Section 12: Sports

12. Sports > The Early Phase of Sport’s Globalization > Lecture

• The globalization of modern sport began during the last decades of the 19th century, a period of intensive internationalization we have identified elsewhere in this course as the second phase of globalization from the middle of the 19th century to 1914.
• We have also described the Red Cross, the scouting movement, and the International Olympic Committee as idealistic internationalisms that appeared during this period and have gone on to great success as global institutions.
• These transnational organizations included some major sports federations that appeared during the second phase of globalization.
• The clustering of these dates of origin clearly demonstrates how the early globalization of sport coincided with the intensive internationalization of this era.
• The first phase of the globalization of sport thus coincided with many other globalizations, including the international expansion of scientific organizations and practical international projects such as the Universal Postal Union.
• The League of Nations, the United Nations, the vast empires of modern science and sports, and countless international arrangements of equal or lesser scope all trace their ancestry, to some degree, to the European Enlightenment and its promise to serve what the American Philosophical Society called in 1778 “the common interests of humanity.
• ” The idea that international sport can contribute to the healing of conflicts between nations was first formulated by the founder of the Olympic movement, the French nobleman Pierre de Coubertin.
• Traumatized, like his entire generation of Frenchmen, by the military disaster of the Franco-Prussian war, Coubertin saw sport of competitions as having two kinds of strategic value.
• Second, the cultivation of sport would strengthen the young French males whose military service would defend France against future threats from Germany.
• The IOC continues to do business with repressive dictatorships on a regular basis while claiming that engagement with the Olympic movement and its values will soften the hearts and change the minds of the authoritarians to whom it grants the right to stage the games.
• The IOC’s rhetorical antidote to the brutal political realities associated with putting Olympic games in Beijing in 2008 or Sochi in 2014 are sentimental cliches about the Olympic family and its so-called values.
• Now, let us return to the early phase of the globalization of sport in search of other formative influences that coincided with the birth of the Olympic movement just before the turn of the century.
• The British empire was by far the most important factor in the early globalization of sport.
• At the elite British public schools, sports played an important role in training the next generation of colonial officers and administrators who would be called upon to discipline the darker-skinned populations of the imperial realm.
• In 1895, one headmaster described this doctrine of imperial sport as follows- “Englishmen are not superior to Frenchmen or Germans in brains or industry or the science and apparatus of war.
• ” In the history of the British empire, he says, it is written that England has called her sovereignty to her sports.
• The global diffusion of sport, notes Professor Alan Bairner, certainly owes much to the imperial exploits of the British with sports such as cricket and rugby union becoming rapidly and firmly established in various corners of the British Empire.
• In summary, the globalization of sport during the early period originated in political strategies formulated by a French nationalist educator, Coubertin, and the political elite in London that was running the British empire.
• One of his successors as president of the IOC, the American business tycoon and Olympic evangelist Avery Brundage said in 1965 that “the Olympic movement today is perhaps the greatest social force in the world.
• Like his countryman Pierre de Coubertin, Rimet believed the sport could be a force for good.
• Today, it is unthinkable that a man of Rimet’s integrity and sincerity could ascend to the presidency of FIFA or any other major international sports federation.
• These positions are now dominated by the opportunistic and sometimes corrupt sports politicians who populate the offshore world of Olympic sport.