A NUMBER of senators were seen at the FIBA World Cup tournament wearing shirts with a “West Philippine Sea” design. The occasion of their fashion statement was the Philippines-China game, which the Philippines won.
Not a few netizens commented negatively on the fashion choice of our senators, with a harsh critique being that these legislators (one in particular) remained deathly silent while the previous administration was cozying up to China and making fun of the arbitral ruling at The Hague that was in our favor. But there they were, at a game they knew would fill the coliseum to the rafters, showing their opinion on their sleeve (their torsos, actually) in an act that was not surprising but, at least in my book, understandable but misplaced.
This is not the first time — nor will it be the last — that a major international sporting event will be “politicized.” We need to understand though that doing so can be a slippery slope.
Ever since I can remember, I’ve always been reading about how sporting events have had their share of politicization. Some of the more well-known include the victory of American Jesse Owens in the Berlin Olympics of 1936, just as Adolf Hitler and his Aryan race-centric belief were on the ascendance. That a colored man beat white men, however, was too much for Hitler, who refused to participate in the gold medal awarding rites to Owens, at that time the “fastest man on Earth,” winning in fact not just one gold but four.
‘Because this is sports, part of me feels that we must do what we can to keep politics at a minimum, if not in fact totally out.’
In the Munich Games of 1972, politics again reared its ugly head when terrorists linked to the Palestinian Liberation Organization held 11 Israeli athletes hostage. All 11 were killed in a botched rescue attempt at the airport where the terrorists had requested for an airplane to fly them out. Other than the athletes, five of eight terrorists and one Munich policeman also died.
In 1980, with Moscow hosting the Olympic Games, the US and Western allies refused to participate in protest of Russia’s invasion of Afghanistan a year earlier; four years later, the USSR and its allies stayed away from the Los Angeles Olympics.
You also have images of black American athletes raising their fists as they stood atop the medal podium in symbolic sympathy to African American protests.
And so many more.
It’s tempting to use a major sports event for political messaging: you have a big audience that is in a way captive. But it also risks spoiling the spirit of sportsmanship on the playing field between athletes who may very well be apolitical and who simply wish to do their best at the sport they love the most.
In the case of our West Philippine Sea protest, I also worried that a future sports event in China may provoke a tit-for-tat response, this time putting our own athletes at the receiving end. Because this is sports, part of me feels that we must do what we can to keep politics at a minimum, if not in fact totally out.
So yes, while I understand the protest, I did also feel that it was misplaced. And I too wish to pose the same question posed by others: why were you silent for so long under the last administration?
