Sport

Challenge “rape culture”!

The sorry saga of Ched Evans, the Sheffield United player found guilty of rape, has revealed the alarming prevalence of what has become known as “rape culture” — the unquestioned acceptance of myths around sexual violence. Rape Crisis identifies these myths as including: that rape happens because women are outside alone at night; because women dress or behave “provocatively”; because women don’t say “no” clearly enough; because women were drunk; because women don’t fight back, scream or run away; because men cannot control themselves; because some men are psychopaths; because men who have no...

John Carlos: "It's not about winning medals - it's about being a freedom fighter"

(In the 1968 picture, John Carlos is on the right.) There must have been at least seven or eight hundred people at the 21 May public meeting organised by the rail workers' union RMT and the firefighters' union FBU. The meeting was addressed by the legendary John Carlos , one of the black athletes who raised his fist at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics as part of a protest against racism and poverty (see here ) - and a number of equally inspiring speakers from anti-racist struggles in Britain, as well as trade unionists. Pretty much the whole room was on its feet again and again for standing...

The Olympics and social cleansing

In 2010 David Cameron claimed he wanted “the Olympics legacy [to] lift East London from being one of the poorest parts of the country to one that shares fully in the capital’s growth and prosperity.” It is claimed the Olympic “legacy” will help regenerate five east London boroughs. The reality for working-class residents is very different: displacement, gentrification and in the words of housing association chief executive officer Gill Brown, “social cleansing”. In Newham the “9,000 new homes, many affordable for local people” promised by Lord Coe have not materialised. Instead, the local...

Jim Riordan, the Spartak spy

I knew the writer and academic Jim Riordan, who died last week, briefly in the early 90s when I was researching, and active in politics, at Surrey University where he was professor of Russian. I had heard rumours of Jim before I ever met him — stories about his kindness and his eccentricity, a political eccentricity that didn’t sit well with his academic life in a department that was well know for inducting linguists into a very NATO-oriented “realist” theory of International Relations. The thing that did strike me about him was his mandarin disdain for the pettiness of what he saw as...

Liverpool FC: ignorance in the Suarez scandal

A few weeks have now passed since Liverpool player Luis Suarez was found guilty of using a racially objectionable word towards Manchester United’s Patrice Evra. But in the storm that followed the incident in the game last October, huge levels of ignorance around racism were shown. The stance that LFC took to defend a player that admitted to using a word that we would describe as racist was extremely disappointing. To say that, because he has always worked with black players, he can’t be racist, and that the word is acceptable in the Uruguayan’s country, is completely irresponsible. The days...

FIFA - Blattered!

In 1996 Joao Havelange retired as President of FIFA. Sepp Blatter, a Swiss lawyer and Havelange's chosen successor defeated the reform candidate Lennart Johannson (a Swedish truck magnate). Johannson had stood on a platform of transparency, accountability and greater recognition within FIFA for European pre-eminence. Blatter did the rounds in the heart of Johannson's support in Europe and Africa, blatantly electioneering under the guise of official business with Havelange at his side. He won 111-80 in the first round of voting and there was no need for a second round. Havelenge's authoritarian...

Give sexism the red card

The recent sacking of sexist Sky Sports presenter, Andy Gray, is a step forward for feminism. But, it’s not without limitations. Gray was dismissed from his seven-figure salary job after he and fellow presenter Richard Keys agreed, off-air before a Premier League Match, that assistant referee Sian Massey and women generally “probably don’t know the offside rule”. Gray initially only received disciplinary action for his sexism. Had Gray’s comments been a racist slur, the furore could have been so great Gray would have been sent packing immediately. When Jade Goody called Indian actress Shilpa...

Scottish referees strike against bullying

Scottish Football Association (SFA) Category One referees, who referee the top matches in Scotland, were out on strike last weekend (27th/28th November). The immediate trigger for their strike was a succession of criticisms levelled at referees by Celtic football club. Celtic’s basic argument is that referees (or at least some of them) are biased against the club. SNP MP Peter Wishart, backed up by Celtic chair and ex-Labour MP John Reid, has even gone so far as to propose that all referees should be obliged to state their personal football allegiances. This attack on referees’ alleged bias...

Olympics: property deals, sportswear, superprofits...oh, and some sport

Sports fan and sports coach Daniel Randall attempts to chart a socialist course through the polluted sea of jingoistic triumphalism and exploit-yourself trickery surrounding the run-up to the 2012 Olympic Games... With just under two years to go until London 2012, the fanfare’s surrounding the games is getting pretty deafening. In a recent Daily Telegraph article, head-honcho and Tory toff Sebastian Coe said: “There are two years to go until the Olympic Games begin and we want everyone to start planning their once-in-a-lifetime experience in 2012.” That’s pretty intense: the Olympics is meant...

The World Cup and class struggle

Even for those of us who love sport, the saccharine liberal puff that accompanies any major sporting event can be a little nauseating. Once you realise that it’s not an insufficient quantity of football in the world that causes poverty, racism etc, and that these things cannot be magicked away by the unifying power of the beautiful game, you begin to begin to find things like FIFA’s “Win With Africa” campaign very tiresome: “The goal is to reach beyond football… FIFA hopes… to ensure the entire African continent will benefit from the long-term effects of the 2010 FIFA World Cup South Africa TM...

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