Feeling compelled to take sides in the ongoing Russia-Ukraine conflict, the All England Lawn Tennis Club (AELTC) issued a statement on 20 April 2022, banning Russian and Belarusian players from the Wimbledon Championships, due to begin on 27 June. This decision was justified by the organisers of the tennis tournament on the grounds that “unjustified and unprecedented military aggression” made it “unacceptable for the Russian regime to derive any benefits from the involvement of Russian and Belarusian players”. The Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP) disagreed, stating: “Discrimination based on nationality constitutes a violation of our agreement with Wimbledon stating player entry is based solely on ATP rankings”, as did several prominent tennis personalities. The ATP is indeed allowing Russian and Belarusian players to continue to compete under a neutral flag.
The AELTC’s decision means that Russian men’s competitors Daniil Medvedev, Andrey Rublev, and women’s competitors Anastasia Pavyluchenkova, Veronika Kudermetova, and Daria Kasatkina, respectively World No. 2, 8, 15, 22, and 26, as well as Belarusian women’s contenders Aryna Sabalenka (World No. 4) and Victoria Azarenka (World No. 18) will be disallowed from Wimbledon this year, thereby reducing the competitive talent on display.
The use of sport as a political tool to exert pressure on nations deemed as deviant is by no means new, and can be traced back to the banning of Sparta from the games at Olympia in 420 BC for violating a peace treaty following the Peloponnesian War. The massive global conflicts of the 20th century encouraged the politicisation of sport, leading to the exclusion of “pariah nations” from international competitions, most notably the Olympic Games. The losing nations from the Great War were not invited to the 1920 Antwerp Olympics, just as Germany and Japan were kept away from London in 1948. The Soviet Union did not participate in the Olympic Games between 1920 and 1956, while China stayed away between 1956 and 1980.
The 1936 Berlin Olympics was itself a highly politicised occasion, turning out to be a propaganda victory for the emerging Nazi regime in Germany. Despite reports of persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany, Avery Brundage, President of the American Olympic Committee, was persuaded, following a fact-finding tour of German sports facilities in 1934 that Jewish athletes did not face discrimination, leading the Amateur Athletic Union of the US to vote to participate in December 1935. Eventually, 49 nations competed in Berlin, despite the exclusion of German Jewish athletes, and the Nazis staged an impressive show, even as Hitler’s theories of racial superiority were dented by the Black American athlete Jesse Owens, who went on to win four gold medals.
Political pressures on the apartheid regime in South Africa ensured that the sport-mad nation was excluded from international organised sport, including the national favourites of rugby and cricket. South Africa refused to set up racially integrated sporting teams for many years, and where token multi-racial squads did emerge, training facilities for athletes remained segregated. In 1968, after 39 nations threatened to boycott the Mexico City Olympics, the International Olympic Committee decided to withdraw its somewhat premature invitation to South Africa, which thus remained banned from Olympic competition from 1964 through to the dismantling of apartheid in 1992.
The Cold War era saw the rise of politically-determined boycotts of major sporting events. Following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979, US President Jimmy Carter issued an ultimatum on 20 January 1980, threatening American withdrawal from the 1980 Moscow Olympics if Soviet troops did not withdraw within a month. The inevitable American boycott was strongly supported by the US House of Representatives (386-to- 12) and the US Senate (88-to- 4) and seconded by the US Olympic Committee. Sixty-four other nations joined in the boycott, including much of the Islamic world. On the other hand, some US allies, including Great Britain and Australia, did send athletes, leaving it to individual competitors to decide on participation or otherwise. An alternative track and field athletics event, the Liberty Bell Classic, was held at Franklin Field at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia on 16 and 17 July 1980 to compensate for staying away from the Olympics.
The careers of a generation of American athletes were harmed by being refused permission to travel to Moscow in 1980, while the boycott itself had little impact on its intended target. Inevitably, retaliation led in turn to a boycott of the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics by the Soviet Union and thirteen Eastern Bloc Communist nations and other Russian allies, citing “safety” concerns. Once again, an alternative Friendship Games was staged in the Soviet Union and eight other Communist states, between July and September 1984.
. Political boycotts have remained unpopular with the US Olympic Committee, who most recently allowed American athletes to participate in the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, despite the “diplomatic boycott” by the US and its allies. This boycott, occasioned by China’s internment of Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang, its political record in Hong Kong and Tibet, and its treatment of tennis star Peng Shuai, was also criticized by Sebastian Coe, President of World Athletics and a competitor in Moscow in 1980, who claimed that sporting boycotts were “historically illiterate and intellectually dishonest”. Notwithstanding Coe’s comments, Russia and Belarus were then barred from the March 2022 Beijing Winter Paralympic Games, as the International Paralympic Committee Governing Board succumbed to pressure from member organisations threatening to boycott the games if Russian and Belarusian athletes were allowed to participate, as was originally planned.
Political interventions in sport include either the imposition of bans on national teams or athletes from certain nations or the boycotting of sporting tournaments organised by regimes that have fallen out of favour for whatever reason. Although sport may have a strong nationalist element in terms of audience support for performers, overall it is meant to be a unifying experience, transcending barriers of race, culture, language, and politics. It is also the case that the vast majority of athletes are not acting as agents of the state and are not participating to make a political statement, even though some have viewed the recent use of the “Z” symbol by Russian athletes as a mark of support for Russian actions in Ukraine. The world is a divided enough place, and the intrusion of politics into sporting and cultural activities will only further divide nations, without necessarily resolving the root causes of political conflict. The Wimbledon decision, in particular, has targeted individuals solely based upon their nationality and irrespective of their political opinions, which are in any case probably irrelevant in the context of a competitive sporting event. Unfortunately, from whichever perspective you view the situation, politics and sports seem to have become irretrievably intertwined, and bans and boycotts seem to have become the order of the day, despite a lack of proof of their efficacy.
Ashis Banerjee