Politics and sports or sports diplomacy describes the use of sport as a means to influence diplomatic, social, and political relations. Sports diplomacy may transcend cultural differences and bring people together.
The use of sports and politics has had both positive and negative implications over history. Sports competitions or activities have had the intention to bring about change in certain cases. Nationalistic fervour is sometimes linked to victories or losses on sports fields.
While the Olympics is often the biggest political example of using sports for diplomatic means, cricket and association football, as well as other sports in the global arena, have also been used in this regard. In the case of Apartheid, sport was used to isolate South Africa and bring about a major overhaul in the country's social structure.
Additionally, numerous athletes have sought political office, some of them unsuccessfully, on either the national level or the sub-national level.
Read more about Politics And Sports: Association With Football, Boxing, Cricket, Olympics, Table Tennis, Tennis, In Popular Culture
Famous quotes containing the words politics and, politics and/or sports:
“The rage for road building is beneficent for America, where vast distance is so main a consideration in our domestic politics and trade, inasmuch as the great political promise of the invention is to hold the Union staunch, whose days already seem numbered by the mere inconvenience of transporting representatives, judges and officers across such tedious distances of land and water.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Politics is repetition. It is not change. Change is something beyond what we call politics. Change is the essence politics is supposed to be the means to bring into being.”
—Kate Millett (b. 1934)
“I looked so much like a guy you couldn’t tell if I was a boy or a girl. I had no hair, I wore guys’ clothes, I walked like a guy ... [ellipsis in source] I didn’t do anything right except sports. I was a social dropout, but sports was a way I could be acceptable to other kids and to my family.”
—Karen Logan (b. 1949)