National Post (National Edition)
Why the despots of the world weaponize the glory of sports.
WHY THE DESPOTS OF THE WORLD WEAPONIZE THE GLORY OF SPORTS
Not even the World Cup can temper the vitriol surrounding politics in the Middle East, as one Iranian soccer player recently demonstrated.
Mehdi Taremi, a stellar forward for Iran’s World Cup team, reposted a tweet from Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s Twitter account. Taremi publicly agreed with Khamenei’s declaration that Israel would cease to exist within 25 years.
Israelis and Iranian opponents of the Islamist regime demanded that FIFA ban the forward for inciting hatred.
That incident is the latest example disproving the cliché that sport fosters international peace and brotherhood. Instead, it shows how totalitarian regimes manipulate sport to promote their agendas.
Iran made a bolder statement during the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens. Arash Miresmaeili, a twotime world judo champion and a medal contender in the 66-kilogram class, deliberately forfeited his firstround match because his opponent, Ehud Vaks, was Israeli.
“Although I have trained for months and now enjoy an in-form build,” Miresmaeili told Iran’s Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA), “I have refused to face my Israeli rival in sympathy with the oppressed Palestinian people.”
Official Iran greeted Miresmaeili’s decision warmly and enthusiastically. Iran’s ambassador to Greece, Mehdi Mohtashami, congratulated Miresmaeili on his “courageous move to refuse to compete with a judoka from the Zionist regime,” he told IRNA. “Certainly, (the) Iranian nation considers Miresmaeili as the real champion of (the) 2004 Olympic Games.”
The chief of Iran’s Olympic delegation, Nassrollah Sajadi, asked the government to give Miresmaeili the $115,000 reward reserved for gold medallists.
Then-president Mohammad Khatami — considered a moderate by Western analysts — said in a message to Iranian athletic officials that Miresmaeili’s decision “in protest to the massacre of Palestinian people by the Zionist regime will be recorded in the history of Iranian glories,” IRNA reported.
Iranian officials timed Miresmaeili’s announcement to coincide with the opening ceremonies, where he would be the focus of attention as Iran’s flag bearer.
During the Cold War, the Soviet Union considered athletes as valuable as soldiers or diplomats because victorious athletes demonstrated the superiority of Communism to the world.
As chairman of the U.S.S.R. Committee of Physical Culture and Sport, Sergei Pavlov said in 1976 that sport provides “another sphere, another criterion for evaluating the advantages of the Soviet political system.”
Promoting Communism meant creating a complex system of state-run schools and clubs to produce worldclass athletes who would be technically proficient and ideologically correct. A coach’s fundamental duty was to instill what one Soviet periodical called a “high Communist consciousness” in which athletes saw themselves as “Soviet patriots irreconcilable to the enemies of socialism and Communism.”
An interview in the newspaper “Sovietsky Sport” during the 1980 Winter Olympics with cross-country skier Lyuba Baranova illustrates that indoctrination’s intensity:
“’I mentally transferred myself to the siege of Leningrad from the first day to the last.’ When the skiing got difficult, Lyuba remembered the blockade of the city on the Neva and said to herself, ‘For the Motherland, Lyuba! For Leningrad!’ “
The Nazis also used sport to glorify the “Aryan” race and prepare Germany for war. For the 1936 Summer Olympics, they spared no expense in turning Berlin into a modern Potemkin village that would impress tourists and allay their fears of Germany’s ultimate intentions.
“We must be more charming than the Parisians, more easygoing than the Viennese, more vivacious than the Romans, more cosmopolitan than London, and more practical than New York,” stated the Nazi newspaper Der Angriff almost a month before the Olympics.
Defusing suspicion belonged to a more comprehensive strategy. “The four million Berliners,” wrote Richard Mandell in his book, The Nazi Olympics, “have constant instruction from above that they had been entrusted with an obligation to demonstrate the excellence of German National Socialism to the whole world.”
Wage-and-price controls kept meals and accommodations cheap.
Official interpreters roamed the streets. Hermann Goering and Joseph Goebbels threw lavish parties for dignitaries.
The Nazis even dramatically played down their antiSemitism. The government removed anti-semitic signs and publications. Newspapers were ordered to eliminate any discussions of race pertaining to the Olympics. The German Olympic committee reinstated Helene Mayer, a world fencing champion and a 1932 Olympian who had been expelled from her athletic club in 1933 for having a Jewish father.
“Jew-baiting had been ordered to cease from the highest quarters,” Mandell wrote. “Evidence of persistent racialism might be, and was, interpreted as vestigial rough edges of a superseded policy.”
The result? As Mandell wrote, “... almost no one escaped the impression that the new Germans were working hard, were playing hard, were at peace and would stay that way.”
Those Olympics should have taught the world a lesson.
Despite the romantic conventional wisdom about Jesse Owens disproving the myth of “Aryan” superiority by winning four gold medals, that myth within the decade would condemn millions of innocents to hideous death.