The Politics and Culture of Modern Sports by Sheldon Anderson (review)

For anyone who believes the old adage that sport is just a game, Sheldon Anderson offers a thoughtful and well-researched rebuttal, explaining how large a role sport plays in terms of national pride and international relations. Anderson argues convincingly that sport has become a critical aspect of national identity, yet, as much as leaders try, athletics most often fail to achieve the desired ends when employed for political purposes. While increasingly taken seriously within the international relations realm, sport has yet to live up to its expectations as a diplomatic game changer.

Beginning with the origins of modern professional sport and moving chronologically to the politics of hosting international athletic events in the present, Anderson’s work demonstrates just how critical sport is now within the global arena. Athletic success has become an internationally recognized means by which a nation can gain political legitimacy and respect, something that leaders of unpopular regimes like the former Soviet Union and Nazi Germany quickly recognized and used to their advantage. An impressive showing at an Olympic Games is also a political victory, while, conversely, a poor performance can prove harmful to national morale. Perhaps the most vivid example of this is how the Olympic Games became a quadrennial Cold War battleground, especially on the track and on the basketball court after the Soviet Union joined the Olympic movement in 1952.

Anderson situates the beginnings of modern professional athletics in Great Britain and the United States, spreading first throughout Europe and later to colonized Africa and Asia during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He argues that, while sports sometimes can help improve relations between nations, as with the so-called ping-pong diplomacy between the United States and China during the Nixon administration, perhaps just as often, athletic disputes are damaging to diplomacy. Anderson proves this thesis in his discussion of the increasingly tense relations between the Soviet Union and the German Democratic Republic (GDR) that developed as the GDR began to challenge Soviet sporting supremacy by the late 1960s and early 1970s. Rather than providing a common bond among those living in divided Germany during the Cold War, Anderson discusses how sports became just another point of contention between Berlin and Bonn, particularly the right to represent Germany in the Olympics.

Anderson’s work on the intersection of sport, nationalism, and international relations is a welcome addition to the growing field of sports history. Effectively organized into a series of nine well-written essays that could easily stand alone, this collection is based on careful analysis of newspapers, the growing body of secondary literature, and the results of myriad international sporting events. Its thorough examination of sport in terms of culture, nationalism, diplomacy, and economics make it useful for a variety of academic fields, including global studies, international relations, and twentieth-century world history. In short, this text is an excellent study of global sport, as well as a cautionary tale against expecting athletes to enter the diplomatic realm.