In the winter of 1945, Dynamo Moscow came to Britain on a goodwill football tour that turned out to be anything but. They played Chelsea, Cardiff City, Arsenal and Rangers, the last two matches so rancorous they inspired George Orwell to write his famous essay The Sporting Spirit. The tour, Orwell wrote, had only created fresh animosity on both sides. “And how could it be otherwise?” he asked. “I’m always amazed when I hear people saying that sport creates goodwill between nations.” Sport, Orwell thought, had become “bound up with the rise of nationalism – that is, with the lunatic modern habit of identifying oneself with large power units and seeing everything in terms of competitive prestige”.
All international sport is political, it’s just that we are so often swept up in the great gusts of excitement about who won and lost we do not often stop to look at the currents that carry it all along. Next year, though, promises to be as much about the games politicians play as it does the sports the athletes do. In February the Winter Olympics start in Pyeongchang, 50 miles from the border between North and South Korea. They are being pitched as the Games of Peace, an opportunity to promote understanding through the medium of salchows and frontside 720s. The International Olympic Committee will be busy “blah-blahing”, as Orwell called it, about “the great part played by the Olympic Games in bringing nations together”.
It has been doing everything it can to encourage North Korea to take part. It has provided funding for equipment, travel and accommodation for the North Korea speed skating and Nordic skiing teams, and has promised to keep wild card slots open for athletes who fail to qualify. The IOC hopes Kim Jong-un will not do anything egregiously provocative during the fortnight if his athletes are competing too. The only North Koreans who have qualified, the figure skaters Ryom Tae-Ok and Kim Ju-sik, are still waiting for permission to compete.
The situation is so unstable the US ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, said recently it was an “open question” whether or not the US would compete, though the White House’s press secretary quickly insisted they would. In 2014, after all, Donald Trump described the fact the USA finished behind Russia in the medal table as “another Obama embarrassment!” and asked “isn’t it time we turned things around and started kicking ass?” Which will be a little easier to do this time around given that Russia have been banned from competing.
This is punishment for their state‑sponsored doping programme. Vladimir Putin has described the decision as “absolutely staged and politically motivated”. Which is certainly a fitting description of the IOC’s subsequent decision to allow athletes who can prove themselves to be clean to identify as “Olympic athletes from Russia”, instead of “independent Olympic athletes”, which is the title it used in the summer Games in Rio. There is talk, too, that the IOC’s ban may be lifted before the Olympics are over, just so Russia’s flag can fly at the closing ceremony.
The Russians will console themselves with the World Cup, which they host in June and July. If the IOC seems soft on Russia, who systematically corrupted the Sochi Games, Fifa has been entirely spineless. The Russia sports minister Vitaly Mutko has been banned for life by the IOC but remained the president of the Russian Football Union until stepping down this week. He also stood down as the chief organiser for a World Cup that will be played, like Dynamo’s 1945 tour, for propaganda. Fifa is apparently satisfied that, as its secretary general Fatma Samoura told the BBC, “there is no widespread doping in Russian football”, although Wada’s McLaren report listed 33 cases between 2011 and 2015.
In between the Winter Olympics and the World Cup, there is the Commonwealth Games on the Gold Coast, a competition memorably lampooned by John Oliver as “the historic display of a once mighty nation gathering together the countries it lost and finding a way to lose to them once more”. But ahead of Brexit, the village fete of international sports tournaments suddenly seems more relevant than it has in a long while. It’s no coincidence the government was so keen for British cities to bid for the Games in 2022 after Durban dropped out, or that it has agreed to meet the large part of the cost of hosting them.
If the government’s enthusiasm for the bid is one of the more tangible effects of Brexit on sport, there is a more nebulous connection, too, which touches on the ideas Orwell explained all those years ago. Much as he decried it, these sports tournaments are among the many ways in which we shape our national narrative. They can influence the mood of the country. Charles Grant, the director of the Centre for European Reform, recently told the New York Times the 2012 Olympics was the last moment in which Britain agreed on its own national story. “Global Britain, open Britain, generous Britain” was how he described it.
In the last year the sporting culture that underpinned Britain’s success in those Olympics and Paralympics has been scrutinised and dismantled. To be blunt, there has been a lot of bad news. Amid the ebb and flow of the annual events, then, the Six Nations, the summer Tests, the F1 season, the cycling tours, golf and tennis majors, let’s hope these three major tournaments might just provide some measure of good feeling too. And if it does all go wrong in Russia, we can claim, at least, to have been heeding Orwell’s advice. If Britain must send a side back to Russia for a return tour, he wrote in 1945, “then let us send a second-rate team which is sure to be beaten”.