ABSTRACT
For a century presidents and foreign ministers have debated issues and formulated policy about sport. ‘Mega-events’ such as the Olympic Games and soccer’s (football’s) World Cup have long been highly sought-after platforms for countries to project messages to huge global audiences. The globe’s biggest corporations use them as prime marketing tools, and television networks compete to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to broadcast them. International sports organizations claim more members than the United Nations and influence the international system in untold ways. Despite the long-standing and profound connections between sport and international affairs, the study of these ties was for decades a mere backwater in sports studies and in diplomatic history. In the 1970s, as social and cultural history flourished while diplomatic history stagnated, histories of sport overwhelmingly focused on sport’s role in society – its relationships to class, ethnicity, race and gender, and its uses in constructing local and national identities.2 Few sports historians tackled the international dimensions of sport, and the scholarship they produced before the 1990s tended to focus on decrying unwanted political ‘intrusions’ into sport. Historians of international relations, for their part, showed no interest at all in sport
until very recently. In textbooks, surveys and monographs on international history, sport’s rare appearances took the form of perfunctory asides. A survey might mention President Jimmy Carter’s boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympic Games in a list of US responses to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, but sport’s deeper significance went unnoticed. This neglect paralleled that of top diplomats and policymakers themselves, who saw sports issues come across their desks but rarely recognized them as anything other than peripheral to the main concerns of diplomacy. Henry Kissinger, for example, was a passionate soccer fan and dealt with a number of important issues relating to the Olympic Games, including the 1972 terrorist attack in Munich, during his tenure as National Security Adviser and Secretary of State. Yet aside from a discussion of the ‘ping-pong diplomacy’ that led to the opening to China, Kissinger mentions sport just twice, both times only in passing, in nearly 4,000 pages of detailed memoirs.3 His thick account of the art and history of diplomacy contains no reference to sport.4
