Too bad the feeling was right.
In the childhood of the pandemic, I wrote that my whole life felt like running a long race. The same emotional highs and lows.
One moment it can feel quite okay, it flows on, this should probably go well. The month after comes new messages, new mutations and new waves of infection and new emotional slumps.
It’s the same feeling that it never seems to be over.
I’ve never felt me so reluctant to go anywhere like to the Beijing and Winter Olympics in early February.
Partly for the pandemic with all the restrictions. Partly because we who are going there once again are forced to play useful idiots in dictatorship propaganda games. The combination is hard to beat.
– 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar.
Foto: Aleksandr Gusev / TT
At the end of the year, it’s time for a similar trip. FIFA World Cup in Qatar.
It is with the fight against dictatorships as with the fight for the environment. Everyone can do something and it is always easiest to say what others should do.
Does it even make sense to go to Beijing and Qatar? I do not know. Will I go? Probably.
That would be a heavy selection about many countries’ journalists stayed at home but then we miss our basic assignment. It’s hard to portray a dictatorship without being there.
At home, it would be an even heavier mark if many of those who intended to watch the broadcasts from the Olympics and the World Cup did not. It would be a way to shoot the messenger, but it is the messengers / TV companies that make sure that the dictatorship games can shine in the sports world.
So if you want to strike a blow against sportswashing and championships in dictatorships, just turn it off or log out.
With shockingly low viewing figures, the broadcasting companies would go on a rampage for the moment and a food for thought for the next time championships in dictatorships are out on the rights market.
It’s hopefully a good while there.
It’s with the sports world as with the pandemic.
Hold on.
Hold on.
It will soon get better.
Or – at least it will be different.
The Winter Olympics in Beijing and the World Cup in Qatar are the end of a black period in sports history. The dictatorships have been able to have their own competition in who has been able to arrange the most championships in the shortest time.
This is the prize for the time more than ten years ago when the great championships had grown so much and become so expensive that few democracies wanted them. It was also a time when corruption and mold in the big unions were even worse than today.
Looking into the future France, Italy, the United States and Australia will host the Olympics.
England and Australia will have the European Football Championship and the Women’s World Cup. Germany and North America will host the European Football Championship and the World Cup on the men’s side.
Still, it will not stop dictatorships from using sport to wash their reputation.
European football clubs will continue to have owners from oil countries. The NBA also wants to continue the great interest in basketball in China in the future. The Formula 1 cars will continue to move around the tracks in various dictatorships. For example.
You can also be appalled by that.
Or refrain from watching.