"Sport has the power to change the world," South African president
Nelson Mandela told the Sporting Club in Monte Carlo in 2000.
Today, we are inundated with similar claims-from politicians,
diplomats, intellectuals, journalists, athletes, and fans-about the
many ways that international sports competitions make the world a
better place. Promoters of the Olympic Games and similar global
sports events have spent more than a century telling us that these
festivals offer a multitude of "goods": that they foster friendship
and mutual understanding among peoples and nations, promote peace,
combat racism, and spread democracy. In recent years boosters have
suggested that sports mega-events can advance environmental
protection in a world threatened by climate change, stimulate
economic growth and reduce poverty in developing nations, and
promote human rights in repressive countries. If the claims are to
be believed, sport is the most powerful and effective form of
idealistic internationalism on the planet. The Ideals of Global
Sport investigates these grandiose claims, peeling away the hype to
reveal the reality: that shockingly little evidence underpins these
endlessly repeated assertions. The essays, written by scholars from
many regions and disciplines and drawn from an exceptionally
diverse array of sources, show that these bold claims were
sometimes cleverly leveraged by activist groups to pressure sports
bodies into supporting moral causes. But the essays methodically
debunk sports organizations' inflated proclamations about the
record of their contributions to peace, mutual understanding,
antiracism, and democracy. Exposing enduring shortcomings in the
newer realm of human rights protection, from the 1980 Moscow
Olympic Games to Brazil's 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Rio Olympics,
The Ideals of Global Sport suggests that sport's idealistic
pretensions can have distinctly non-idealistic side effects,
distracting from the staggering financial costs of hosting the
events, serving corporate interests, and aiding the spread of
neoliberal globalization. Contributors: Jules Boykoff, Susan
Brownell, Roland Burke, Simon Creak, Dmitry Dubrovsky, Joon Seok
Hong, Barbara J. Keys, Renate Nagamine, Joao Roriz, Robert Skinner.
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