The political hysteria around the US national women’s soccer team which crescendoed last weekend with the win in the World Cup final was hilarious on many levels. First of all, speaking purely as an outsider, it’s always adorable to see America getting worked up about soccer, a sport it deems to notice only once every four years and that only for the purposes of giving its grumbly baseball scribes something to rant about. The verbal diarrhea of your dusty Boston Globe columnists about how boring, collectivist and anti-ethical to the very soul of America this foreign contagion is will never stop being amusing. You still write those, don’t you, America’s grumbly baseball scribes? Please, never, ever stop.
But this unscheduled rerun of the “America Gets Worked Up About Soccer” shit show was, of course, both hilarious and political for an entirely different reason. No, this time we beheld the old “Shut Up and Dribble Routine”, also known as the “Stick to Sports” routine, also known as the “Sports and Politics Don’t Mix” routine… All of which is better described as “Sports and Politics I Don’t Share Don’t Mix” because you can be damn well sure none of the Outrage Brigade would utter a peep had Megan Rapinoe and the crew voiced a political opinion they can get behind. Which makes sense, to be sure, because politics itself has become a team sport in America: it doesn’t matter who the guy is, as long as he is wearing my colors and makes the other guys lose…
Behold, for example, how rabidly they rushed to deify another US player, Kelley O’Hara, for the valiant act of saving the US flag from under the trampling hooves of liberal un-American teammates. The fact that Allie Long, the player who ostensibly dropped the flag during the celebration, was celebrating WITH IT to begin with and the fact that it was Long who actually picked it up and handed it to O’Hara didn’t matter. Long was engaged in a choreographed routine with Megan “Evil Lesbian” Rapinoe herself, which put her squarely into the enemy camp, making O’Hara an overnight right-wing heroine. I am not sure how many creatures from the Fox News comment section wound up finding out that O’Hara is actually a lesbian herself and whether this merely made them sad, or, hopefully, led to more than a few cranial explosions.
Either way, any time anyone tells you that they want sports and politics separate, they lie. They lie like they are in the final minutes of the Lying Bowl. The very creator of the principle, baron Pierre de Coubertin, the father of the modern Olympics, may have believed it when he said it, but he was as full of crap as your average member of the Trumpist commentariat. In fact, Coubertin’s entire Olympic philosophy had deep political underpinnings (his principle of strict amateurism, for instance, was designed specifically to keep the working class out) and was later shamelessly used by his favorite pupil Avery Brundage to keep the riff-raff in its place.
Sports have never been separate from politics. Not in the ancient days, not in the XIX century, certainly not during the Cold War. Americans understood it quite well back then, which is why beating the Russians was so paramountly important that achieving this goal summarily became America’s brightest sports moment of the XX century. Russians understood it better than anyone, which is why all international sports teams in the USSR fell under the auspices of the Propaganda Department of the Communist Party’s Central Committee. In fact, sports was always considered merely a part of the Soviet Union’s foreign policy, and Olympic reports in Soviet press assiduously listed and tabulated achievements of the socialist nations.
If sports and politics didn’t mix, there would have been no visits to the White House, no presidential calls to the Super Bowl winners’ locker rooms, no national flags at the Olympics, no state-sponsored Russian doping program, and the Miracle on Ice would have been known as “a hockey game we played in the run-up to the great gold-medal-winning victory over Finland 39 years ago.”
The encroachment of politics into sports has only ever been frowned upon when it was the athletes who took it upon themselves to get political. Instead of, you know, simply being used as political tools by their respective states. This is when the righteous anger would manifest itself, be it the savage way the United States treated a pair of sprinters who rose their hands in the Black Power salute or how the Soviet Union tried to muzzle its hockey players who wanted a degree of freedom from the dictatorial head coach Viktor Tikhonov.
Thus, we get the current hilarity. The surreal spectacle of Gadsden-flag-waving “Mercan Patriots” rooting for England, of all countries, just to see Rapinoe defeated and Trump triumphant. The logical contortions the Outrage Brigade tried to put itself through in order to not appear unpatriotic while denouncing Rapinoe for lack of patriotism (note here the subtle substitution of “hating Trump” with “hating America”; nothing is more Russian than conflating the country with the leader). This sad display of the world’s ultimate shmendrick bemoaning the women’s lack of athletic skill.
Or, as the crowning glory, this pompous piece of dreck from the citadel of Never Trumpers. Do yourself a favor and read it to the very end. It has everything. The all-but-literal-Russian-translation of the “be proud and grateful to the generous Motherland” thesis. A mansplaining spectacle of a middle-aged white man lecturing world class athletes on how to do sports right. The somber history lesson on the greatness of the founding fathers. The (what else?) unflattering comparison of soccer with baseball (whose players “defy the laws of physics”, don’t you know). Everything!
All that brilliant eloquence flung at an athlete for the crime of having a political stance. But not for that alone, of course. Otherwise, Rapinoe, by far not the only member of the team to express unflattering opinions about Trump, wouldn’t have been singled out for all this scorn. Her being, to quote the shlemiel, “an outspoken lesbian” had something to do with it as well. Even if the shlemiel in question thinks that 2019 is some kind of a golden age of homosexuality in America, so everyone should just shut up and sit down.
Listen, guys, who ever told you that being quiet, lining up and saluting the state is the most American thing in the world? I always thought that self-expression and unapologetic freedom were, but hey, go figure, right?
In the USSR, as well as in modern Russia, athletes are rarely said to be “competing”, “playing” or “participating.” They are always “defending the honor of the Motherland”, as if the Motherland is some kind of a stereotypical Middle Eastern maiden in need of murderously jealous brothers to protect her. The implication here is that the world is full of villains who are desperate to take the Motherland’s honor away the very moment that glorious Russian athletes show some slack in their preparation or their political vigilance.
Such sad insecurities are quite befitting of Russia with its terrible history and a crippling inferiority complex. There are few things more un-American as for the United States to go down that same path.
