Sports and Politics

Sports and Politics by Macey Downs Lauren Yee’s The Great Leap centers on the inevitable rematch of two basketball teams separated by nearly 6,000 miles: Saul’s University of San Francisco team and Wen Chang’s Beijing University team. As Saul publicly throws around comments like “no Chinese team will ever beat an American team, I promise you,” it becomes clear that more rides on this game than simply which team wins or loses. This courtside conflict in The Great Leap points to the ways that sporting events, and particularly international sporting events, have always been inseparable from nationalism, politics, and protest.

In America, athletic challenges have always been used to play out larger-scale conflicts, as Indigenous communities played sports long before colonization. The Six Nations of the Haudenosaunee, or Iroquois, Confederacy saw lacrosse as a spiritual game given to their people by the Creator, and used lacrosse for recreation, healing, and politics. Some deemed the game as the “Little Brother of War” because they often played it as a way to settle disputes between the nations. Lacrosse was a crucial way of keeping the peace and creating strong social bonds, with the games often concluding with a communal feast. The sport helped strengthen the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, preventing conflicts from escalating into war.

Lacrosse as we know it today was stolen by European colonizers from Indigenous players, who were then intentionally barred from playing the game they created in an attempt to deny Indigenous sovereignty. However, many members of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy have continued displaying resistance to colonial violence by playing lacrosse both locally and now internationally, as a team of entirely Haudenosaunee players began competing in the World Games in 1990. This has still been met with systemic barriers: the International Olympic Committee originally deemed the Iroquois Nationals (now known as the Haudenosaunee Confederacy) lacrosse team ineligible to compete in the 2022 World Games, despite the Iroquois Nationals being ranked third in the world. After public pushback, and the Ireland team withdrawing from the tournament to ensure Iroquois Nationals had a spot, the team representing the Haudenosaunee Confederacy will officially compete among seven other international teams in 2028.

The international stage of the Olympics has never been simply a space for the worldwide celebration of athleticism. The first modern Olympic Games was held in Athens in 1896, and despite being celebrated as the inception of a worldwide sporting event, the only nations that were officially recorded to have competed were European or had been colonized by Europeans. Not a single nation from Africa or Asia competed in the first Olympic Games, showing an early prioritization of White and European athletes in the games.

The Olympic Charter officially states that “no kind of demonstration, political, religious, or racial propaganda is permitted in any Olympic sites, venues, or other areas.” Yet separating politics from international sporting events is antithetical, and the Olympics consistently sees intentional political conflicts, messaging, and protests. When Berlin hosted the Olympic Games in 1936, the Nazi Party had risen to power in Germany only three years prior. With 49 participating countries and individuals around the world watching, the Nazi Party used this spotlight as an opportunity to appear benign while providing fuel for its white supremacist propaganda of Aryan superiority. Many felt that the Nazis’ violent and racist agenda was symbolically undermined when the Black American track athlete Jesse Owens

Jim sHankman (aea) and norman garCy yaP (aea) in the great leap, at tHe Hangar tHeatre and Portland stage ComPany, 2022. PHoto By raCHel PHilliPson. won gold over a member of the Nazi Germany team in the long jump. Together, Black athletes took home fourteen gold medals, four of which were won by Jesse Owens.

Politicization of the Olympics is more the rule than the exception. The Helsinki 1952 games were portrayed by media as a competition between free and communist countries of the Cold War; in Mexico City in 1968, Black American sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their hands in a Black Power salute to protest the US’s inhumane treatment of Black people, and were subsequently kicked off the team by the US Olympics Committee; the Montreal 1976 games were boycotted by over twenty African countries after New Zealand was allowed to compete despite having allowed its rugby team tour racially segregated, apartheid South Africa. Beijing 2022, the most recent games, were diplomatically boycotted by several countries in response to China’s human rights violations against Uyghurs and other Muslims in the northwest Xinjiang region. Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Russian athletes have been banned from competing in several international sporting events, including the Beijing Paralympic Winter Games and the World Figure Skating Championships. Today, the culture created around sporting events continues to promote particular political and social orders. A famous Serbian football player, Ivan Ergić, is critical of the relationship between sports and global capitalism, stating: “The sports industry today serves as a way of promoting socially domineering capitalism, particularly through the idea that competition brings the best results and the best out of humanity.” Mainstream media coverage of sports often revolves around a meritocracy narrative, with the winning team being celebrated as the most athletic and hardworking, without also discussing how access to resources or forms of systemic oppression also contribute to different teams’ outcomes. Schools also use sports from a young age to teach children about nationalism, as they are encouraged to support teams based on geographic proximity.

The Great Leap doesn’t shy away from these layers of politicization in sports. Both the Beijing and San Francisco teams’ styles of playing basketball are impacted by the ideals of their home country, making the inevitable rematch of these teams not just about which team will win, but whose ideals will appear victorious on a world stage. By having the Tiananmen Square protests and massacre echo onto the Beijing basketball court, Yee points to the ways in which the world of sports cannot be separated from world events.