Millions (if not billions) of dollars have been spent providing a stage to showcase elite athletes at the Olympic games. Only very few privileged people ever get there. It is important to note that the Olympics do not showcase the definitive ‘best’ athletes in the world, rather they showcase those athletes who have had the support (financial, moral, political) and safety (free from violence and persecution) to single-mindedly pursue their dream of competing for the world to see. Decolonising sport is first about acknowledging this inherent privilege and the systems of domination that come with it.
Sport per se is not the problem. Sport can be fun, transcendent even, healthy, social, focused, and more. There is evidence of sport being played throughout history, before the colonial era. There is nothing wrong with wanting to play and enjoying winning.
Yet when the drive to win and to be better than others lead to questionable morals, extractive values, and the improper use of power, that is where colonisation has taken hold.
The issue is that sport is not taken very seriously a lot of the time. It is a pastime, a frivolity; it is associated with bodies and away from the intellect. And hence there is a drive for power.
What does this require of us?
Decolonising sport requires us to learn to look both inwards and outward, as bell hooks advises. Many would have done well to take this look both ways and acknowledge privilege and base actions on that. We can ask ourselves, how has my privilege got me here? How can I use this privilege to make sport better? Or even, am I taking up space that might be better filled by others?
There are no simple solutions of course and there is discomfort in confronting these questions. The Olympics will most likely go ahead in 2036 in Los Angeles USA and in Brisbane in 2032. And so the question remains as to how to do this better. How to decolonise sport so that we can move towards a more sustainable future?
As Kerry Arabena, a decendent of the Meriam people from Murray Island in the Torres Strait notes, the real crisis of our time is the crisis of ideas. New theories of physics, feminist theories and Indigenous cosmologies can provide these new ideas. Arabena writes, ‘Colonization was based on a knowledge system that perpetuates the suppression of a global society founded on the respect for nature, universal human rights, economic justice and a culture of peace’.
Decolonising sport is a shift back towards respect for nature, universal human rights, economic justice, and a culture of peace. It is a shift towards thinking about our interdependency, rather than our independence.
Bio
Dr Adele Pavlidis is an Associate Professor in Sociology with the School of Humanities, Languages and Social Science, and previously a DECRA Fellow (2018 to 2021). She has published widely on a range of sociocultural issues in sport and leisure, with a focus on gender and power relations. Theoretically her work traverses contemporary scholarship on affect, power and organizations, and she is deeply interested in social, cultural and personal transformation and the entanglements between people, organizations, and wellbeing.
