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Afghanistan’s cricketers inspire nation with World Cup dream
The streets of Kabul erupted in joy Monday night as Afghans celebrated their national team’s massive upset victory against Pakistan in the Cricket World Cup. It’s a brief moment of elation amid the crushing crises that have immiserated millions since the US withdrawal.
The stunning eight-wicket win against one of the sport’s most celebrated sides put Afghanistan in a four-way tie for a knockout stage berth. They face an uphill climb for a shot at the trophy, though: The mighty South African and Australian teams are sure to put Afghan bowlers and batters through their paces, and they’ll have to beat both Sri Lanka and the Netherlands as well. If they manage to pull it off, waiting in the knockout stages is thus-far undefeated India, playing at home to roaring crowds.
Intimidating, but cricket is a game that rewards resilience, a trait Afghans have shown they possess in spades over the trials of the last half-century. Many members of the Afghanistan Cricket Board fled the country after the Taliban takeover, and the team has since played home games in the United Arab Emirates and India.
Daily life for those back home teeters on the knife’s edge: The World Food Program is urgently calling for $400 million to keep the country fed through winter as the families that can afford food report spending 91% of their incomes to buy it. Women are shut out of public life so totally that 90% of the victims of recent earthquakes near Herat were women and children, stuck indoors during the day.
That’s just a taste of the pressure the Afghan players will feel to bring a little joy and hope into the darkness when they take on Sri Lanka next week. If this sounds like must-see TV to you, read this cricket explainer for Americans, brew up some coffee, and we’ll see you at 4:30 a.m. on Monday.Saudi vs. Qatar: A sporting rivalry
Saudi Arabia announced this week that it plans to launch a new sports investment company that will be part of the oil-rich Gulf kingdom’s $650 billion sovereign wealth fund.
The move signals the Saudis are accelerating their efforts to become a global powerhouse in sports — not so much with their athletes as with their wallets. The kingdom recently bought up English Premier League football club Newcastle United, absorbed the Men’s PGA Golf Tour into a Saudi-based rival, and lured Portuguese megastar Cristiano Ronaldo to a local football squad with a nine-figure contract.
Saudi come lately? Riyadh’s regional nemesis, Qatar, has been at this game for more than a decade already. In 2011, Doha bought the Paris St. Germain football club. It then spent $300 billion to host the 2022 FIFA World Cup, snapped up a stake in the Portuguese side Sporting Braga last fall, and just a few weeks ago took a 5% stake in the structure that owns Washington DC’s NBA, WNBA, and NHL teams.
New look for an old rivalry. From 2017 until 2021, you may recall, Saudi Arabia – along with the UAE, Egypt, and a number of other Arab nations – cut ties with Qatar and imposed a strict blockade against the Kingdom because of its friendly ties with Iran and its support for Islamist political groups in the region that Saudi Arabia opposes. Since then ties have been restored, but they remain on opposite sides of many regional issues.
Is this “sportswashing”? Human rights activists and other critics say this is all a soft power play to distract the world from the Gulf monarchies’ appalling human rights records. Taking Gulf money, they say, makes teams complicit.
Money talks. But the Gulf monarchies’ flush sovereign wealth funds — Abu Dhabi is in on the act as well — are a huge new source of cash for teams and leagues to spend on better players, newer facilities, and sharper marketing.
Newcastle, for example, was a storied club in a deteriorating post-industrial city, making it an easy target for Saudi investment. Even the NBA, hardly a league starved for cash, changed its rules last year to allow sovereign wealth funds to take stakes of up to 20% in clubs.
The upshot: It’s long been true that the largest market for sports, China, had an abysmal human rights record. Now leagues around the world must contend with the fact that some of the sports world’s flushest investors have similar baggage as well.
Additional time – a linguistic interlude: Sports, in Arabic, is “riyadha,” coming from the same root as Riyadh, which means “gardens” or “meadows.” So if the Saudis bought the Knicks, “The Gardens” would run The Garden. It could happen!Can sports fans save America?
You already know that America is getting more polarized by the day. Democrats and Republicans hardly live together, work together, or hang out together the way they used to.
But a new book called Fans Have More Friends argues that highly-engaged sports fans are less politically polarized, have greater trust in institutions, and generally live happier lives.
To learn more, GZERO's Alex Kliment met up with one of the book's authors, Dave Sikorjak, a marketing consultant who studies the motivations of sports fans. Where'd Alex and Dave link up? Where else -- at a tailgate in Philadelphia ahead of a game between the Giants and the Eagles. It all went great until Alex got taped to the front of a bus, but you'll get to that...
Podcast: The IOC's Dick Pound on how sports and politics should mix
Listen: On the GZERO World Podcast, a look at the long history of protest at the Games with Dick Pound, the longest serving member of the International Olympic Committee and a former Olympic athlete himself. With COVID rates rising globally, this year's Olympics faced some major hurdles. But the pandemic was only part of the picture. The Tokyo Games played out against a backdrop of mounting global tension surrounding gender equality, racism and human rights, leaving many people to examine the place of politics on the playing field and podium.
Subscribe to the GZERO World Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or your preferred podcast platform, to receive new episodes as soon as they're published.Dick Pound: Olympics successful despite COVID tensions
Before the Olympics, most Japanese people were against the Games due to fear of COVID. As the tournament got on, the International Olympic Committee's Dick Pound says that most resistance vanished, but some resentment still lingers among Tokyo's residents. "There's that tension, that still exists, but it's not interfering with the sport," Pound tells Ian Bremmer on GZERO World.
Watch this episode on US public television - check local listings.
How should athletes protest at the Olympics?
For Dick Pound, the longest serving member of the International Olympic Committee, protesting at the Games is fine — as long as it doesn't "interfere" with the competition itself or awards ceremonies. The Olympics, in his view, are an oasis of calm in the middle of an increasingly tense world, and "we shouldn't be spoiling that by pointing out the obvious , which is that there are social and political problems." Watch his interview with Ian Bremmer on the latest episode of GZERO World on US public television.
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How political sports boycotts (really) work
In recent days, America's pastime has become deeply embroiled in America's politics. US Major League Baseball pulled its annual All-Star Game (an annual friendly matchup of the sport's best players at every position) out of Atlanta to protest the Georgia state legislature's recent passage of restrictive new voting laws.
Just a week into baseball season, the move is a big deal in the US. But more broadly, it's the latest in a series of increasingly high-stakes sports decisions around the world that have a lot to do with politics.
China under the spotlight. Human right groups outraged by China's genocide in Xinjiang are putting pressure on Western governments and corporate sponsors to withdraw from the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing. At the same time, Chinese sports fans have turned on Nike — which makes the kits for China's national football and basketball teams — for expressing "concern" over allegations of forced labor in Xinjiang's cotton industry.
Meanwhile, European football (soccer) players have defied a FIFA ban on political statements in order to join a growing chorus of protest over the rampant mistreatment of migrant workers in Qatar, which is set to host the 2022 FIFA World Cup. (Some 6,500 migrant laborers building the stadiums have died in the decade since the gas-rich Gulf kingdom was awarded the tournament under fishy circumstances.)
But what these boycotts actually intend to achieve is probably not what you think. All of these major sports events — watched by hundreds of millions of fans across the world and which draw in billions of dollars from corporate sponsorships — will surely take place as scheduled.
The odds of Georgia expanding voting rights for minorities to get back the All-Star Game in Atlanta are as slim as those of China admitting it holds Uighurs in mass internment camps and uses them as modern-day slaves to pick cotton to ensure all nations attend the Olympics. Interestingly, Qatar caved somewhat by promising long-overdue reforms to improve the conditions of migrant workers.
That's because sports boycotts are not usually designed to reverse the policies they are opposing. But they can be quite effective in achieving other outcomes.
First, their unique combination of cultural and economic power make sports an outsize arena for political disputes to play out.
The MLB's decision to drop Atlanta is less about weighing on the latest US political culture war than taking a stand on not further restricting voting rights, which most Americans support. It also follows the tournament organizer's own efforts in recent years to attract younger, more racially diverse fans.
Second, boycotts raise the cost of pursuing certain policies. While the specter of Western countries pulling out of Beijing 2022 may not be enough for China to reverse course on Xinjiang, a mass withdrawal of corporate sponsors could lead Beijing to lose billions of dollars in revenue from the games.
However, the domestic boycott against Nike is being led by Chinese celebrities and consumers who want the American brand to stop talking about the Uighurs. This puts Nike into an impossible position in China: on the one hand it risks a backlash from its Western clients if it doesn't speak out (which is what the NBA did when it kowtowed to China regarding Hong Kong's democracy protests in 2019), and on the other hand it can lose a lot of business in China if it does.
To further complicate things, China is also in a tough spot: stoking nationalist sentiments by unilaterally terminating these agreements would be immensely expensive. And all of this is going to get worse as US-China relations continue to deteriorate.
Third, boycotts are a great way to draw wider attention to problems that boycotts alone won't solve.
In the 1960s, bans on white-only sports teams in international tournaments, including the Olympics, helped rally public opinion against the apartheid regime in South Africa. Today, with many sports superstars among the world's top influencers on social media, it's a lot easier for them to raise awareness about any issue, and reach a wider audience.
But wading into political minefields in the current highly polarized environment can also be immensely risky for athletes, sports leagues and governments if they make the wrong call. Just ask Colin Kaepernick.
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- Podcast: The IOC's Dick Pound on how sports and politics should mix - GZERO Media ›
- Aaron Rodgers takes "Cheesehead" literally | Ian Bremmer - GZERO Media ›
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Olympic Bronze medalist on safety of Tokyo 2020 Games
Meet Mikako Kotani, Sports Director of the Olympic and Paralympic Games for Tokyo 2020. A two-time bronze medalist in synchronized swimming, Kotani explains to GZERO Media the importance sports and competition have had in her life and describes the inspiration the Olympics are to Japan and the world. The 2020 Games, postponed last year due to the COVID-19 pandemic, face unprecedented challenges for organizers and athletes. Kotani says they can also be an opportunity to bring the world together in her home country, and details the protocols and safety measures the Olympic Committee are enacting to protect all who participate. The series "Japan in 60 Seconds" is produced in partnership with the Consulate General of Japan.
This video is sponsored by the Consulate General of Japan.