[1] Recent world events have highlighted the myth that sport and politics are separable. Nick De Marco QC argues that sport has always been political, and it should accept the fact.
One of the oldest (and perhaps silliest) shibboleths in sport has been that it is not political, and sports’ bodies have routinely imposed rules banning political expression. But not for the first time, major political events have exposed the fallacy that sport is not (or should not be) political.
In his 1945 Tribune Essay “The Sporting Spirit”, written just after the visit of the Soviet Union’s Dynamo Moscow football team to the UK, George Orwell famously commented that “Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play (…) it is war minus the shooting.” Orwell linked the “modern cult of sport” to the rise of nationalism and the alienation of urban communities from creative labour.
“War minus the shooting” might not be the best description of sport (not least as it obviously doesn’t apply to shooting sports; but nor perhaps to some...
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