The (e)sportswashing reading list

If you're looking for a no frills, default primer on the subject, look no further.

An excerpt from the piece:

"Hitler, for example, used the 1936 Olympics in Berlin to project a vision of Aryan supremacy while concealing the brutality of the Nazi regime from the rest of the world, to considerable success: A New York Times reporter wrote at the time that the games had put Germany 'back in the fold of nations who have arrived.’”

A great discussion (monologue? rant?) about the reasons fans of esports should speak up about sportswashing, particularly when it comes to Saudi Arabia.

An excerpt from the piece:

Christesen tells this story: “There's a long war between Athens and Sparta. Athens looks like it's getting its ass handed to it. They're getting the crap beaten out of them. And everyone thinks that they're down and out. And so an Athenian politician named Alcibiades comes to the Olympic Games in 416 [B.C.E.], right in the middle of the war, when things are going bad for Athens. And he enters several chariot teams into the four-horse chariot race and wins first, second and either third or fourth place. And that's like an F1 racing team—it was insanely expensive.

“And they all said to him at home, 'You're crazy. We don’t have those kinds of resources.' And he’s like, ‘Listen. Everyone thought we were down and out. I win all these events at Olympia, and now everyone in the Greek world thinks that we're just fine. And they're terrified of us.' It was a straight-up geopolitical maneuver.”

This piece was nominated for an award! My former editor and I worked on it!

An excerpt from the piece:

Beyond the sounds and sights are the feelings—that is, when sports are used to devalue damaging content. This is laundering IRL: atmospheres so immersive and entertaining as to infect users’ emotions. Pregames and tailgates, chants and banners, roars and revelry—the matchday experience, for spectators, can be so seductive and electric as to alter the way they think about besieged brands and repressive nations.

...

Whether this last form of sportswashing works out is what’s at stake right now, as football fans in open societies begin planning which games to watch, with which friends and family, in which bars and biergartens. With the games on, the types of news articles they share in the group chat will matter. The kinds of personalities they pay attention to will matter. The topics of conversation they bandy about will matter.

An excerpt from the piece:

The LIV lineup includes Graeme McDowell, who won the U.S. Open in 2010 but has had only sporadic tournament success since then. When he was asked about [the assassination of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi by a Saudi hit squad] at a press conference last week, McDowell referred to it as a “situation,” and added, “If Saudi Arabia wanted to use the game of golf as a way for them to get to where they want to be, and they have the resources to accelerate that experience, I think we’re proud to help them on that journey.”

An excerpt from the piece:

Qatar has for years rejected criticisms of its effort to win the World Cup as jealousy or, worse, Western racism. But having the money and the ambition to host the tournament was one thing. Winning the right to do so was quite another. And in 2010, that was Qatar’s biggest problem.

...

[After Qatar won its bid,] accusations of corruption and bribery followed. The United States Department of Justice accused three South American voters of accepting seven-figure bribes to select Qatar. Within a few years, in fact, almost every one of the 22 members of the committee who had participated in the vote had been accused of or charged with corruption. Dozens of other executives had been arrested. Most were forced out of FIFA, and several were barred from soccer altogether.