Sport is concerned with contests of skill and prowess, primarily, though not exclusively, athletic prowess. Until the last quarter of the nineteenth century ‘sport’ in the English language referred primarily to field sports; games were not included. However, many contemporary reference works on sport now exclude not only all of the field sports, but also many of the most popular games, including the cue games, card games, board games, and electronic games. Official definitions, such as those used by the Sports Council, are similarly exclusive. Thus, ‘sport’ can be said to have a shifting and contested meaning.
From its first conception modern sport had moral and political aims. It was conceived by such educators as Thomas Arnold of Rugby as a necessary means of training young men in loyalty, teamwork, and discipline while dissipating their excessive energy. These values were seen to be as relevant to an urban-industrial society as to a school and of particular value in the running of an empire. In the United States, English games like baseball and rugby developed separate American forms from the 1870s, highly trained and specialized, with an important role in both the educational system and the growing industrial conurbations.
The politics of sport has been subject to a mythical belief that sport had ‘nothing to do with politics’. This myth was driven by the idealism, the purity of aspiration, which many people sought from sport and it functioned to help keep sport off the political agenda. But the reality was that modern sport was conceived, essentially, as a form of political socialization and the institution has contained political struggles at its core and lent itself to a number of political functions. The principal contest internal to sport has been between an amateur-elite ethos and a professional-commercial ethos. To the amateurs, sport was both recreation and moral training; these functions must necessarily be corrupted by the development of specialized professionalism. To the commercializers, sport offered a myriad of possibilities for making incomes and profits. The struggle between these ethoses was a long one, with many battles and compromises on the way. Some sports, including rugby union and the Olympic Games, lasted much longer than most in resisting commercial professionalism, but, given the power of television, the defeat of amateurism was, by the late twentieth century, something of a rout.
It would be too simplistic to suggest that sport has functioned, or been successfully used, as an ‘opiate of the people’ as Leon Trotsky suggested it was (in Where Is Britain Going, 1926). Many politicians have tried to associate with sport and sporting success, though with mixed results. One consistent theme has been the development and preservation of national identities. Even in the early development of sport in the British Isles, the establishment of separate national competitions and teams in the most popular sports (and separate sports in Ireland) was important in redefining the relationship between the United Kingdom and its component nations. The Soviet Union after 1945 devoted enormous resources to success in Olympic sport in order to convince people of the virtues of its form of society. The fostering of and identification with sporting success have been an important element of attempts by post-colonial African states to meld multitribal societies into modern nations. The success of these enterprises was partial at best, but there can be no question that sport has had a distinctive part to play in modern politics.
— Lincoln Allison
