Between the Winter Olympics in Beijing and the men's World Cup in Qatar, this year is full of particularly blatant exercises in reputation laundering through sports. But regimes have been using this trick for centuries:
Qatar wants the world to see it as the host of the 2022 men's World Cup, not a country where migrant workers are exploited. Former Chinese Communist Party leader Mao Tse-tung once banned golf, calling it a “sport for millionaires,” but the game has since become both legal and popular in China, leading to propaganda that golf was actually invented there. If you were to listen to the Party, you'd believe that everything that happens in China started in China and belongs to China.Erick W.
“It is a proven fact that the game now designated 'Base ball' is of modern and purely American origin,” insisted one of the game's first power brokers, Albert G. Spalding, in his 1911 bookThere is a hint of sportswashing every time a U.S. president throws out a first pitch or a college president talks about football as the “front porch” of a university. Sports seem like they aren't political, which is precisely why they are so often used for political purposes.
Shortly after delivering a famously blistering anti-West speech in Munich in 2007, Putin successfully lobbied the IOC to award the '14 Winter Olympics to Sochi, a one-two punch that made Russia seem like it belonged on the world stage.
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