sportswashing

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The 2022 World Cup witnessed a memorable win for Lionel Messi (center) of Argentina. But host Qatar and organizer FIFA, whose respective leaders, Sheikh Tamim ibn Hamad Al Thani (left) and Gianni Infantino (right) faced significant accusations of sportswashing related to the event.

Maja Hitij—FIFA/Getty Images

sportswashing, the use of an athletic event by an individual or a government, a corporation, or another group to promote or burnish the individual’s or group’s reputation, especially amid controversy or scandal.

The term was coined in 2015 as a portmanteau of sports and whitewash to describe Azerbaijan’s use of the European Games to divert international attention away from concerns over human rights in the country. It came into popular use about 2018, when Amnesty International began using it to draw attention to the correlation between the decline of human rights in Russia in the 2010s and Russia’s hosting of the Sochi 2014 Olympic Winter Games and the 2018 World Cup. The term counters the notion of sports competitions as apolitical and instead suggests that such contests often benefit governments that engage in unsavory policies.

Since then, accusations of sportswashing have been leveled against a number of events hosted by authoritarian governments, such as the Beijing 2022 Olympic Winter Games, which were held against the backdrop of the Chinese Communist Party’s systemic abuses of the Muslim Uyghurs in the Uygur Autonomous Region of Xinjiang. Qatar likewise tried to put on a positive face for the 2022 World Cup despite a troubling human rights record, which included the extensive exploitation and abuse of migrants in preparation for the tournament. Moreover, the launch that same year of the LIV Golf series—which has included some of the game’s biggest stars, such as Phil Mickelson—also drew controversy, as its sponsor, Saudi Arabia, was accused of sportswashing its human rights violations.

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A runner carrying the Olympic torch into Olympic Stadium to light the cauldron there during the opening ceremonies of the 1936 Games in Berlin.

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The concept has since been applied retroactively to a number of historical sporting events that likewise coincided with human rights concerns. The most notorious example of sportswashing is the Berlin 1936 Olympic Games, sometimes pejoratively called the “Nazi Olympics.” The athletic festival faced unsuccessful calls for a boycott against the racist regime of Adolf Hitler, which assured the International Olympic Committee that qualified Jewish athletes would be part of the German team and that the Games would not be used to promote Nazi ideology. Nevertheless, when the Games were held, only one member of the German team was of Jewish descent, and Nazi propaganda was commonplace, as the Nazi government tried to portray Germany as a peaceful and tolerant country to foreign visitors and international mass media.

At the conclusion of the competition, The New York Times praised the Nazi-run Olympic Games as “the biggest athletic games ever held, the most largely attended, the best organized, the most picturesque and the most productive of new and startling records.” The newspaper talked up the “good-humored, happy crowd” and added, “That is the picture that foreign visitors will take home, to the undoubted improvement of world relations and general amiability.” Three years later German armies invaded Poland, and by the end of World War II in 1945 some six million Jews (and millions of others) had been killed by Nazi Germany in the Holocaust.

Like the 1936 Olympics, the 1978 World Cup was the subject of unsuccessful boycott efforts. It took place in Argentina, where the military had seized power two years earlier and was engaged in systematic human rights abuses—including killing between 10,000 and 30,000 people—in a campaign known as the Guerra Sucia (“Dirty War”; 1976–83). One of the leaders of the junta, Adm. Emilio Massera, said on the eve of the World Cup, “Holding the tournament will show the world that Argentina is a trustworthy country, capable of carrying out huge projects. And it will help push back against the criticism that is raining on us from around the world.” At the opening of the tournament, organizers released hundreds of doves, and Pres. Jorge Rafael Videla declared, “We hope these games will contribute to strengthen peace, which we desire for all the world and among all men.” The Argentine team ultimately won the championship, invigorating the nationalistic spirit that had fed into the Guerra Sucia, which ended only as the junta’s hold on the government began to wane in the early 1980s.