Keynote Address
International Society for the Sociology of Sport International
Conference
Taoyuan City, Taiwan
Christopher Gaffney
Reimagining Democracies
and Sport – for whom does the pendulum swing?
I would like to extend my thanks to the
members of the organising committee of the International Sports Sociology
Association for extending the invitation to give this keynote address, a big
xie xie to our hosts at the National Taiwan Sports University, and my greetings
to colleagues old and new. This promises to be an exciting week of debate and
discussion and it is a privilege to be able to be able to offer these opening
remarks.
Before latching onto the wildly gyrating
pendulum of global sport, I want to offer a personal reflection on the ways in
which democracy and sport shift and change over time.
When I first set foot in this city in March
of 1996, big sabres rattled across the Taiwan Strait. The Taiwanese were
holding their first vote for president and the People´s Republic of China was
not pleased. As tens of thousands of enthusiastic Taiwanese marched up and down
and around the city, the People’s Liberation Army lobbed a few missiles in the
direction of my new home, prompting Chairman Clinton to send two aircraft
carrier battle groups down from their hijacked nest in Okinawa. Undeterred by
mainland aggression, the Taiwanese voted to keep the Kumongtang in power, reasserting
through the ballot box their increasingly dubious claim to be the
representative government of all China.
Being in Taipei during the 1996 elections was
personally instructive in a number of ways. In being faced with the prospect of
war over the right to vote, I was introduced to politics in ways that had never
been apparent to me in the United States. The streets of Taipei were alive with tens of
thousands of marchers, full of colour and vibrancy that made a deep impression
on my political consciousness. The presence of the Okinawan fleet was a keen
reminder of the geopolitical importance of small islands caught in the teeth of
continental superpowers.
Then as now, the rift between the two Chinas
is particularly visible through the lens of international sport. The Taiwanese
have not competed under their national flag since the 1970s and are the most
populous country in the world not have formal representation at the United
Nations. If we consider the first question posed by the conference organisers, Who are or should be considered members of
the sport society?, the answer for 23 million Taiwanese is more complicated
than for 24 million Australians.
In the intervening twenty years, much has
changed economically and politically for both the ROC and the PRC, but their
relative positions in the global sports arena have not shifted significantly.
You may be wondering why I was in Taiwan,
dodging ballistic missiles and watching democratic experiments.
I spent much of my youth near the
floodlights of Arlington Stadium, a 60s era baseball ground in suburban Dallas.
In the early 1990s, cities in the USA began to offer staggering sums for
professional teams to knock down old facilities as the anti-trust exemptions
given to the USA’s major sports leagues allows teams to pick up sticks at the
slightest hint of not extracting monopoly rents. In one of my first experiences
of the complicated relationships between democracy and sport, a local ballot
measure gave more than 130 million dollars and tax exemptions to an ownership
group headed by a single-lettered son of a former director of the CIA.
Dubya entered into the majority ownership of
the Texas Rangers, a mascot that refers to a state-sponsored terrorist organization charged with
exterminating the indigenous population in a 19th century settler
colony, with a loan from the Bin Laden family, and with his rehabilitated
public profile, leveraged his position as owner of the Rangers to became the
governor of Texas in 1994. Sickened by these developments (which have since
deteriorated – the city just agreed to pay 1.6 billion to finance a newer baseball
stadium and paid more than 600 million for the Dallas Cowboys stadium a decade
ago), I left the US for Central America, eventually landing in Taiwan in a bout
of youthful wanderlust, attracted by a job to teach in an English cram school. It
was still the early days of the internet and there was not much information
about the city or what it had to offer, so I put some things in a bag and
headed off to Formosa.
Oddly enough for a Texan, I had always
travelled with my football boots and learned that there was an active league in
the city. I found my way to the training sessions of the Red Lions Football
Club, a motley assortment of ex-pats and Taiwanese who played in the Taipei
Businessman´s League. Taipei was much dirtier then and we frequently had to
pick dead animals and medical waste off the pitch after the monsoon rains had
flooded the nearby river. The league was comprised of ethno-national teams from
Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Ireland and the British Isles. On-field
tensions were as high as the humidity, making for a pungent and pugnacious
Sunday morning kickabout. On one occasion we brawled with the team from Hong
Kong who had brought twenty odd supporters along and I remember one of my
teammates having his arms held behind him as he was repeatedly punched and
kicked in the face.
To make a long story short, we battled
through the league and the toxic mud, won enough to go on to the final which
was played in the Zongshan Stadium
in front of what must have been dozens
of fans in a driving rain. The local media were out to cover the match, I
scored a couple of goals, and we won the league. In the awards ceremony, I was
handed a surprisingly heavy trophy with a Chinese inscription that I was told
was for the league´s best player. I couldn’t read it, so took it on confidence
that’s what it was.
Ten years later, I
wrote a book about football stadiums in Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro and put
a relatively cryptic reference to this forgettable event in Taiwanese sporting
history on the back cover.
So it is with great
pleasure that I return to Taipei, nearly twenty years to the day from my
modestly triumphant departure.
Now to our swinging pendulum…
“If we take the simple democratic view that what men (sic) are
interested in is all that concerns us, then we are accepting the values that
have been inculcated, often
accidentally and often deliberately by vested
interests. These values are often the only ones men (sic) have had any chance
to develop. They are unconsciously
acquired habits rather than choices.”
This is a quote from C.W. Mills that is on
the splash page of the conference website under the heading Reimagining Democracies and Sport.
If we take the words that I have highlighted
here and place them together, we come up with a formula that I would like to
use to probe some key issues associated with sport and democracy in an age of
tremendous political uncertainty.
If, as Mills suggests, citizens in
democracies (and other political systems) are inculcated with a particular
value system AND that value system is dominated by vested interests, then it
follows that political habits are unconsciously acquired. That is, we are not
fully conscious of our own actions and behaviours or how those inform the
increasingly trans-local societies in which we live. This may be especially
true for sport which is one of the most de-politicized realms of civic
engagement and much like the Texas Rangers baseball team of the Bushes, is
conditioned and controlled by vested interests.
As academics interested in the cultural and
political manifestations of sport, we are called to question the unconscious
habits that sustain our sporting practices. If we assume that sporting practice
is inherently political, then a through examination of sporting practice will
also reveal a great deal about our political consciousness, our political
practices, and the tones and quality of our forms of governance.
I wish to explore these dynamics by interrogating
some of the ways in which achievement sport is inherently undemocratic, before
turning to some ways in which a progressive politics can emerge from the
current political conjuncture in which populist governments are more likely
than ever to use the deracinated politics of the sport industrial complex to
consolidate their power.
I lived in Rio de Janeiro between 2009 and early
2015, a period in which the city underwent traumatic contortions to prepare
itself for the World Cup and Summer Olympics. Having witnessed first hand the
impacts upon geographic space and social relations in the city, I wish to bring you through a trajectory of
the ways in which these events unfold in whichever city is unfortunate enough
to have political leaders that pursue them.
The first decade of the 21st
century was a time of great optimism in Brazil. With a stable currency, a booming
economy, and the ascendency of a nominally progressive government headed by Lula,
elite coalitions within the emergent BRIC nation pursued and captured the 2014
World Cup and 2016 Olympic Games. In 2007, FIFA handed the World Cup to Brazil without
any competition, as a team headed by Ricardo Texeira and Jerome Valcke
presented Sepp Blatter with a 300 page dossier in the Amazonian city of Manaus.
That document was never seen by the Brazilian public, the aspirational promises
contained within it stashed in Zurich. It was only a few months ago, after two
years of digging in Switzerland that I was able to get my hands on it.
After being awarded the World Cup, a
Brazilian delegation led by Lula was in Copenhagen to argue for the awarding of
the Olympics to Rio de Janeiro. Again, a closed circle of elites, backed by the
real-estate and construction industries, put together a bid that had no input
from Brazilian civil society, no mechanisms for participation in the creation
of the future Olympic City, and came with a guarantee from three levels of
government that any and all cost overruns would be taken care of by the
Brazilian taxpayer. There is an on going investigation into which IOC palms
were greased prior to the 2009 vote, but in his emotive appeal, Lula claimed
that the global financial crisis would only be a ripple in Brazil, and that it
was Brazil’s, no, South America’s turn to host the world’s biggest party. The
IOC made no mistake about its intentions to prise open a neo-colonialist market
for the Olympic Movement and its business partners by calling the Rio Olympics
“A New World”.
Once the World Cup and Olympic bids were
accepted and the ink on the hosting contracts dried, Brazilian politicians at
all three levels of government passed a series of laws that would allow FIFA
and the IOC to do business there. These exceptional laws included tax
exemptions for multi-national corporations, fast-track contracting procedures
that did away with environmental impact studies, compulsory purchase orders
that removed inconvenient neighbourhoods, and low interest loans for hotel and
stadium construction, exemptions to municipal debt regulatory structures, and
special powers for policing, including preventative arrests and the creation of
a draconian anti-terrorism law.
These legal exceptions are the norm for
mega-event hosts and similar measures were passed in Germany, South Africa, Sydney,
Torino, Athens, Vancouver, and London - to only mention the recent democracies
to host the Olympics and World Cup. These states of exception are the norm
because the events themselves are abnormal, requiring extraordinarily rapid
transformations of urban space within seven years to accommodate the gigantism
of the spectacle and the feudal demands of the lords of the rings.
Once these laws of exception have been put
into place, the wrecking balls begin to swing and cities are forever changed.
Their pendular action sets off waves of creative destruction that inevitably
result in white elephant structures, environmental degradation, gentrification,
privatization, militarization, long term debt, and the consolidation of elite
privilege and consumer sovereignty.
These are not accidental outcomes.
Let me be more explicit:
The vaudevillian pulling of a city or
country out of an envelope sets off powerful forces that bring into reality the
places and spaces that are contained within bid documents. These documents are
technical assemblages complied by vested interests in local politics as well as
the finance, construction, media, real-estate, security, and tourism industries.
These documents have no broadly democratic input and have very little in the
way of accountability mechanisms. The documents are an assemblage of ideas,
desires, ideologies, and intentions, are full of promises to deliver generalized
benefits for populations, but are low on reality checks.
Bid documents and the material
transformations that result from them are, in many senses, pornographic as they
intend to stimulate the desires of capital, of tourists, of the IOC and FIFA to
reproduce their social worlds in a particular geographic space in a way that is
familiar to them while hiding the violence implicit in the production and consumption
of those spaces and places. Indeed, FIFA, the IOC, and their corporate partners
only reproduce in certain kinds of spaces, within air conditioned boxes, with
certain sightlines, with suites of privileges, with seasonal fruits presented
to them in five star hotels. Cities and citizens endlessly construct these
sporting landscapes with public resources across the globe, but they have weak
voices, little agency. These pornographic geographies of global sport always
come with the promise of bling and bliss but inevitably and intentionally
result in wasted public resources, fleeting feel good moments for the few, and
enduring hangovers for the many.
Thus it happens that a city and country has
its laws and geography altered to attend to the demands of a small, opaquely
governed group of Swiss-based sports executives who enter into a binding
contract with a willing coalition of local politicians and their patterns in
the industries that stand to benefit the most from the production, consumption,
and destruction that the event itself calls into being. The convergence of
these two rent-seeking coalitions, the local and the international, plays upon
the civic and national consciousness of residents, local pride in hosting the
world overtaking the common good of building a better city, a healthier
society.
In Brazil, the euphoria that accompanied the
arrival of the world’s biggest sporting events had dissipated even before the
Germans hammered seven nails into the ideological coffin of the Pais de Futebol.
Millions had already voiced their discontent at governmental spending
priorities in 2013, a general recognition that the damage to Brazilian
democracy had been done before that fateful semi-final. When the World Cup was
over, the bills were coming due as a colossal corruption scandal unfolded and a
real life House of Cards was playing out under increasingly desperate economic
conditions.
The trials and tribulations of Rio de
Janeiro and Brazil in the post-mega event era are, or should be, fairly well known
to this audience. What we forget is that it was less than a year ago that the
IOC, the Rio organizing committee, the federal government and the sports
industry were clamouring about how many positive benefits were going to accrue
to the city as a result of hosting the Olympics. The evidence to the contrary is
there for all to see, as it always was. The business model of the mega-event is
designed to take money from the public purse and transfer it to private
interests while building iconic infrastructure that has little functional use
in the daily lives of residents, who are quadruply taxed for the dubious honour
of hosting.
Citizens, in democracies or not, must pay to
build the venues, then they must pay to attend the events, then they must pay
for maintenance and if they are wealthy, they can afford the higher ticket
prices that result from the gentrification of fandom. Those who benefit most
are a small cadre of elites involved in the event, and the international
tourist class that sprites into town for a few days or a week on a holiday, collecting
experiences, selfies, and social capital, before zipping back home without ever
thinking of the consequences.
Within the operationalization of the
mega-event, which is not so much an event as a process, the insidious cleverness
of the business model comes more fully to light. The convergence of
differential governance structures, one of sport and the other of society,
creates a shell game of responsibility wherein no individual or autarchy or
institution can be held to account for what is happening on the ground. If we
take the Brazilian example of the World Cup as paradigmatic, local governments
claimed that they were forced to spend money to build stadia that conformed to
FIFA requirements, the organizing committee could claim that they were held
hostage by state inefficiencies, and FIFA could claim that they were helpless
to intervene in Brazilian political affairs. In the end, citizens have nowhere
to turn, the games go on, the profits end up in Swiss accounts, and on to the next
host.
The media, implicated in the production and
consumption cycle of the spectacle, habitually repeat the question that allows
for the event to proceed apace. I was recently asked to participate in a BBC program
that was going to ask, again: is hosting the Olympic Games worth it?
I refuse to answer this question as it
continues a monetized engagement with the impact of the mega-event when their reality
should be explored in much more detail and texture, especially in regard to the
role of sport in creating a more just and liveable world. While I think the
BBC’s producers may have had good intentions, the framing of the debate around
questions of worth does not allow for a questioning of the business model, but
rather maintains a focus on a dichotomized economic calculus. On top of that,
the question is facile: of course sports mega-events are “worth it”, for some.
Audiences have never been bigger, profits in
the sports industry never higher. For those that have never lived in a city
whose urban agenda has been hijacked by a mega-event, the burden of fandom is
never felt directly, the political consequences of the spectacle are always
borne by others. For global audiences, the World Cup and Olympics are biennial
comets that flash across our screens, spasms of flag waving, beer drinking, and
human interest stories. We may be inspired to do some more exercise, but the
events also create sharp divisions between us and them, reifying the
territorial boundaries of the nation-state and highlighting legal parameters of
citizenship, while creating ever more consumerist subjectivities. In this
particular political conjuncture we should ask ourselves if we need more
fanaticos waving national flags and creating mutual antagonisms predicated upon
narrowly defined categories.
What if we were to ask the BBC’s question
differently: how do the Olympics and World Cup make a more just and liveable
world? How does sport contribute to human solidarity, mutual understanding, and
social justice? I think that in asking these questions, we are more likely to
uncover the ways in which sport and politics are one and the same. By exploring
answers to these questions we can reveal the mechanisms through which the
sports industrial complex is embedded within our political lives and can find
ways in which to use sport as a site of progressive political agency.
So, how do the Olympics and World Cup make a
more just and liveable world?
One of the wonderful things about these
events is that they are opportunities for people from all over the world – even
if they don’t attend in person - to meet
within a mutually intelligible set of practices, vocabularies, and histories. I
still remember my experiences from the 1994 World Cup when I met Nigerians and
Koreans, Argentinos and Bulgarians on the streets of Dallas, or from France
1998 when Iranians were consoling me on the streets of Lyon after they knocked
us out of the tournament. On Copacabana Beach in 2014, Brazilians were
introduced to the songs, chants, and passionate commitment of their fellow
South Americans in a way that most had never seen. It was both revealing and
instructive for them to see their hermanos
latinos in action as Brazil has no identifiable national team culture.
For the athletes and teams, participating in
the Olympics is always a special event, though this too has been changed by the
superstar status accorded the Yanquis, and the hyper securitized and increasingly
disciplined spaces in which the athletes must circulate.
Those who are fortunate and wealthy enough
to travel to distant countries to participate as spectators and tourists
inevitably come away from the World Cup and Olympics with a sense of deep satisfaction,
even if their team loses. I did this myself in France, traveling around the
country with friends as we went from city to city watching matches. However, as
the stakes become ever higher for the cities and standardised processes of
militarisation, privatisation, and corporatisation have taken hold – we can no
longer afford to maintain a de-politicised position in regard to our fandom,
our tourism, or our relationship to the games we love.
The strong affect and good feeling that
surrounds the events extends to our ordinary sporting lives in many ways. Some
of my closest friends are teammates from seasons past, and my life has been
constantly marked by the rhythms and places of sport. Despite their personal importance
and potential to bring people together in unique and important ways, I am no longer convinced that achievement
sport makes a more just and liveable world.
The interminable corruption scandals,
doping, gambling, and administrative chicanery that characterise global sport
appear to have crept into our everyday politics. The naked use of sport as a
site of political manipulation is nowhere stronger than in the USA where every
game must be opened with a singing of the national anthem, and every helmet,
backboard, and jersey must be slathered with the flag. The first memorial
services for victims of 9/11 were held in Yankee Stadium, and during the W. Bush
presidency NASCAR races and American Football games were increasingly used as
sites to bang the drums of war. The NFL is a certified contractor with the
Department of Defense and the game itself is a metaphor for Yanqui militarism.
To make matters worse, achievement sport is increasing
its stranglehold over municipal budgets, bringing ever younger labourers into a
globalised talent pipeline that has no safety nets, and uses public school
systems as a subsidized pipeline for future professionals. The highest paid
public employee in the majority of US states is either a basketball or American
Football coach, while the gentrification of fandom has accelerated with the
corporatization of stadium spaces financed with public money. The sports
industrial complex is replete with histories of exploitation, sexual abuse,
graft, corruption, and criminality. The Olympics and World Cup are platforms
for increasing consumption of tvs, soft drinks, fast food, energy, concrete,
glass, steel, and tourism. The more one looks the nastier it becomes – yet we
are constantly watching, drawn by our unconscious to watch this century-long
narrative unfold in yet another wave of creative destruction, or if you prefer,
destructive creation.
If the core question of a politicized
sporting life is “does this practice make for a more just and liveable world?”
then it is clear that achievement sport at the highest level is something that
needs a radical intervention. Conferences such as this are essential to
providing a space for pushing forward this essential dialogue.
If we move away from
achievement sport to ask “How does sport contribute to
human solidarity, mutual understanding, and social justice?” then we may be
able to find some ways to work our way out of the current conjuncture in which
dangerously radical populism in a fake-news world may have found a serially
replicable model in the post-truthiness of mega-event rhetoric.
Although it is
human nature to play games, institutionalized achievement sport is a relatively
new human endeavor. Whether or not the inventors and organizers of modern sport
wished them to be so, their social positions and ideological frameworks, the
places and spaces in which they played, their inclusions and exclusions, their
diffusion patterns and institutional structures have always grounded sports in
politics.
It is probably
fair to say that everyone in this room cares deeply about sport. Personally, I
have explored the world by following a ball, bouncing from country to county,
city to city, always looking for and finding a game. The more I came to
structure my life, my personal relationships, and experiences around the sports
I play and watch, the more alienated I became from their most spectacular
manifestations and the more important the grounded engagement with them became.
I think it is possible to disassociate oneself from the sports industrial
complex and to use sport as a tool for political activism. While a Saturday
kickabout doesn’t need to happen while marching under a red star banner with
fists raised, there should always be an awareness about the freedom that can be
found within four lines, and the ways in which those same four lines can
function as exclusionary boundaries. There can be no game without opposition,
and trying and failing to convince mutually antagonistic groups that their
common practice, their common space, their common passion was under threat was
always one of the most frustrating elements of trying to organize football fans
in Brazil. In a dark political era, finding ways to use sport as a vehicle for
community engagement and basic human solidarity has never been more important.
Knowing that professional and high level
achievement sport are inherently undemocratic and increase rather than decrease
democratic institutions and practices, we need to be aware that we may be
asking unconscious, habitual questions of them. We should, indeed, be asking
whether or not we need them at all. What mutual benefit do they bring that we
do not already have in other areas of life? Are their rewards equally
distributed? How does sporting practice open space for social inclusion? If the
answer is “I don’t know”, then something needs to change. Can we disrupt and
rearticulate the oligarchic cabals that currently preside over global sport? Will
we learn from the lessons of the 1930s when both Hitler and Mussolini latched
onto the Olympics and World Cup to consolidate their political projects? What ends
would an Paris 2024 Olympics serve a hypothetical Le Pen presidency?
These questions do not have easy answers and
may require that we sacrifice, or at least examine closely, some of our most
commonly held assumptions about sport. It may require that we never again watch
the Olympics or World Cup, it may require that we have to work against sporting
institutions in order to build something different. It may require that we stop
the Olympics, end the World Cup, as they are no longer fit for purpose.
I would like to bring some of the points I
have made above in answer to the principal questions posed by the conference
organisers.
·
What does, or should, constitute a minimum level of control over
decision making by members for a sport system to be thought of as democratic?
I have argued that achievement sport is
inherently undemocratic, especially at the highest levels. The monopolistic
cabals of the IOC and FIFA, the NCAA and the Premier League are extraordinarily
poor examples of using sport to advance democracy, transparent decision making,
and accountability. While there have been incremental reforms, the underlying
governance structures of these institutions are relics of 19th
century paternalistic colonialism and should be torn down. They operate within
a governance infrastructure of an age where sport did not mobilize billions of
dollars across continents and had not yet emerged into a globalized sports
industrial complex. As we have seen on innumerable occasions, those who have
inserted themselves into sports governance structures have the ability to use these
cosseted positions to their advantage, all the while claiming that sports are
not political, that we should focus on the game. While of course not every
sports official is corrupt, the systems within which good people try to do good
work are so slavishly conditioned to maintain the status quo that whistle
blowers are prosecuted and left unprotected, and good intentions that negatively
impact the maximum extraction of monopoly rents are thwarted.
Part of the problem in answering this
question is that sport is inherently hierarchical. It is so tied to the project
of capitalist modernity that it may be impossible to have a system within which
there is a broadly distributive system of decision making. However, at smaller
scales, under more localized and regionalised conditions, there are models that
work to increase solidarity among members even within an inherently competitive
system.
I would argue that it doesn’t matter so much
what we think about democracy or
levels of collective engagement, but that we implement meaningful reforms through personal practice so that the
benefits of sporting participation can extend beyond the immediacy of the
sporting community. For instance, I grew up playing soccer in suburban Dallas,
where every practice and every game had to be reached by car, where uniforms
cost upwards of 200 dollars a year, boots were 100 dollars a season, and travel
was the norm. This is an exclusionary form of sport that is predicated upon discriminatory
urbanism. In order to make sport more inclusive in suburban Dallas, we would
have to rethink our cities as well. In New York, where I now live, immigrant
communities that have long used public parks as a site for sport and community
building have started to retreat to other, more hidden spaces for fear of immigration
raids on a Sunday afternoon. In order to guarantee their ability to build
community through sport, we have to guarantee access to public space and
freedom of movement and association. Thus, in order for sport to be more
democratic, we have to have societies that are more democratic, which is to say
that sport and society are always reflexive of each other, drawing attention
yet again to sports’ inherently political nature.
The final question poised by the conference
organizers is: How much participation is
necessary for a sport to be democratic?
This is a question that I hope to find
answers to throughout this conference as it has raised a host of others in my
mind. For instance, “What kind of participation, under what conditions and to
what end?” If practicing sport in public spaces leads to incarceration, then
perhaps it is better not to do it. For many years in Brazil, capoeira was
banned as authorities considered it to be too much of a threat to public order.
This prohibition contained explicitly racist and classist overtones. We should
consider the ways in which similarly discriminatory practices are reflective of
broader institutional and societal ideologies.
Secondly, what do we mean by democratic and
is this equally applicable in all contexts? If democracy means sheer numbers of
participants as a percentage of the population, then it is clear that even
within nominally democratic countries, there are radical inequalities. Can we look at sports participation and begin
to analyse democratic deficiencies and begin to address the systemic
inequalities as they are expressed through sport? If we consider the USA to be
a democracy, then it is clear that within the country there are massively
unequal expressions of democratic agency. Not coincidentally, the regions shown
on this map closely correlate to voting patterns, education levels, school
quality, public services, and other discriminatory practices.
Finally, would a redistributive
authoritarian sport regime be acceptable if it took community considerations on
board as part of the decision-making processes? I have just spent several weeks
in the Peoples’ Republic of China which is levelling forests and diverting
rivers to provide snow covered venues for the 2022 Olympic Games. The goal is
to create a skiing industry northwest of Beijing so that the emerging consumer
class from the capital can engage in mass tourism in the countryside. This is
clearly a process that many Beijingers are excited about, but that the locals
in Chongli have not had much say in, even though they have seen their
real-estate values increase and will likely gain from the emergent service
economy. Is this democratic? Millions of people might benefit from this
developmental vectorisation that the Olympics are stimulating and surely 50% +
1 of the Chinese population is in favour of hosting the Games. This seems to
fit many of our criteria for democracy, yet will we dare say that China is a
democratic state?
As we prepare for a week of debate and
scholarship, I look forward to hearing from you regarding these initial
thoughts regarding democracy and sport, and applaud the conference organizers
for positioning sport in an explicitly political context. As the political
pendulum swings sharply to the right, what role will sports and sports
scholarship play in mitigating the pernicious effects of a feckless populism
predicated upon rigidly defined nationalist categories? Will we be able to turn
away from exclusionary expressions of sport in order to create a less consumerist
model that is predicated upon social justice and human solidarity? Can we
continue along the same path of corporatization and spectacle that brings
violence to the planet and communities, while consolidating benefits for the
wealthy? How can we use the commonalities of sport practice to educate our
students, our colleagues, our teammates, and those next to us in the stadium
about the real politick of the sports industrial complex? Do we have the
courage to lead by example? Can we afford not to?
