Sporting boycotts hurt the players not their nations

The Times has been giving voice in the style that long, long ago led it to be called “The Thunderer”. It did so in the grand manner of the “Skibbereen Eagle”, which once warned the Tsar of Russia that it had its eye on him. 

On Thursday, The Times in its leader was in fine Eagle form: “The response of various bodies to the problem of Russian and Belarusian sporting participation has been patchy, ranging from the refreshingly robust, in the case of Wimbledon, to the pusillanimous, in the case of Uefa. Although European football’s governing body has suspended all Russian teams from its competitions, it has yet to expel the Russian Football Union from its ranks. The argument for doing so is overwhelming.” 

Really? This is treading on treacherous ground. The Russian invasion of Ukraine is abominable and indefensible. It would have been that even if there had been any substance to President Putin’s assertion that the Ukrainian Government was neo-Nazi. 

Yet whoever wrote that Times leader is inviting a “Tu quoque” response. In the eyes of many other states — of many people in Britain and the USA too — the American-British invasion of Iraq in 2003 was likewise indefensible, and its consequences abominable. 

It too, like Putin’s war, was justified by a lie. How, one wonders, would we have responded if, say, the Olympic Movement had expelled us from its ranks. 

UEFA has done what was right and necessary, but it has wisely stopped well short of what Wimbledon has done and barred individual Russian and Belarusian footballers from plying their trade with Uefa-member clubs.

Tennis players compete at Wimbledon as individuals. They are not representing their country, and this is the case even if their country may take pride in any achievement. 

Wimbledon’s decision, deplored by both the men’s and women’s player unions (the ATP and WTA) has come after what The Times calls “a mammoth rally between SW19 and the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport”, and I think one can assume that pressure from the Government has been intense.

Perhaps the All-England Club was relieved to give way to this sporting boycott. It would, after all, have been embarrassing if the club’s Patron, the Duchess of Cambridge, had been required to present the Men’s Singles winner’s Cup or the runner-up’s shield to Daniil Medvedev, currently ranked two in the world, though I imagine she would have done so graciously.

Bans and boycotts have a chequered history. We have been here before. The 1980 Olympics were staged in Moscow. The Iron Curtain was still in place, and the Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan. Most of us took less notice of that than of Putin’s war, perhaps because it wasn’t in Europe but in a faraway country of which we knew little. 

But Thatcher tried to persuade the British Olympic Committee (BOC) to boycott the Games. The BOC sensibly refused and left the decision to the athletes as individuals. Most went. 

The American Government was what The Times would call more “refreshingly robust”. So the USA boycotted the Games. (One result was that Scotland’s Alan Wells returned home with the 100 metres gold.) Four years later, the USSR boycotted the Games in Atlanta, a futile gesture.

The most celebrated and, in many people’s opinion, successful sports boycott was directed at South Africa and its deplorable apartheid regime. 

It lasted a long time, more than twenty years, almost half the duration of law-imposed apartheid. It was directed chiefly at rugby union and cricket, the two most popular team sports in white South Africa. 

It may be held to have begun in 1968 when the South African Government refused to accept an England team selected by the MCC because it included Basil D’Oliveira, himself a South African by birth and upbringing but classified as a Cape Coloureds. 

Many in Britain deplored and opposed the boycott, some because they weren’t greatly disturbed by apartheid, others because they believed that continuing friendly relations might, even would, in time, lead to the withering of the racist policy, euphemistically given the official description “separate development” of the different races.

Despite the rejection of that MCC team, the Springboks — that is, the South African all-white rugby team — toured Britain and Ireland that winter, playing some twenty matches and internationals against England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. All the matches were staged, successfully in rugby terms, but all were disturbed by mass protests, some of them violent. 

Though a South African cricket team was scheduled to tour in 1970, it was certain that this would lead to public disorder, close to rioting. Cricket grounds couldn’t by their nature — and the nature of the game — be defended in the same way as rugby grounds. 

The tour was called off, the cricket authorities and public yielding reluctantly to the Government’s decision. Soon afterwards, a Springbok tour of New Zealand met with such violent opposition that the New Zealand Government fell into line with the boycott.

That sporting boycott would last until Nelson Mandela was released from prison, apartheid dismantled, and Mandela was elected President. Nevertheless, it had never been quite complete. 

The British and Irish Lions toured South Africa in 1974 and 1980 playing Tests against white-only Springboks, and there were several so-called rebel cricket tours in the 1980s. These were financed by South African business interests and were designed to demonstrate that apartheid was beginning to wither.

So the visiting team included black players, and others of Indian descent, from the West Indies — who would find themselves barred from the West Indian Test team as a consequence. Several, however, continued to earn a living playing for English counties.

There is no question that the sporting boycott and South Africa’s isolation contributed to the ending of apartheid. Claims that it was the chief cause of this are exaggerated. It certainly helped to have South Africa branded a pariah nation in the eyes of many. 

But the fact is that even the governing National Party — or at least its leaders — came to recognise that apartheid, the separate development of the different races as originally envisaged, was unworkable. 

Despite its restrictions, a black middle-class had emerged, and South African business was increasingly colour-blind, as is the way with capitalism. Then the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War in 1989-90 meant that the American Government and, to a lesser extent, the British one, no longer regarded white South Africa as a bulwark of defence against Communism.

Who knows? The old buffers at Lord’s and Twickenham who deplored the boycott may have been right in thinking that gradual change might have come about without the boycott. Yet the idea was firmly planted: sporting boycotts can effect desirable change. There is little other evidence that they do, but the myth, based on the South African story, survives.

What they are effective in doing is in making many feel they are doing the right thing so that they can feel good. It is right that harsh measures should be taken against Russia and its governing class. It is right that its economy should suffer as a result of Putin’s folly and brutality. 

But what purpose is served by barring or boycotting individual Russian players and artists besides satisfying the desire that “something must be done”?