In the winter of 1945, Dynamo Moscow came to Britain on a goodwill football tour that turned out to be anything but. They played Chelsea, Cardiff City, Arsenal and Rangers, the last two matches so rancorous they inspired George Orwell to write his famous essay The Sporting Spirit. The tour, Orwell wrote, had only created fresh animosity on both sides. “And how could it be otherwise?” he asked. “I’m always amazed when I hear people saying that sport creates goodwill between nations.” Sport, Orwell thought, had become “bound up with the rise of nationalism – that is, with the lunatic modern habit of identifying oneself with large power units and seeing everything in terms of competitive prestige”.
All international sport is political, it’s just that we are so often swept up in the great gusts of excitement about who won and lost we do not often stop to look at the currents that carry it all along. Next year, though, promises to be as much about the games politicians play as it does the sports the athletes do. In February the Winter Olympics start in Pyeongchang, 50 miles from the border between North and South Korea. They are being pitched as the Games of Peace, an opportunity to promote understanding through the medium of salchows and frontside 720s. The International Olympic Committee will be busy “blah-blahing”, as Orwell called it, about “the great part played by the Olympic Games in bringing nations together”.
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