Whenever major sporting events roll around, such as the Olympics or FIFA, the same snarky remarks emerge. While fans and sports media alike are spending their leisure hours peacefully invested in athletes and outcomes, critics will sit at home and scoff at the silliness of “sports ball”.
This group constantly reminds people that sports are a distraction from serious issues and effectively work to deflect a population’s attention and critical thinking away from things with power. We have all heard this argument in one form or another.
However, not everyone sees sports this way. Dr. Tim Elcombe is an Associate Professor in Kinesiology & Physical Education at Wilfrid Laurier, as well as a Fellow at the Balsillie School of International Affairs. Dr. Elcombe wrote previously about this topic of “The Significance of Insignificant Sport” on the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic back in 2020.
In our conversation, Dr Elcombe argued that sport is humanity’s greatest invention, saying “there’s nothing else humans have created that does what sport does. It brings people together; it tears them apart. It’s nationalism, its economics, its politics, its religion. It’s everything, right?… It literally encapsulates everything.”
The only other thing that generates the level of global interest that events like FIFA do are major conflicts. So, having that positive projection on the global stage is valuable—and politically leveraged.
Elcombe also emphasizes that sport is always defined by tension. It is “play, it’s politics—it’s both. It can be distracting,” he acknowledged. You can sit down and watch a game and let your problems fade for a couple of hours. But at the same time, it is deeply embedded in the political, economic, and social structures of society. Cases of mega sporting events, high-impact spectacles like some Olympic events and FIFA, particularly make this tension palpable.
In the pandemic, the tension was obvious. Governments used sporting events and their questioned essentialness as political statements about health and severity. Questions of when leagues would return, and debates over whether or not athletes were essential workers were real reflections of how governments understood risk, responsibility, and national morale. In the circumstance of a biological event, major sporting events could not be untangled from the social and political tensions of the time.
In the post-covid era, it certainly feels like our mega sporting events are bearing significant political weight once again. Only this time does this weight on our sports feel a little more explicit—the cultural leverage is being used by geopolitical actors to boost morale is right in our faces. The platform that mega-sport provides allows both athletes to create positive forms of national pride, and governments to translate athletic success into symbols of national strength, and overall legitimacy.
This lens also helps contextualize the overwhelming support US hockey has gotten from the US administration. Political leaders have long benefited from being in power during national sporting success. Simply put, they generate “good vibes” about national identity. That emotional connection can be capitalized on and is one reason governments consistently invest in national teams and international competition.
Sports are just games. That’s kind of the best part about it, and why humans seem to love them. But for this very reason, it may be worth asking how it serves as a shared language through which politics, belonging and collective emotion are expressed.
Contributed Graphic/Anna Koelher
