Why nations search for sporting glory

Just a month back, clouds of gloom had descended on the country after India lost to Australia in the cricket world cup final in Ahmedabad. It was an unpredictable gloom that displaced a well-planned national euphoria for which everything was going according to plan till that day. It was not a coincidence that the burst of national euphoria was planned to come out of Gujarat, from where only such glorious stories of wealth, sparkling diamonds, world’s biggest stadium, world’s biggest office building, world’s richest men, etc, are meant to emerge.

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Why would an entire country go into mourning? Isn’t a sporting victory or defeat meant to be left behind in the stadium where fairy lights glimmer? Unfortunately not, because sport for various reasons has been linked irreversibly to national pride and the very notion of national glory itself. Usually, only economically advanced countries often have the privilege of celebrating sporting victories, which in turn are projected as national achievement, glory, etc. When a well-known singer gets an award, or a writer gets a big award, it is not celebrated as a national victory but an individual achievement. Only in big sporting events do the winners cover themselves in national flags and do a lap of glory. Just as the Indian team would have done had they not been vanquished.

It took a month for the captain, Rohit Sharma, to even summon the courage to talk about the defeat. “I had no idea how to come back from this. The first few days, I didn’t know what to do. After the final, it was very hard to get back and start moving on, which is why I decided that I needed to get my mind out of this. But then, wherever I was, I realised that people were coming up to me and they were appreciating everyone’s effort, and how well we played. I feel for all of them.” That was an endearing comment. A defeat stays longer in a sportsman’s mind than the champagne pop of victory. A sportsman’s life is counted in victories, just as ours is counted in monthly salaries.

Nations have always used sport to pep up national mood, to advertise achievement and rulers of all states appear on stage to appropriate all the glory grinning from ear to ear as if they themselves scored all the goals. A country winning the world cup, in say football, the most popular sport, can forget all its woes for months on end. A mind-boggling 50 lakh people turned out at the Buenos Aires city square to receive the world cup winning Argentina team last year. In the musical Evita, when Evita Peron sang ‘Don’t cry for me, Argentina’, she was asking the country to look ahead. Through all its struggles and wars and many close defeats, the victory and the cup had finally come home to Buenos Aires. It was a great sporting moment when a football victory wiped out all sorrows. But yet, today, Argentina is in an economic shambles. Just recently, a new government of Javier Milei took over and adopted drastic measures, including devaluing the pesos by 50 per cent, reducing the Argentine pesos to a piece of paper at 800 per US dollar. Eighteen government departments have been cut to nine. All subsidies have been scrapped. So, unfortunately, sporting glory does not translate into anything real. It is an emotion that vaporises. Messi’s curling, left-legged free kicks are just that: unreal.

Now countries like Saudi Arabia and Qatar are trying to achieve national pride and international acceptance by buying out world-class players to play in their leagues. The Qatar World Cup was seen by some as “a task of the Islamic world”. From here to hosting the Olympics is but a short step. For the Gulf states, it is time to assert their emerging superiority in material wealth, and to stand shoulder to shoulder with Christianity in religious fervour.

So when a nation wins a world cup, enduring notions of masculinity and nationhood surface and the celebrations mirror like what was witnessed in Buenos Aires. In such moments, the actual economic stature of the country is forgotten and everyone, including the rulers, is forgiven, for, after all, a global victory has come their way. The same thing happened after the 1936 Olympics hosted by Nazi Germany when nationhood and political philosophy came to be attached to sport in a big way. Hitler was opposed to the idea of hosting the Olympics, saying that it was an invention of “Jews and freemasons”. But Josef Goebbels convinced Hitler about the possibility of presenting Germany as a civilised and modern state. Hitler was convinced. While standing at the site of the Olympic stadium, Hitler ordered, on the request of the architect, that the adjoining horse racing track should be removed for the expansion of the stadium. He also ordered a sports complex for a unified ‘Reich sports field’. “It will be the task of the nation,” he announced. Sounds familiar.

— The writer is a senior journalist and author