of exploitation that is causing increasingly alarm amongst west Africa-based NGOs such as Save the Children and Caritas”.
Sport is as culpable for corrupt practices and man’s inhumanity to man as much as the rest of society.
Sport’s response
In the recent past sport has found itself in a quandary as to how best to respond to the challenges being discussed here.
While the media appear, in large measure, to have surrendered to the wealthy owners and sponsors and abandoned Kapernick and all that he stands for, the leaders of sport, predominantly white and wealthy, regardless of ethnicity, have continued along their merry way, enhancing their marketing and increasing their profits.
But the athletes are now far more numerous in their condemnation of the behaviour of sport administrators, patrons, officials and more, recently, public officials and the members of society.
Formula 1’s most successful driver, Lewis Hamilton, started something very special and cleverly controversial in the sport. He put his profession on the line, using his remarkably high and infective profile on the line by taking on board causes he deemed sufficiently important to the human condition. He has used printed T-shirts bearing messages in support of some issues. He has taken the knee and had been able to convince his peers and the leadership of the sport to support him and take some action, however, limited, in the hope of ameliorating situations.
More recently, another Formula 1 driver, Sabastian Vettel, added his voice to the concerns over climate change, suggesting that the sport had to pay due attention and take its own action to support the fight to save our planet.
In the recent past, we have had athletes add their voices to the violence that is sweeping the world, inclusive of the butchery that is taking place in Ukraine by a seemingly unconscionable Russian regime.
The massacre of children by a single individual in Uvalde, last week, has given rise to a series of voices, many of whom are athletes, in appealing for a meaningful approach to gun control.
Unfortunately, many of the monied interests, in countries that perpetrate violence and other inhumane and corrupt practices continue to prop up politicians who have no care for justice.
If our sportspeople remain silent they will, inevitably, be part of the problem. This cannot be just.
Wrong cannot otherwise be defined. Injustice of any sort must be vehemently condemned by all who believe in the dignity of the human being. To do otherwise would be to deny our very own human dignity.
The fact is that there is still too many who wish to remain silent; too many who are afraid that they will be cast aside for challenging ‘the system’ however corrupt, racist or disgusting that may be.
In a piece in Time, dated 14 January 2020, Melissa Godwin, highlighted, “Megan Rapinoe who wrote in an Instagram story: ‘so much being done about the protests. So little being done about what we are protesting about. We will not be silenced.’”
The Rapinoe quotation must serve as an inspiration to other athletes around the world.
We only need to understand why it took so long for the IOC to understand that amateurism had to be abandoned. However, the same institution has found ways of reaping significant monies from the performances of athletes at the Olympic Games without any direct financial compensation from those revenues. Somehow there should be a contradiction there but for how much longer will we ignore it.
In the Americas, we have two Olympic institutions, the Panam Sports Organisation and Centro Caribe Sports that continue to justify a voting system for the election of officers to their Executive Boards and the election of host cities for the Pan American and Central American and Caribbean Games, respectively, in which the National Olympic Committees of countries that hosted the Games have two votes while those who have never hosted are relegated to only one vote. Somehow, too, the obvious contradiction is ignored through to the highest level.
Athletes must lend their voices to injustices that befall them at every turn. They must cast aside the petty jealousies whose acceptance they have been socialised to engender and fight for genuine justice in all situations.
Sportspeople must not only see and advocate against injustice in sport but everywhere in society each time it rears its ugly head.
Vincentian sportspeople must be commit themselves to the fight against the obvious injustice that is violence against girls and women. They must speak out against the wanton murders that now threaten to become normative in Vincentian society.
