‘Sport has the power to change the world, ‘ South African president Nelson Mandela told the Sporting Club in Monte Carlo in 2000. Today, we are inundated with similar claims—from politicians, diplomats, intellectuals, journalists, athletes, and fans—about the many ways that international sports competitions make the world a better place. Promoters of the Olympic Games and similar global sports events have spent more than a century telling us that these festivals offer a multitude of ‘goods’: that they foster friendship and mutual understanding among peoples and nations, promote peace, combat racism, and spread democracy. In recent years boosters have suggested that sports mega-events can advance environmental protection in a world threatened by climate change, stimulate economic growth and reduce poverty in developing nations, and promote human rights in repressive countries. If the claims are to be believed, sport is the most powerful and effective form of idealistic internationalism on the planet.
The Ideals of Global Sport investigates these grandiose claims, peeling away the hype to reveal the reality: that shockingly little evidence underpins these endlessly repeated assertions. The essays, written by scholars from many regions and disciplines and drawn from an exceptionally diverse array of sources, show that these bold claims were sometimes cleverly leveraged by activist groups to pressure sports bodies into supporting moral causes. But the essays methodically debunk sports organizations’ inflated proclamations about the record of their contributions to peace, mutual understanding, antiracism, and democracy.
Exposing enduring shortcomings in the newer realm of human rights protection, from the 1980 Moscow Olympic Games to Brazil’s 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Rio Olympics, The Ideals of Global Sport suggests that sport’s idealistic pretensions can have distinctly non-idealistic side effects, distracting from the staggering financial costs of hosting the events, serving corporate interests, and aiding the spread of neoliberal globalization.
Contributors : Jules Boykoff, Susan Brownell, Roland Burke, Simon Creak, Dmitry Dubrovsky, Joon Seok Hong, Barbara J. Keys, Renate Nagamine, João Roriz, Robert Skinner.
Содержание
Introduction. The Ideals of International Sport
—Barbara Jean Keys
PART I. The Core Ideals
Chapter 1. Friendship and Mutual Understanding: Sport, Rhetoric, and Regional Relations in Southeast Asia
—Simon Creak
Chapter 2. Antidiscrimination: Racism and the Case of South Africa
—Robert Skinner
Chapter 3. Democracy and Democratization: The Ambiguous Legacy
—Joon Seok Hong
Chapter 4. Peace: The United Nations, the International Olympic Committee, and the Renovation of the Olympic Truce
—Roland Burke
PART II. The Rise of Human Rights
Chapter 5. Reframing Human Rights: Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and International Sport
—Barbara Jean Keys
Chapter 6. The Moscow 1980 and Sochi 2014 Olympic Games: Dissent and Repression
—Dmitry Dubrovskiy
Chapter 7. Hosting the Olympic Games in Developed Countries: Debating the Human Rights Ideals of Sport
Jules Boykoff
Chapter 8. The View from China: Two Olympic Bids, One Olympic Games, and China’s Changing Rights Consciousness
—Susan Brownell
Chapter 9. Competing for Rights?: Human Rights and Recent Sport Mega-Events in Brazil
—João Roriz and Renata Nagamine
Conclusion. The Future of Idealism in Sport
—Barbara Jean Keys and Roland Burke
List of Contributors
Index
Acknowledgments
Об авторе
Barbara J. Keys is Professor of U.S. and International History at the University of Melbourne. She is author of Reclaiming American Virtue: The Human Rights Revolution of the 1970s and Globalizing Sport: National Rivalry and International Community in the 1930s.
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