When athletes speak out against injustice, the world listens

When athletes speak out against injustice, they prove that politics is an important part of sport

In the two years since Israel began its indiscriminate killing of civilians in Gaza and buried the city under bombs, many people from all walks of life have raised their voices against the atrocities—from doctors to dock workers, actors and professors, writers and musicians, and indeed, Jewish organisations and groups of holocaust survivors. Even as the political establishments of countries like the US and Great Britain laid bare their total moral collapse, choosing political expediency over the killing of babies, children and women, ordinary people have taken to the streets for Palestine across the world.

There is only one community whose silence on the issue has been deafening—sportspeople.

Except a handful of athletes like F1 legend Lewis Hamilton, footballers Mohammed Salah and Karim Benzema, football legend Eric Cantona and Pep Guardiola, the manager of the football club Manchester City, there has not been even a whisper of dissent from the thousands of athletes whose exploits we follow so eagerly on screens or stadia.

This silence feels all the more complicit since over a thousand Palestinian athletes are among the estimated 67,000 Palestinians who have been killed since Israel's attacks began in October 2023. Every single sporting facility and venue in Gaza has been flattened.

Palestine's most famous footballer, Suleiman Obeid, was shot dead by Israeli forces at an aid distribution site in Gaza on 6 August, as he waited in line, trying to find food for his wife and five children. In January he had posted a photo of him and his five-year-old daughter, sitting dazed on the rubble of what was once their home, on Facebook.

Hani Al-Masdar, player turned coach of the Palestinian national football team, was killed in an airstrike on 6 January, 2024, in his home.

The list goes on. Yet, athletes from around the world have not been moved to speak. Why?

The old adage that “sports and politics don't mix” is both totally false and deeply cynical. Sports is very political. Athletes represent their nation states, raise the flags of the countries, and sing national anthems with their hands on their chest.

The Olympics is both a celebration of sports and a patriotic warring field—countries use it to showcase their rise as a global power, like China in 2008, or as India desperately wants to sometime in the future, or boycott the Games to show political dissent (the most well-known examples being the US-led boycott of Moscow 1980, where a total of 65 nations did not participate, and the Soviet Union-led retaliatory boycott of 1984 Los Angeles).

While nation states use sports as an extension of politics, dissent from athletes is met with the most extreme repercussions, not only from the political establishment, but also from the general public. It's a curious phenomenon, and at least one athlete who dared to raise her voice has questioned it.

In July 2020, the American-Japanese tennis star Naomi Osaka, who was heavily criticised for supporting the Black Lives Matter movement, asked, “Do people see us as no more than bodies—individuals who can achieve what's physically impossible for nearly everyone else, and who entertain fans by pushing ourselves past our limits? Do they wonder if a collection of muscles, bones, blood and sweat might also be able to voice an opinion?”

When these collections of muscles, bones, blood and sweat do voice an opinion, terrible things can happen. On 16 October 1968, two black US athletes—Tommie Smith and John Carlos—stood on the podium at the Mexico City Olympics, heads bowed. They wore black socks with no shoes; Smith wore a black scarf around his neck. As the U.S. national anthem played, they each raised a black-gloved hand in silent protest. Australian silver-medallist Peter Norman stood with them in solidarity, wearing a human rights badge on his jacket. Smith and Carlos were protesting racial segregation and violence in the US, including the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr, which had taken place just a few months before the Olympics.

The “Black Power Salute” is now celebrated as a defining moment in the history of civil rights activism, but back then, the repercussions were swift, brutal and widespread. Smith and Carlos were condemned by the International Olympic Committee, which called the protest a “deliberate and violent breach of the fundamental principals of the Olympic spirit”. The two were expelled from the Olympic village, suspended from the US team, lost their jobs, and were vilified by the media and the public. They could never compete on the track again. Norman too was ostracised—Australia did not pick him for the 1972 Olympics even though he had qualified for it, and even as late as 2000, he was not invited to the Sydney Olympics.

Yet another famous example of athletes being silenced comes from the extraordinary life of Muhammad Ali. In 1966, when he refused to be drafted into the US army for the Vietnam War, Ali became “the most hated man in the country”. His boxing licence was suspended, he was stripped of all his championship titles, and briefly jailed. Death threats came pouring in to him as well as to anyone who supported his stand. But this was Ali. Nothing silenced him.

“No, I'm not going 10,000 miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over,” Ali said. “I have been warned that to take such a stand would cost me millions of dollars. But I have said it once and I will say it again. The real enemy of my people is here. I will not disgrace my religion, my people or myself by becoming a tool to enslave those who are fighting for their own justice, freedom and equality. So I'll go to jail, so what? We've been in jail for 400 years. I am America. I am the part you won't recognise. But get used to me.”

Ali's words ring so true now that it seems almost absurd that he had to suffer for saying them. Let me leave you with another quote from a sporting giant who never backed down from taking a stand or speaking his mind, because what Eric Cantona, the France and Manchester United legend (and another outspoken critic of the Gaza killings) said as his acceptance speech while receiving an European football award in 2019 sounds like the most prescient vision of humanity's future summed up in less than ten sentences.

The host gives Cantona the award and asks, smiling, “What's going on through your mind right now?”

“As flies to wanton boys, we are for the gods...they kill us for sport,” Cantona begins. The host stops smiling. In the audience, Cristiano Ronaldo looks like he is in shock. Lionel Messi fidgets. “Soon, the science will not only be able to slow down the ageing of the cells, soon the science will fix the cells to the state, and so we will become eternal,” Cantona continues. “Only accidents, crimes, and wars, will still kill us. But unfortunately, crimes and wars will multiply.” Cantona pauses for a second before bringing it to an end. “I love football,” he says. “Thank you.”

Rudraneil Sengupta is the author of The Beast Within, a detective novel set in Delhi.

Source: LiveMint
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