The Olympics and International Sport

Abstract

Links between international sport and politics have a long pedigree. The political scientist Trevor Taylor has noted that while sport rarely if ever dominated interstate relations during the twentieth century in the same way as security or economic issues, there were obvious connections between sport and diplomacy. Among the reasons for this, Taylor pointed to sport becoming an organized global phenomenon, one that aroused considerable emotional commitment; on this basis alone, contentious questions concerning relations between nations were bound to arise. In addition, sport was consciously employed by some regimes as a tool of foreign policy, and the international controlling authorities of sport, who set the rules and organized worldwide events, were frequently drawn into political processes by having to interact with governments, corporations and the media. Taylor went on to describe why — despite claims to the contrary — the Olympic Games, the most high profile of all global sporting endeavours, was particularly vulnerable to political involvement and interaction. The use of the Olympics for propaganda purposes, divisions within the Olympic movement and the interaction of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) with participant nations: all contributed to what Taylor calls ‘the politics of Olympism’.1 Lord Killanin, refiecting on his experiences as President of the IOC in the 1970s, lamented that nearly all problems he encountered arose from issues in national and international politics: ‘politics are “in” sport and have always been. Everything in our lives is governed by political decisions’.2