In response to the impact of transgender athletes some advocate the sexes competing together, a move others argue would banish women from top-level sportCan you imagine sport without separate men’s and women’s categories? A world where Serena Williams never got a sniff of 23 majors – not with Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic in her path – and the golden British women’s hockey team of Rio 2016 never even took to the field. It sounds like a dystopian nightmare. In fact it was an idea mooted on Radio 4 last week in a Woman’s Hour discussion about whether transgender women should play women’s sports.When it was put to the psychologist Dr Beth Jones that it could lead to...
The Winter Olympics, World Cup and Commonwealth Games will all have an unavoidable backdrop that reminds us that all international sport is politicalIn 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...
Lindsey Vonn’s outburst against Donald Trump means she takes her place in a complex game where politics and sport have once again become deeply entangledOn the face of it, Lindsey Vonn looks like Donald Trump’s type. Tall, blond, blue-eyed and a former star – naked but for a coat of paint – of Sports Illustrated’s annual swimsuit issue, the champion skier is the epitome of what would once have been called an all-American girl. And she will be one of the main draws of February’s Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, hoping to repeat her 2010 Olympic downhill win in Vancouver and thus take a measure of solace for her absence through injury in Sochi four years ago.Coming off a 2016-17 season...
Despite calls from UK and US anti-doping bodies for shamed nation to be banned from February’s games, IOC and Wada inaction could let them off the hook‘It wouldn’t surprise me if the fix is already in,” warned Travis Tygart, the venerable head of the US Anti-Doping Agency, when I asked him on Thursday whether Russia will compete at the 2018 Winter Olympics. It was not so much pessimism as prophecy. Twenty-four hours later Alexander Zhukov, the head of the Russian Olympic Committee, confidently predicted at the 131st IOC summit in Lima: “It will be a Russian team with the Russian anthem and Russian flag” in Pyeongchang.Of course it will be. No one who follows the arcane politics of the International...
A regime with one of the world’s worst human rights record is staging the Asian Indoor and Martial Arts Games and the IOC – like Australia, which will be represented – is silentThe city of Ashgabat in Turkmenistan is famous for two characteristics. It has the highest concentration of marble buildings in the world and is capital of one of the most repressive regimes in the world. The two are not unrelated: all-powerful central Asian dictators with natural resource wealth are able to construct ostentatious monuments to themselves with little concern for their citizens.But the current Turkmen leader, Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, has grown tired of building with marble. On Sunday the 60-year-old dentist’s newest vanity project will be unveiled: the latest...