Sportswashing will cycle on
International sport has turned a blind eye to human rights. What happens now?
One of the biggest breakout stars in professional cycling last year was the young Slovenian Tadej Pogačar. Pogačar clawed back second upon second from his rival and fellow countryman Primož Roglič during the Tour de France Stage 20 time trial up La Planche des Belles Filles. By the time Pogačar reached the top of the mountain, it was clear that he had secured the overall victory.
This week, professional racing is back, albeit in a drastically different landscape than France. Stage 1 of the UAE Tour kicked off from Al Mirfa and headed into the warm, windy desert south of the Persian Gulf. Pogačar sealed the overall victory in this race too, which is certainly what his team’s sponsor expected.
The Slovenian rides for UAE Team Emirates, which is funded by...you guessed it...the United Arab Emirates as well as the Emirates airline. The UAE Tour is also funded by the UAE government money. Naturally, the race’s presence every year brings discussions of the morality of sanctioning teams and races funded by governments with bad human rights records.
There are multiple cycling teams and races funded by this “dirty money,” which leads to accusations of “sportswashing.”
What’s sportswashing?
Sports washing is when an entity uses sport to manicure its image. The United Arab Emirates doesn’t want you to think about its human rights violations, they want you to think about Pogačar winning the Tour de France, or the world’s top pros competing on smooth desert tarmac.
This concept is similar to “greenwashing,” where corporations who don’t have a great environmental record will use sport to bolster their image. Cycling has its own greenwashing accusations, like when Team Sky became the Ineos Grenadiers.
Journalist Neal Rogers summed up cycling’s sportswashing problem this way, in an in-depth 2019 piece on CyclingTips:
While the brilliance, magnificence, and miracle of the human spirit is a recurring marketing angle across the Olympic movement, behind closed doors, international sport is often funded and managed by unseemly characters whose priorities run counter to these ideals.
What’s the deal with UAE?
Global human rights abuses are a burly topic to get into, so I’ll summarize what some organizations say about the United Arab Emirates.
In 2020, the human rights organization Freedom House gave the country a score of 17/100, which classifies the nation as “not free.”
The country’s political process is not democratic, and freedom of expression does not exist. Human Rights Watch reported that “Hundreds of activists, academics, and lawyers are serving lengthy sentences in UAE prisons, in many cases following unfair trials on vague and broad charges that violate their rights to free expression and association.”
The same report points out that Article 356 of the federal penal code is used “to convict people for same-sex relations as well as consensual heterosexual relations outside marriage.” Plus, misogyny is encoded in law. One example is that married men are free to divorce their wives, but women must obtain a court order to divorce their husbands.
The list goes on, and that’s not even mentioning the documented cases of kidnapping and human trafficking.
Human rights abuses on the world stage
Cycling is an international sport with ambitions to become even more global. However, the Olympic Games are constantly under scrutiny for human rights issues and other unsavory practices.
Every iteration of the games brings controversy, but one example is the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia. Organizations called for a boycott of the 2014 games because of Russia’s treatment of same-sex couples. More recently, in 2020 an amendment to Russia’s constitution defined marriage as an act between a man and a woman. An additional proposal in parliament would officially ban same-sex marriage and impact transgender people’s ability to marry and raise kids.
In the build-up to the 2016 Olympics in Brazil, poor neighborhoods were bulldozed to make way for Olympic stadiums and facilities. Destroying poor neighborhoods, while leaving rich neighborhoods alone, is a trend across Olympic host cities.
There are already calls to boycott the 2022 Winter games in China. Since 2017, China has imprisoned Uyghurs and other Muslims in internment camps, and the country has curtailed the sovereignty of Hong Kong citizens, leading to mass protests since 2019.
Sportswashing will cycle on
The International Olympic Committee and the broader Olympic movement have decided that human rights are not a priority. So, when sports washing occurs at the biggest sporting event in the world, I’m not surprised that cycling has a sportswashing problem too.
As long as international sport events, like the Olympics and FIFA World Cup, are sanctioned in countries with dubious human rights records, other sports like cycling have no incentive to change.
This week, cycling’s governing body proved that they can’t even solve its problem with abusive coaches, something that would seem to be a much simpler solution than solving sportswashing. Patrick Van Gansen, the former manager of the Health Mate-Cyclelive women’s cycling team, had been accused by at least 10 riders of abusive behavior and fostering an unhealthy work environment, including allegations of “sexual remarks, verbal aggression, body shaming and mental abuse.”
This week, a disciplinary commission suspended him from working in women’s cycling for two years and seven months, but the suspension is retroactive, so essentially he’s only banned for a year. Many people in the sport have argued that Gansen’s ban should be a lifetime one—even dopers get harsher sentences.
If cycling can’t keep abusive team staff out of the sport, how should we expect them to address sportswashing, both in terms of team sponsorship and the sanctioning of races?
So long as cycling, and international sport as a whole, turns a blind eye to human rights, sportswashing will cycle on.