Stick to sports

Journalist Karim Zidan on what Trump owes to professional wrestling, how the culture war came for women’s sports, and why we can't separate entertainment from politics

“To say that politics is not a part of sports is not being realistic,” Tanzanian middle-distance champion Filbert Bayi said. The opposite is also true, from classical notions of “bread and circuses” as a way to manage the masses to stadium funding reshaping cities; to athletes today defining the language of social change (or standing in its way). 

Increasingly, sports have become both weapons in and arenas for the culture wars that have defined 21st-century right-wing politics. In his writing for The Guardian, Foreign Policy, Bloody Elbow, and, most recently, his newsletter Sports Politika, journalist Karim Zidan has focused his reporting on the intersection of sport and politics, with an emphasis on examining how autocrats and far-right parties worldwide have moved to consolidate power through their control and support of teams, organizations, and fans.

We talked to Zidan about how professional wrestling and mixed martial arts shaped Trumpism (and vice-versa), the uncomfortable place of athletes in American politics, why culture warriors and anti-trans activists have focused on women's sports, and how fans have been able to push back against sportswashing by the oligarchs and autocrats who’ve sought to dominate professional sports — and audiences — around the world.

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Recently you wrote about the Harris campaign's use of proxies from sports — part of her outreach to non-traditional media, and that got me wondering about why Americans — and it is Americans in particular because it is different elsewhere — see sports as a separate sphere, even when it so obviously part of the world of politics.

This is a question I've thought about a lot over the years. So in my own professional and personal experience, where I was born and raised in Egypt under the rule of military dictatorships and authoritarian regimes, I didn't really have the option to separate sports from politics. It wasn't really a privilege given to me. 

Long before I ever thought of comparing sports and politics, I was just a football fan. I wanted to attend games at the Cairo Stadium like everybody else, and I had a big team that I loved called Al Ahly which is Egypt's most popular football club, the most successful football club in Africa too, really something worth celebrating in a country where we really didn't have much to celebrate as a teenager coming up. The country was in despair economically. It's far worse now, but it was in despair when we were kids. It seemed like there was no future to be handed over to us. 

When I returned to Egypt from living in Bahrain in 2007, I decided to attend the football match alongside all of the ultras that had formed that year. And we sat in the poorest section of the stadium, a place where everybody could attend for just a few dollars. I was thinking I'm just going to be enjoying a football game, when the police started pulling people from the crowd and whacking them with batons. And I'm thinking, "I just wanted to watch a game. Why is this being done to us?"

And I quickly came to realize that the Egyptian government and many authoritarian regimes fear their youth. They fear their youth uniting in these groups and having a voice. And in Egypt's case, that was a very realistic fear. That was not paranoia. The ultras would go on to become a revolutionary force during the Arab Spring.

All that showed me from a very young age that there is no distinguishing sports and politics. I've come to realize this is not recognized uniformly across the world. And really that comes down to privilege. Many people have never really had to encounter a scenario where their enjoyment of sports was marred by politics, or they had no choice but to look at the political ramifications of the sporting event that they're taking part in.

So in the United States, the question of who has that privilege is very much bound up in the way class and race are intertwined, and how people in sports — by and large, Black people — are seen as people who don't have a political voice. 

When athletes have raised a left voice in the U.S., whether that’s someone like Muhammad Ali, or John Carlos and Tommie Smith, or more recently someone like LeBron James, it's seen as a surprise or an intrusion, “Why is this entertainment figure saying anything?”