2022 was a year of sportswashing like no other

As we close out a year bookended by major world sporting events in countries engaged in human rights abuses, perhaps it's time to think seriously about how we respond to the selection of these forums.

Photo by Connor Coyne on Unsplash

It’s been a good year for athletes, but a bad year for athletics. We started the year with the Beijing Olympics and closed it out with the World Cup in Qatar. Book-ending this year in February and December we have been bombarded with sportswashing, like never before. By the time the opening ceremonies of the 2022 Beijing Olympics began, the world had been aware of the Chinese government’s persecution of the Uyghur people for some seven years. And yet, despite concerns from the IOC itself about the state of China’s respect for human rights, the games were not boycotted by the team of any country. 

Since the games concluded, discussion of the plight of the Uyghur population has all but disappeared from the headlines of major newspapers. This is part of a long pattern of nations using sporting events as cover for their human rights record as part of the phenomenon known as sportswashing. For as concerned as we all were with the reports of concentration and re-education camps, we were swept up in the excitement and glory of watching our athletes perform. So much so, that by the time the games were over, we were ready to move on to other news.

When FIFA announced in December 2010 that Qatar would be hosting the 2022 World Cup, it immediately set off the alarm bells of sportswashing. The problems with allowing a country where it regularly reaches temperatures exceeding 45℃ in the summer to host an outdoor soccer tournament were impossible to ignore. That is why, after discussions about indoor stadiums and playing games late in the evening and early in the morning, the tournament, which usually takes place during the summer, was moved to the winter. 

For 12 years, we have known that a major spotlight would be shone on Qatar in 2022. We have also known that Qatar has a long history of human rights abuses, particularly against women who are not allowed to make key life decisions such as traveling and studying abroad, working government jobs, or getting married without the permission of male family members; members of the LGBTQ+ community who can serve up to a decade in prison for engaging in a consensual homosexual relationship; and members of the press who can serve up to three years in prison for criticizing the Qatari government. While FIFA has a long trend of not being terribly concerned with the human rights record of nations, the international community should be. 

This is perhaps why it was so shocking to me to see a giant screen and seating set up in the lobby of the over 70-story office building where I work for people to watch World Cup matches in stadiums built by what can only be classified as a form of slave labour. When it was revealed that Qatar would be hosting the World Cup, migrant workers from India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka came to Doha in search of work building the infrastructure that would be necessary for the tournament. These workers accounted for approximately 90% of the workforce used to build the World Cup infrastructure. Upon arrival in Qatar, many of these workers had their passports taken away by their employers, rendering them unable to leave the country. Over the course of construction some 6,500 foreign workers died from these nations alone. The total number of deaths that can be attributed to preparing to host the Qatar World Cup is unknown as there is no accurate account of the number of Kenyan and Filipino workers who died during the decade-long project.

None of that should be news to anyone. We have been aware of Qatar’s human rights record, and particularly the practices they were engaging in to prepare to host the World Cup, for over a decade. And even if you weren’t aware before, witnessing the reports of journalists who traveled to Qatar to report on the World Cup should have tipped you off pretty quickly to the situation. But we did not boycott, or demand FIFA stop acquiescing to totalitarian monarchical regimes. 

We had ten years to make a plan about how the world would approach this tournament, and we didn’t do it. On the heels of the 2022 Beijing Olympics, the international community had a chance to redeem its complicity in allowing abusive regimes to use our athletes as a cover against their ongoing human rights abuses. But we didn’t. Instead, we engaged in the moral ambiguity of cheering on our teams while witnessing reports of journalists being imprisoned for wearing rainbow coalition shirts. 

On Sunday, we will begin a new year. We cannot undo the decisions that were made around the countries permitted to host major world sporting events in 2022. But as we are making our resolutions about how we will be better in 2023, maybe one of those ways would be to speak out when organizations like the IOC and FIFA tender bids from countries seeking to sportswash human rights abuses and other atrocities.