Should it take a war to show that sport and politics are forever linked?

Jonathan Liew
Sun, 6 March 2022

Photograph: Thomas Lovelock for OIS/AP

For years, Big Sport has said they should be kept separate. Now, events in Ukraine have shown that it was wrong

‘Happy Thursday everyone!” the official Uefa Europa League account tweeted on the morning of 24 February, looking ahead to another crucial round of matches in Europe’s second most prestigious men’s football competition. Alas, not everyone was in quite as festive a mood. For, just a few hours earlier, Russian artillery had moved into Ukraine bringing up the curtain on a bloody and avoidable war in mainland Europe.

It’s easy to forget it now, amid the breathtaking speed with which the world of sport has closed ranks against Russia, but in the hours and days after the fighting started Uefa on Twitter was hardly the only sports authority to monumentally fail to read the room. For example, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) eventually banned Russia from the Paralympic Winter Games but only after first announcing an unsatisfactory compromise in which Russian athletes would have been allowed to compete in neutral colours. Fifa only kicked the Russians out of this year’s World Cup qualifying after other European teams made it clear they were not prepared to play them.

This is, after all, how Big Sport has instinctively operated: cautiously, conservatively, with a moral cowardice that runs as deep as its avarice. With empty gestures and weasel words. Only when the scale of global outrage became apparent, only when it became obvious that any entity associated with Russia was at risk of suffering grievous, perhaps terminal reputational damage, did many governing bodies take decisive action. “There go my people,” the French revolutionary Alexandre Ledru-Rollin is said to have remarked. “I must find out where they are going so I can lead them.”

This is not a particularly new phenomenon. In 1939, the IOC was looking for a new venue for the 1940 Winter Olympics after Japan’s military aggression meant it had to relinquish hosting rights (voluntarily, rather than after any significant pressure). Hitler’s invasion of Poland soon forced the IOC to cancel the Games entirely, having first reassigned them to the charming ski resort of Garmisch-Partenkirchen in Nazi Germany.

However, even in this digital age, it is possible to feel vaguely stunned at the speed with which the landscape of sport has now changed. The men’s Champions League final has been stripped from St Petersburg and handed to Paris. Manchester United have ended their commercial partnership with Aeroflot. Russian teams – and in some cases individual athletes – have been banned across sport, from athletics to cycling, rugby union to Formula One. It is inconceivable that Russia will be allowed to host any major sporting event for many years.

Individuals whose wealth and power were widely assumed to be impregnable have been forced to leave the stage

Most shocking of all, individuals whose wealth and power were widely assumed to be impregnable have been forced from the stage. Roman Abramovich has announced his intention to sell Chelsea FC, sensing the threat of sanctions in the UK. The Russian billionaire Alisher Usmanov has stepped down as president of the International Fencing Federation and his sponsorship of Everton FC has been suspended. Even Vladimir Putin has been punished, with the International Judo Federation stripping him of the honorary presidency he has held since 2008.

Other cases are more complex. Was it right for Russian F1 driver Nikita Mazepin to be ejected from the British Grand Prix then see his Haas team contract terminated? Should individual Russian athletes be punished unless they condemn the invasion of Ukraine? Will Ivan Drago have to be censored out of the Rocky movies? In part, this is the tragedy of autocracy: the state and the individual begin to bleed into each other to the extent that it is difficult to separate them. Whether you are a billionaire oligarch, a film-maker reliant on state funding or an athlete benefiting from a centralised performance programme, it is virtually impossible to thrive in Russia without becoming entangled with the regime in some form.

But the wider lesson here is one that goes well beyond Russia and well beyond this war. For years, we have been told by the world’s sporting bodies, many of its athletes and the majority of its autocratic regimes that sport can and should be kept separate from politics. Now we realise why they were so intent on touting and maintaining this fiction. For those invested in the smooth running of international sport, either as a vehicle for commercial growth, personal enrichment or soft power, politics means questions and moral dilemmas. It means independent thought, scrutiny and oversight. It means exercising a conscience. It means change.

Now, as it turns out, an entire country can be wiped from the sporting map almost overnight if the will is there to do it. And for political reasons, rather than anything it has done on the field of play. This was possible all along! Why, then, was Russia allowed to host the 2018 Fifa World Cup? Why was the genocidal regime in China rewarded with this year’s Winter Olympics? Why have abusive governments in the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia been allowed to own football clubs and cycling teams? Why is this year’s World Cup in Qatar?

The past week has been an eye-opener in many ways. Athletes leading the call to action. Public opinion forcing governing bodies into U-turns. People beginning to rethink the entire relationship between elite sport, money and power. Maybe this is just a fleeting illusion of solidarity in the jaws of a terrible human catastrophe. But if things really are going to change, this is how it starts.

• Jonathan Liew is a Guardian sports writer