SPORTSWASHING

 

               A new term is making the rounds. It’s “sportswashing,” which means the use of sports connections to burnish stained reputations. Nations do it. Individuals, too. It’s all the rage.

               The current best example is the LIV golf tour, launched in competition with the long-established PGA Tour.  It’s financed by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, which gets its considerable money from the country’s oil sales. Saudi Arabia has been in bad repute for some time because it is waging war in Yemen, murdering its internal critics and treating women as second-class citizens, among other things. The country is pumping billions of dollars into the new tour so that when its name comes up people will think of golf rather than the above-named stuff.  

               If nothing else, the investment has disrupted the cozy world of The Tour, replacing all other subjects of conversation. It’s also provided a few public answers to a question most of us ask ourselves only in moments of reflective quiet—“What’s my price?” In the case of Phil Mickelson, a much-decorated linksman, the widely reported answer is $200 million, just to show up. That’s serious money; as the inimitable Charles Barkley put it, “for that much I’d kill a relative, even one I liked.”

          Sportswashing has caught on in part because the term is cute. Its use of “washing” mirrors the well-worn journalistic practice of attaching the suffix “gate” to any politic scandal, following the 1970s Watergate saga. Its root is “whitewashing,” the broadly used word to describe any effort to cover over wrongdoing. A currently popular offshoot is “greenwashing,” which applies to things like Big Energy’s trumpeting its investments in “clean” sources that are far more modest than its environmental depredations.

               The very-rich have similarly used philanthropy to obscure the sometimes-not-admirable sources of their fortunes. When the name “Rockefeller” is heard today people think of the family’s charitable foundation, not John D.’s monopolistic business practices. The name “Carnegie” now summons up libraries, not Andrew’s Darwinian capitalism.

               A cursory knowledge of history shows that sportswashing is anything but new. Ancient Greek kings and Roman emperors staged Olympics to improve their approval ratings, medieval European rulers thought an occasional joust would improve their odors among their serfs. Male members of the British royal family take to the polo fields from time to time to polish their regular-guy credentials.

               The 20^th century advent of international sports gave sportswashing a big kick forward. Exhibit A in that regard was Nazi Germany’s pausing its hideous beliefs and practices long enough to host the 1936 Summer Olympics.  It was abetted in that by the International Olympic Committee, which long has smiled on authoritarian governments that make the trains run on time and the graft flow smoothly. In this it was abetted by Avery Brundage, the businessman fan of Adolph Hitler who headed the American Olympic Committee at the time and, later, the IOC.

The IOC liked Hitler so well that it also gave Germany the 1936 Winter Games, the first and only time both events were staged in the same land. The 1940 Winter Games went to Germany and the year’s Summer Games to Imperial Japan, although both fests were cancelled by World War II. Later the IOC gave the 1980 Summer Games to the Soviet Union, the 2014 Winter Games to Vladimir Putin’s Russia, and the 2008 Summer and 2022 Winter Games to China.

But just because sportswashing is tried doesn’t mean it will succeed. Russia might have done well with its ’14 Winter Games if it had played it straight as an ad for its host city of Sochi, on the Black Sea, but Putin overreached and tried to steal the medals stands as well. The result was an ultimately laughable, state-run doping program that, among other things, involved passing “clean” urine samples through a hole in a testing-lab wall to replace medal-winners’ dirty ones. It was uncovered by whistle blowers and resulted in multisport bans on Russian athletes, some of which remain in effect. Sochi became a synonym for cheating, not winter fun.

The red-letter day for sportswashing was December 2, 2010, when in one breathtaking swoop FIFA, the French-named world-football (soccer) governing body, awarded its 2018 World Cup to Russia and the 2022 event to Qatar, a tiny, dusty kingdom on the Persian Gulf with no history in the sport. The move was seen at the time as a bribe-o-rama, something that’s been confirmed since through investigations in several countries. A story in the New York Times last year reported that more than half the FIFA officers and directors then serving have been accused of wrongdoing, although not all had been criminally charged.  Sepp Blatter, FIFA’s head at the time, and Michel Platini, a former star player and top administrator, now are on trial in Switzerland for bribetaking. Additionally, several executives of the Fox TV network are charged in the U.S. for paying bribes to land television rights to the two events.

For sheer chutzpah, the Cup going to Qatar is in a league of its own. The country has a population of fewer than three million people, of whom only about a quarter are considered citizens. At the time of the award it had one stadium of World Cup class and nowhere for most visiting fans to stay. The weather there in June, when the Cup traditionally is staged, is about the same as the inside of a pizza oven.

Those were quibbles compared with the loot to be harvested. Cup dates were moved to November, playing havoc with national-league playing schedules worldwide. The Qataris have spent a reported $200 billion (that’s a “b”) on seven new stadiums and infrastructure that will be little used when the Cup ends its three-week run.

There’s a phenomenon known as the Streisand Effect, named for the singer, Barbra. It seems that she valued the privacy of her palatial beach home in Malibu and was so offended by a publication of a photo of it that she sued. The result was to put many more eyes on the place than it would have had otherwise.

So there were the rulers of Qatar, quietly enjoying their limitless oil money and but yearning for sportswashed applause. And there came the world’s press, eager to report on the country’s medieval laws, brutal migrant-labor practices, human-rights violations and ridiculous expenditures, subjects that will continue to arise through the competition. 

 A win or a loss? They shoulda asked Barbra.