Moral Authority?

By Donald “Braveheart” Stewart

An opinion piece from the only Donald worth listening to…

Full Stop – In British English grammar a full stop is a lengthy pause, in the US, you call it a period. In the UK that tends to suggest feminine products. Here it means a period of time where I look at something in boxing in a little more depth. I am typing from my perspective of a fan who watches the sport closely. It’s an opinion. It is my opinion. Don’t like it? There are other opinions out there but if you don’t like it then good, debate and democracy are a good thing. If you do like it, feel free to spread the word.

Moral Authority?

Let’s be honest, sport and politics make for unhappy bedfellows. When sport gets embroiled in politics, sides get taken and even if there are good reasons for not allowing a particular country to have the right to parade themselves at the highest level – like at an Olympics – there are those unhappy that the best shall not meet the best. This is especially true if the political views of the superstar are simply unknown or untested. Why, for example stop Dmitry Bivol fighting for the WBC belt because he is Russian but because Artur Beterbiev has lived in Canada for 15 years make it all right for him?

Rules seem to be being made up as people go along – and broken.

When a Ukrainian fencer refused to shake the hand of a Russian athlete, she was banned from her sport. The sanctioning and governing bodies had ruled, that her Russian fencing foe was eligible to play their part in the sport. But the Ukrainian, whose country is under attack from Russia felt it was a hand shake too far to normalize relations on a sporting occasion, whilst soldiers lay dying in trenches. You can, I think, see her point.

Morally countries have always taken sides in times of war and when Russia invaded Afghanistan, America boycotted their Olympic Games. Four years later, the Russians repaid the compliment. There have been many examples over the decades of countries using sport to punish their enemies. The winners? I am not sure.

What I am sure about is that sport is a convenient place to show off your country, gather admirers, pile on the hospitality and make people within your country and in the wider world think you have a beneficent regime. We saw that when the soccer World Cup went to Italy in the 1930s and Mussolini used it for fascist propaganda. The way that Hitler exploited the Olympics in the same decade is well known but some of the lesser events in comparison may have lost their noticeable shine in current debates – after all we are not facing Il Duce or Fascism this century – or are we?

Now, how you would enforce a condition of any nation wanting to hold a major sporting event, that they had a squeaky-clean human rights record is difficult to imagine. Who would make the call? Amnesty international? They don’t think either the US or UK have such a clean record so It could end up being a very small pool from which to choose.

Or should there be a basic minimum of easier to quantify conditions – respect for LGBT/women’s rights etc.? If so, then the majority of Commonwealth countries would be out of the equation as homosexuality is banned in the vast majority of them. This is vitally important just now as we have a crisis in the Commonwealth as Australia have just pulled out of hosting the next games – people are wondering if the UK or India or Canada or whoever step in?

There are two issues here. Individual and the big occasions where country faces country.

Countries who do not have a decent human rights record nor respect for women in their legislation or have a positive policy for LGBT rights should not host international competitions.

So no to Saudi Arabia, UAE, Russia, North Korea etc. What should happen if these countries are given these competitions like FIFA for soccer, the PGA for Golf and the FIA for Formula One – ban any participant from your country representing your country. And if it is the Olympics, soccer World Cup etc., then boycott it.

Of course, it will not happen, but we are at a halfway house, because individual sports people are being banned from competition due to the actions of their countries. It is a sanction that bites, is effective and works. It worked in South Africa and that is why Bivol needs to make his case or give up the belts. The WBC need to reach out to him and ask him to make the case that he is not Russian – even though he lives there and is an ethnic Kyrgyzstani.

The WBC stance is the right one, but their application of it to Beterbiev is curious. It is not enough to say he has a Canadian license and has been there for 15 years – it should need more than that and IF they sanction Bivol to fight, then it is a further breach of a solid standing point.

Of course, if Beterbiev loses his fight to Callum Smith it becomes mute. That is what many are hoping that Smith triumphs and we do not have to worry about a better application of morality. The currents stance of the WBC – and many other sporting bodies around the world – is that, in trying to make a stand, they then they try to rebrand that stand and end up in a moral conundrum. Not that boxing ever does that with grace…

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