Sport, protest and globalisation

GLOBAL CULTURE AND SPORT

SPORT, PROTEST

AND GLOBALISATION

Stopping Play

Edited by Jon Dart and Stephen Wagg

Global Culture and Sport Series

Series Editors: Stephen Wagg, Leeds Beckett University, UK, and David

Andrews, University of Maryland, USA Th e Global Culture and Sport

series aims to contribute to and advance the debate about sport and glo￾balization through engaging with various aspects of sport culture as a

vehicle for critically excavating the tensions between the global and the

local, transformation and tradition and sameness and diff erence. With

studies ranging from snowboarding bodies, the globalization of rugby

and the Olympics, to sport and migration, issues of racism and gender,

and sport in the Arab world, this series showcases the range of exciting,

pioneering research being developed in the fi eld of sport sociology.

More information about this series at

http://www.springer.com/series/15008

Jon Dart• Stephen Wagg

Editors

Sport, Protest and

Globalisation

Stopping Play

Global Culture and Sport Series

ISBN 978-1-137-46491-0 ISBN 978-1-137-46492-7 (eBook)

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-46492-7

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016956277

© Th e Editor(s) (if applicable) and Th e Author(s) 2016

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with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988.

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illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfi lms or in any other physical way, and trans￾mission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or

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Th e use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication

does not imply, even in the absence of a specifi c statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant

protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.

Th e publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book

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the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any

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Cover illustration: Trinity Mirror / Mirrorpix / Alamy Stock Photo

Printed on acid-free paper

Th is Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

Th e registered company is Macmillan Publishers Ltd. London

Editors

Jon Dart

School of Sport

Leeds Beckett University

Leeds , United Kingdom

Stephen Wagg

Carnegie Faculty

Leeds Beckett University

Leeds , United Kingdom

For everyone seeking to challenge injustice, in or via sport

vii

Th anks to all the contributors to this book for their enthusiasm and

support.

Acknowledgements

ix

Introduction: Sport and Protest 1

Jon Dart and Stephen Wagg

‘Deeds, Not Words’: Emily Wilding Davison and

the Epsom Derby 1913 Revisited 17

Carol Osborne

Women’s Olympics: Protest, Strategy or Both? 35

Helen Jeff erson Lenskyj

A Most Contentious Contest: Politics and Protests at

the 1936 Berlin Olympics 51

David Clay Large and Joshua J. H. Large

Splitting the World of International Sport: The 1963 Games of the New

Emerging Forces and the Politics of Challenging the Global Sport Order 77

Russell Field

“ Memorias del ’68 : Media, Massacre, and the

Construction of Collective Memories” 101

Celeste González de Bustamante

Contents

x Contents

Race, Rugby and Political Protest in New Zealand: A Personal Account 131

John Minto

Fighting Toxic Greens: The Global Anti- Golf Movement

(GAG’M) Revisited 151

Anita Pleumarom

‘Human Rights or Cheap Code Words for Antisemitism?’

The Debate over Israel, Palestine and Sport Sanctions 181

Jon Dart

Chicago 2016 Versus Rio 2016: Olympic

‘Winners’ and ‘Losers’ 209

Kostas Zervas

“The Olympics Do Not Understand Canada”:

Canada and the Rise of Olympic Protests 227

Christine M. O’Bonsawin

‘The Atos Games’: Protest, the Paralympics of 2012

and the New Politics of Disablement 257

Stephen Wagg

‘Messing About on the River.’ Trenton Oldfield and

the Possibilities of Sports Protest 289

Jon Dart

Sochi 2014 Olympics: Accommodation and Resistance 311

Helen Jeff erson Lenskyj

An Anatomy of Resistance: The Popular Committees

of the FIFA World Cup in Brazil 335

Christopher Gaff ney

Index 365

xi

Celeste González de Bustamante is an Associate Professor in the School of

Journalism at the University of Arizona, USA.

Jon Dart teaches sports policy and sociology in the Carnegie Faculty of Leeds

Beckett University.

Russell Field is Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Kinesiology and

Recreation Management at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada.

Christopher Gaff ney teaches geography at the University of Zurich,

Switzerland.

David Clay Large retired as Professor of History at Montana State University,

USA, and now teaches at the University of San Francisco. He is the author of

Nazi Games: Th e Olympics of 1936 (New York, 2007).

Joshua Large teaches history at Universidad EAFIT in Medellin, Colombia.

Helen Jeff erson Lenskyj is Professor Emerita at the University of Toronto

and a leading critic of the Olympic industry. Her books include Inside the

Olympic Industry (2000), Th e Best Olympics Ever? Social Impacts of Sydney 2000

(2002), Olympic Industry Resistance (2008), Gender Politics and the Olympic

Industry (2012) and Sexual Diversity and the Sochi 2014 Olympics (2014) (the

last two books were published with Palgrave Macmillan).

Contributors

xii Contributors

John Minto is a teacher and political activist based in Christchurch, New

Zealand. In a television documentary called New Zealand’s Top 100 History

Makers shown in the country in October 2005, John was placed 89th.

Christine O’Bonsawin is an associate professor of History and Indigenous

Studies at the University of Victoria, Canada. She is a specialist in Canadian

sport history, Olympic history and the history of indigenous peoples.

Carol A. Osborne teaches the history, sociology and philosophy of sport at

Leeds Beckett University, UK. She is a former chair of the British Society of

Sport History.

Anita Pleumarom is a geographer and member of the Tourism Investigation

& Monitoring Team based in Bangkok, Th ailand. She has written extensively

on tourism and the environment.

Stephen Wagg is a professor in the Carnegie Faculty in Leeds Beckett

University. He is co-editor of Th e Palgrave Handbook of Olympic Studies (2012)

and author of Th e London Olympics of 2012: Politics, Promises and Legacy

(Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

Kostas Zervas holds a doctorate from Leeds Metropolitan University in 2012

for a study of anti-Olympic movements. He is a lecturer in sport, health and

nutrition in the School of Social and Health Sciences at Leeds Trinity

University, UK.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 1

J. Dart, S. Wagg (eds.), Sport, Protest and Globalisation,

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-46492-7_1

Introduction: Sport and Protest

Jon Dart and Stephen Wagg

On the 30th January 2016, the news agency Reuters carried a story

about a Greek second division football match between AEL Larissa and

Acharnaikos in the Thessalian city of Larissa. The match was about to

begin when all 22 players sat down on the pitch. They, along with the two

clubs’ coaches and substitute players, remained seated while the following

announcement was read out over the public address system:

‘The administration of AEL, the coaches and the players will observe two

minutes of silence just after the start of the match in memory of the hun￾dreds of children who continue to lose their lives every day in the Aegean due

to the brutal indifference of the EU and Turkey. The players of AEL will

protest by sitting down for two minutes in an effort to drive the authorities

J. Dart (*) • S. Wagg

Carnegie Faculty, Leeds Beckett University, Beckett Park Campus, Leeds

LS6 3QU, UK

to mobilise all those who seem to have been desensitised to the heinous

crimes that are being perpetrated in the Aegean1

’ (Reuters 2016).

This incident suggests at least two things: first, that, even in the postmod￾ern twenty-first-century sports, people can recognize that there are more

important things in the world than sport and, second, that sport remains—

indeed, given the vast swathes of mass media now given over to sport, it is

perhaps more than ever—a significant forum for political protest. Some of

this protest, as on that day in Greece, uses sport as a platform upon which to

highlight an issue outside of the immediate purview of sport. Equally, some

protest is levelled at the institutions of sport itself and the governance thereof.

The former, of course, encompasses notable stands against racism, as

with the now-iconic clenched-fist salute at the Mexico Olympics of 1968

(see Smith 2011) and the numerous attempts worldwide to disrupt sports

encounters which featured representatives of apartheid South Africa (see,

e.g., John Minto’s chapter in this book); against anti-gay discrimination, as

with the demonstration at the Sochi Winter Olympics of 2014 against the

so-called ‘gay propaganda’ legislation passed in the Russian duma the previ￾ous year2

(see BBC 2014, and Helen Lenskyj’s chapter in this book); and

in favour of the rights and protection of women, as when, in November

2014, members of Sheffield Feminist Network demonstrated outside the

city’s town hall against the prospect that Sheffield United FC would re-sign

striker Ched Evans at the end of his prison sentence for rape (Evans 2014).

Many of the latter kind of protests have been aimed at the institutions

of sport and its governance and go to the heart of the capitalist structure

of sport and its commercial excesses and abuses. Recent examples here

would include the ongoing protests by Newcastle United supporters at

their club’s sponsorship deal, signed in 2012, with the controversial payday

loans company Wonga, which included their marketing a Newcastle shirt

without Wonga’s logo (Marsh 2015); the walk-out by 10,000 Liverpool

supporters chanting ‘You greedy bastards…’ during a home match in

February 2016 in protest at ticket prices (Press Association 2016); and

1A total of 45 refugees drowned in the Aegean in January 2016 alone. See Connolly et al. (2016).

2The law is officially known as For the Purpose of Protecting Children from Information Advocating

for a Denial of Traditional Family Values.

2 J. Dart and S. Wagg

following growing evidence of corruption in world football’s governing

body FIFA (Jennings 2015) the showering of its apparently venal presi￾dent Sepp Blatter with fake money by British comedian-prankster Simon

Brodkin in July 2015 (BBC 2015). But the principal protests in this

regard appear to have been against the International Olympic Committee

(IOC) and have grown in tandem with the massive and escalating public

expense generated by staging the Olympics since the mid-1970s. There

are signs that these protests are having an effect. At the time writing,

three cities have pulled out of bidding process to select host cities for

future Olympics: Rome in 2012 (Owen 2012), Boston, Massachusetts in

July 2015 (Seelye 2015) and Hamburg the following December (Bohne

2015)—all on grounds of the likely drain on public finances.

This book is an attempt to offer what may be the first thoroughgoing

review of the history of sport, protest and activism. It is a contribution

to the small but growing literature of which eminent recent examples

include Jean Harvey et al.’s Sport and Social Movements (Harvey et al.

2015) and Michael Lavalette’s Capitalism and Sport: Politics, Protest,

People and Play (Lavalette 2013), although the latter, while an important

book, says comparatively little about protest.

The book is arranged as follows:

In Chapter 2, “‘Deeds, Not Words’: Emily Wilding Davison and the

Epsom Derby 1913 Revisited”, British historian Carol Osborne examines

male sport as a target for those campaigning for women’s suffrage before the

First World War. As is quite well known, the suffragette Emily Davison was

killed by King George V’s horse during the 1913 Epsom Derby while try￾ing to draw attention to the cause of women’s suffrage. However, this much

publicized and shocking incident was not the only connection between

sport and political protest in the early twentieth century. This chapter

shows how British suffragettes carried out a series of violent acts against

sport and sportsmen that were unparalleled in the English-speaking world.

Chapter 3, “Women’s Olympics: Protest, Strategy or Both?” is by

sociologist and leading Olympic critic Helen Jefferson Lenskyj and con￾cerns the protests against the exclusion of women from the early mod￾ern Olympic Games which resulted in the staging of the first ‘Women’s

Olympics’ in Paris in 1922. The Games, first held in 1896, have always

Introduction: Sport and Protest 3

privileged some groups of athletes over others. Organized by the IOC, a

group of self-elected men (and a small number of women), the Olympic

sporting programme is by no means representative of world sporting

practices. The eligibility rules, both explicit and implicit, have been vari￾ously based on sex, gender, sexuality, social class, nationality, religion,

race/ethnicity and/or ability, thereby enabling the participation of some

groups while posing barriers to others.

Resistance to the Olympic Games has been in evidence through￾out the twentieth century and continues into the twenty-first century.

Numerous alternative sporting and cultural festivals organized by mem￾bers of excluded groups represent the earliest ongoing form of Olympic

resistance, such the Workers’ Olympics, staged between 1925 and 1937

(see Riordan 1984). Some followed the general Olympic model, while

others reflected the distinctive sociocultural values and priorities of the

excluded groups. Many alternative games had their beginnings in the

early decades of the twentieth century and continue today; others were

relatively short-lived, but had important impacts on international sport.

The Women’s Olympics provide a pertinent example. Many historians

treat the establishment of the Women’s Olympics as a strategy to force

the IOC’s hand, at a time when the sporting programme for female ath￾letes was extremely limited. In other words, rather than representing a

genuine alternative and a radical political stance, the Women’s Olympics

are reduced to a mere stepping stone to the ‘real’ Olympics. This chapter

examines these debates and contradictions.

Chapter 4, “A Most Contentious Contest. Politics and Protest at the

1936 Berlin Olympics” by American historians David Large and Joshua

Large identifies the 1936 Berlin Summer Olympic Games as a watershed

in the emergence of the Modern Olympics and as a lightning rod for

political protest. Hosted as they were by the capital city of Nazi Germany,

these Games sparked a major international boycott movement in which

the USA played a central role. Although the boycott effort eventually

failed to materialize, it managed to force some (alas, essentially token)

concessions from the German organizers and, more importantly, helped

focus world attention on the racist policies of the Hitler government.

The ‘Boycott Berlin’ movement also brought to the fore an issue that

would bedevil a number of later Olympiads: the questionable legitimacy

4 J. Dart and S. Wagg