Georgia music gaffe is the latest in long line of insults
Greater care is needed to show all nations the respect they deserve, writes Jim White
The Kazakh champion had to listen to Borat’s mock anthem
Awhile after Georgia had beaten Uruguay in the World Cup on Sunday, the guy in charge of the public address system at the Kumagaya stadium thought it would be a good idea to play some Georgian music in celebration. The trouble was, the piece he played was sung in Russian, by a Georgian singer who now lives in Moscow.
Cheerful as they were in victory, this was not what the bull-necked titans of Georgia wanted to hear. In the cultural politics of the former Soviet Union, knowing which side you are on is important, and this song was unquestionably on the wrong side. Playing it was like, ahead of a Northern Ireland international, getting Steve Coogan to reprise the rebel tune he
performed as an Irish Alan Partridge doppelganger on the This
Time sofa. Sure, they are all Irish, but Come Out
Ye Black and Tans will not go down well in the bastion of unionism.
Sadly, the Georgians cannot have been too surprised. After all, ahead of their warm-up game against Scotland last month, as the players lined up for their national anthem, the Murrayfield PA system went all nostalgic and played the old Georgia anthem; the one that stood in the days before the country gained its independence from the USSR.
This is the thing about sporting symbols: however nuanced, they matter. Get them right and nobody notices. Get them wrong and the insults to national sensitivities can be profound. And it happens more often than we might imagine: the crucial moment when heartfelt patriotism is on display, the bloke spinning the CDS makes the wrong choice.
Ahead of a recent European Championship qualifier, instead of standing to attention to their own anthem, Albania’s footballers were obliged to listen to the whole of an unfamiliar tune belting round the Stade de France. It was, unbeknown to them (or probably anyone else in attendance), Andorra’s theme. It was a mistake compounded when, five minutes later – after the appropriate tune had been located – the public address announcer issued sincere apologies to his Armenian guests. President Macron was obliged to clear up what swiftly developed into an embarrassing diplomatic gaffe: insult our team and you insult us all.
Still, it could be worse. At no point have Albania and Andorra (or indeed Armenia) been engaged in war. You might have thought when any Korean team play, for instance, everything is checked to see the right symbols are displayed. But that did not happen in 2013 when the South Korean football team played Jordan at the Under-19 Asian Championships in Indonesia, and they were serenaded with the North’s anthem.
At the 2012 Olympics, so aware were the organising committee of the potential faux pas available in such circumstances, they had every country’s tune carefully recorded in advance by the London Philharmonic Orchestra. There could be no mistakes. Sadly, there was less scrutiny over flags. And North Korea’s women footballers duly walked off the pitch ahead of a group match in Glasgow when pictures of their faces on the big screens appeared alongside images of the South Korean flag.
As was proven on that occasion, we Britons are not immune from putting our feet in the wrong place. Remember the opera singer who, in a generous attempt at hospitality, learnt the Croatian anthem ahead of singing it before an international at Wembley? Trouble was, he had not quite mastered the subtle differences of the language and instead of the line “we love your mountains” belted out the less-than-modest claim that “my penis is a mountain”.
But that was nothing compared to the Amir of Kuwait Shooting Championships in 2012. When the Kazakh champion, Mariya Dmitriyenko, stood on the podium listening to the anthem played in her honour, it should have been the finest moment of her career, confirming victory not just for herself and her family, but for her entire nation. Instead, she was obliged to listen to Sasha Baron Cohen’s mock Kazakh anthem composed for his film Borat. The spoof song praises Kazakhstan for its superior potassium exports and for having the cleanest prostitutes in the region. Dmitriyenko was not amused.