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| The Globetrotters met with Soviet Leader Nikita Khrushchev during their trip to the USSR. |
Sports diplomacy can act as a symptomatic representation of common ground between nations, and athletic events can manifest themselves as a symbolic forum for the beginning of international understanding. The love of sports can universalize the human experience, as Sharon Robinson noted her gratitude for “the unifying game of baseball” because it highlights the common interests of nations. By bringing teams together in a sporting venue, countries intrinsically recognize the legitimacy of the other country on the field, and simultaneously acknowledge their national identity while still reproducing international commonalities.
When the Tampa Bay Rays played the Cuban National Team with Barack Obama and Raul Castro in attendance, the willingness of the United States team and the President to take the field with the Cubans implicitly symbolized American attempts to normalize relations with Cuba. Obama's deputy national security advisor for strategic communication and speechwriting, Ben Rhodes, said, “Baseball is part of both of our heritages, and part of the type of exchanges we are pursuing in business, in culture, in the arts, in sports.” The nations' love for baseball acted as a symbolic illustration of political attempts to reconcile the countries. Sharon Robinson reflected how the fan’s sense of hope, because of Obama’s presence at a shared national pastime, “struck [her] as a sign of the beginning of a changing Cuba.”
Rob Manfred’s desire for a legal path for Cubans to play in the MLB without defecting serves as a representative framework for a new dialogue with Cuba that moves away from a practice where, as Dave Zirin said on TSN Winnipeg 1290 Radio, “Cubans are separated from their families and delinked from their home.” Thus, the US and Cuba used a sport that binds the countries to serve as a representation of political diplomacy.
However, while sports diplomacy can act as an emblematic demonstration of international understanding, athletic events do not irrevocably change the longstanding conflict between national officials. Michael Rubin referenced in his article in the magazine Foreign Policy how “President Franklin Roosevelt had granted Hitler legitimacy by having the U.S. Team participate in his Olympics [in Berlin in 1936].” Even if President Obama's main intention in Cuba was to merely “bury the last remnant of the Cold War” and begin negotiations with the nation, by sitting with Castro at such a public spectacle, Obama legitimized the exceedingly precarious elements of the Cuban regime. Rubin added “Athletic contests can’t bring rogue states in from the cold… when the final whistle blows, the lights dim, and competitors break their final handshakes, it is the same politicians who remain in charge.”
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| President Obama was the first US President to visit Cuba while in office since Calvin Coolidge in 1928. |
While the baseball game in Cuba may have personified an attempt at international convergence through sports, the athletic event did not change the nature of the Castro political dictatorship. Sports cannot transcend politics because sports are inherently political, as Cuban descendant Dan LeBatard wrote, "I'm not in the mood to play ball with a dictator who still has the blood of our people on his hands.” While sports may not actively bring about political change, the public still paradoxically imbues athletics with symbolic political implications, and the game in Cuba may have also implicitly desensitized the past torment of the Castro regime.
Hosting international sporting events project the conscious effort of a state to disseminate specific images of their nationhood and act as an extension of governmental identity politics. By putting a nation’s capabilities in front of the world, organizing a global athletic competition inherently assigns an immediate mythic grandeur to the host nation. It also re-defines previous external perceptions of the country’s organizational competency, and implicitly effects how other nations perceive them.
Rook Campbell said about the World Cup in South Africa in 2010, “The World Cup helped outlay a nation branding legacy in which a post-apartheid South Africa could show itself as truly democratic global power.” The value of the World Cup to South Africa was how other nations saw the event as a legitimization of the progress of the state from its internationally unaccepted past. Campbell added that the event “was celebrated as both a national and continental opportunity to correct stereotypes and forge new stature.” The World Cup acted as a symbolic divide between the state and the vestiges of apartheid, and shaped a nationalistic identity apart from racial oppression.
While hosting an international sporting event may act as a symbolic representation of a nation’s re-branding in global politics, it does not ensure actual structural changes to the nation on the ground. In the past, global sporting events have come at the expense of public facilities for the nation’s ordinary citizens. Even the public transportation in South Africa that was developed for the World Cup or received more funding because of the tournament, like the transit railway system Gautrain, are as Andrew Harding said in the BBC, "priced out of the reach of most South Africans, and highly controversial new tolls on the motorways mean drivers are still paying for the renovations.”
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| "Soccer City" in Johannesburg is one of many World Cup Stadiums in South Africa that cannot cover its operating costs. |
