I’m no football freak, but I am enjoying this year’s World Cup. If you have Instagram, you will have seen how the Norway team and its upcoming match with England has caught the imagination of content creators, not just for fun but also for the sake of the tourism industry. Airline SAS and the national tourist organisation have both created some really imaginative material, and I bet lots of people will feel inspired to go on holiday there in the wake of this.
This got me thinking about Russia and the Soviet Union and how invisible Russian people would be if it weren’t for sport. There are other fields of cultural endeavour, but it seems to me that sport is the most approachable, accessible cultural form for all people, something that is international, crosses all boundaries. Countries build a face through sport, and that can be about more than tourism. Diplomacy is one thing, soft diplomacy for whole populations more than for statesmen, and in the case of countries with difficult political profiles where one to one communication is poor and where national isolation evolves, where warfare sadly flourishes, diplomacy really matters, and friendship has to hold out its hand.
I’ll probably write more on this, but I will finish here with one thought.
If I had never seen Olga Korbut at the 1972 Olympics, had never followed the sport, I would probably never have known any Russians apart from people like President Putin. No faces, no names, no places. Everything that I know about Russia, apart from the political stories and a few more things like ballet, stems from my interest in sport.
That’s why sport really matters.
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