There is a common refrain that suggests sports should be separate from events or politics. It is one we often hear. Certainly sports do provide a distraction at times. But to paraphrase the late comedian Rodney Dangerfield in the movie Back to School there is a place where sports are separate from the unpleasant and even difficult issues and aspects of our lives and it’s fantasy land.
Sports are much more a mirror reflecting our best and worst intentions. Sometimes they are a hopeful mirror, the kind you catch a glimpse of yourself in and think everything is alright. Other times they are a cruel mirror, confronting us with our warts and imperfections in greater detail than we would ever want to comfortably see. But they are always a truthful mirror reflecting all that we have done and still have left to do.
Two events this past week prompted this article and its conclusion that sports can’t and should not try to hide from the weight of issues, events, or politics and couldn’t if they tried.
The first of these was the victory of Valentyna Veretska in last Friday’s Jerusalem Marathon. What made Veretska’s victory noteworthy, is the fact that she fled Ukraine for Israel, on the eve of the Russian invasion only about a month earlier. Veretska is a refugee, an athlete and a mother of an 11 year-old daughter. Veretska and her daughter are in Israel while her husband remains in Ukraine as that nation fights a foreign invader for its very survival. Some might conclude that running a competitive marathon during such a crisis is unimportant but Valentyna Veretska is a runner. That is who she is and what she proved in 2 hours and 54 minutes and 54 seconds over the hilly terrain of Jerusalem. The inescapable mirror that is sport reminded us all, as if we needed reminding, of the toughness and indomitable spirit of the Ukrainian people wherever they may be and whatever they may do. It is Veretska who will do the defining and with her effort she showed she was a world caliber runner.
History is full of examples of athletes using sport to make athletic statements that challenge or upend political beliefs. There are perhaps enough for a whole chapter of this story devoted to athletes from nations invaded by either the Soviet Union or Russia to suppress self-determination and expression, whether it is the Hungarian Olympic Water Polo Team in 1956 or the Czechoslovakian Ice Hockey Team in the 1969 World Championships, both shutting out favored Soviet teams or now, Veretska. Sport is a truthful mirror that reflects our world and the less flattering reflections can’t be wished away, because sport will always remind us over and over again.
The second event, that reinforced the inescapable nature of sports as a mirror of our best and worst images, was a panel discuss I moderated at a DEI Summit presented by an aspirational group called Travel Unity in Brookhaven, Georgia. Travel Unity is working to provide standards for diversity, equity and inclusion in the travel, hospitality, sports and events sectors. The discussion, which was lively and was interrupted by applause for each of the three speakers, took a pointed turn when it came to how the head of the largest Atlanta-based running club responded to the murder of Ahmaud Arbery, a young Georgian of Color who was chased and murdered by three men in cars with guns, while jogging through his community in 2020 in shorts and a t-shirt and carrying nothing.
If someone innocently participating in sport could lead to one’s death, how would a diverse community of runners and walkers respond? “Doing nothing was not an option,” Atlanta Track Club President Rich Kenah, a former Olympian and World Championship medalist, said during the panel. So despite a percentage of his membership who said they come to the sport to escape the difficult events of news and politics, Kenah and his organization sought a greater dialogue with all of Atlanta’s community around these difficult issues and so the Atlanta Track Club’s Common Ground initiative was born. You can read more about this innovative Common Ground program here https://www.atlantatrackclub.org/news/common-ground-report.
But these two events in tandem proved to me the absolute folly of asking sports to only serve as an escape from the more painful aspects of life. It diminishes what sports are and can be. Rather than escaping through sports, they are mirror to the world, where we see ourselves and what is right, what is wrong and what can be better if only we have the courage to try.
A Mirror to the World: Why Sports Can’t Hope to Hide From the World
Written by Robert Boland in Articles on