If all art is propaganda, as George Orwell maintained, then all sport is politics. You cannot divorce a country’s sport from its politics. One affects the other however often we mouth platitudes about not mixing the two. Sport and politics are not like oil and water; sport dissolves in politics easily and often.
Sometimes this relationship can be a force for good, as when sporting boycotts played a role in hastening the end of South Africa’s apartheid rule. Sometimes it is a stage for hardened political rivalries to explode, an extreme case being the killing of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympic Games by the Palestinian Black September group.
To say that sport and politics should not mix is naive, and fails to acknowledge that often sport is politics by other means.
