What do Pat Hickey and Conor McGregor think now about Vladimir Putin?
FIFA chief Gianni Infantino and Vladimir Putin at the 2018 World Cup final trophy presentation at the Luzhniki Stadium
The highpoint of the Vladimir Putin’s success in using the world of his sport as his plaything came on 15 July 2018.
The staging that day of the World Cup final in Moscow saw Putin bask in the immediate glow of what was widely considered to be a brilliant tournament.
It was not just a soccer tournament, of course; it was also the centrepiece of a massive propaganda drive by Putin. The mission was to use sport to project his own importance and, all the while, deflect attention from the imperialist violence that had sat at the heart of his regime for almost two decades.
And it worked.
The failures of the world of sport to resist the embrace of Putin are also Irish failures.
They are revealed in different ways by two men: Conor McGregor and Pat Hickey.
McGregor was invited to the 2018 FIFA World Cup as Putin’s guest. He posed with Putin, had a photo taken with his arm around Putin’s shoulders and uploaded pictures on Instagram where he described Putin in fawning terms.
He wrote: “Today I was invited to the World Cup final as a guest of Russian President Vladimir Putin. This man is one of the greatest leaders of our time and I was honored to attend such a landmark event alongside him. Today was an honor for me Mr. Putin. Thank you and congratulations on an amazing World Cup. Россия вперёд!”
That Russia phrase at the end of the post means: “Go Russia!” The post received more than 3,100,000 likes.
For his part, Pat Hickey – for so long the central person in the Olympic movement in Ireland – sat beside Putin at Olympic Games and at the European Games in Baku. Their shared love of judo helped forge a connection that drew them together.
And as Hickey said on The Paul Williams Podcast in 2017, the Russian government had tried to secure his release from prison in Rio when he was being held there at the Olympic Games in 2016.
Hickey told Paul Williams about his relationship with Putin: “He’s the patron of the Judo Federation in Russia and the World Judo Federation and I meet him at tournaments. He is not an honorary black belt - he's a fighting black belt. We'd talk about the stars of judo... That relationship built up between us. So any time I was in Russia on business, I invariably got an invitation to come and see him in the Kremlin. I had the privilege of being twice there to see him, once to have dinner with him but not just us on our own, there were about five or six other people, which was a great honour and great privilege.” Previously, after many countries had called for Russia to be banned from competing in those Rio Olympic Games because of repeated, systematic doping offences, Hickey said he himself “supported totally” the athletes being allowed to take part: “You can't condemn all the athletes for the sake of the few that are caught.”
What do Hickey and McGregor think now about Putin? Where do they stand on their past association with him?
Do they regret it?
How do they feel about the photographs of their time together?
For the world of sport, the stain of the engagement with Putin and his regime will not be easily erased.
The Winter Olympics in Sochi and the World Cup Final in Moscow will sit in a bracket with the Berlin Olympics of 1936.
To be clear, by the time of their stagings, that Putin was a murderous tyrant was not in doubt. The litany of the misdeeds of his regime was well-established. Journalists were being murdered (Anna Politkovskaya, a critic of rights abuses in Chechnya, 2006); opponents were poisoned by Russian spies (Alexander Litvinenko, 2006); he started a short, brutal war with Georgia (2008); he annexed Ukraine’s Crimea region (2014); he supported breakaway regions in eastern Ukraine leaving 13,000 people dead in long term rebellion (2014). There was repeated, demonstrable evidence of the scale of his brutality; all the while, he extended his own wealth and power, creating a privileged elite around him, suborning the state to his ambitions.
And, at the same time, Russian money and influence went to work on those who run world sport. What emerged was the grotesque spectacle of pretence that there was nothing to see beyond the boundaries of sporting contests; that sport and sports people were somehow entitled to choose to live in a world where Putinism did not matter or even really exist.
Throughout his time as leader of Russia, Putin has used sport to present a very particular image of himself and of his country. On the one hand, he has sought Russian success in international competition as a matter of national prestige. On the other, he has used major sporting events to demonstrate that Russia was a modern, normal state.
All the while, Putin has put himself at the centre of the story. There is footage of him scoring goals in an ice hockey match against global stars of the game, Putin in the frame with sporting celebrities at multiple events or, most revealingly at all, Putin bare-chested out hunting; the photographs are usually the staged attempts of a little man trying to pretend he’s a bigger one.
By the time of the 2018 FIFA World Cup, such legitimacy was conferred on Russia through sport that there were repeated testimonies offered of how the country was not at all like it was portrayed to be in the western media.
Indeed, at the time, the BBC reported the broad consensus that the World Cup was a “resounding public relations success”. This was neatly encapsulated in the words of one England supporter, who gave his name as Darren from Blackpool: “Everything the British government has said about Russia is a lie. It's propaganda. Fair play to Putin. He's done a brilliant job with the World Cup.”
This is exactly what the men who run FIFA thought, also.
And the legacy of those thoughts can be seen in the shameful reaction of FIFA to the invasion of Ukraine.
Even days after the first murders of Ukrainian civilians had taken place, FIFA had to be shamed by the players of Poland, Sweden and the Czech Republic into suspending Russia from World Cup qualifiers.
It says much that FIFA’s president Gianni Infantino (also a member of the International Olympic Council) still declines to return the Russian Order of Friendship Medal bestowed on him by Putin. This is a choice that is utterly appalling.
The point is that there is no room for equivocation. This is true across all walks of life. For example, the statement offered by my own university – UCD – in response to the war in Ukraine was embarrassingly weak, referencing “the situation in Ukraine” and “in particular the violation of international law”. Language is fundamental to a university and this form of words fell a long way short of what was required from the university’s management. Placed also beside the ongoing relationship with China, through the Confucius Institute, it marked a failure of judgement that cannot be accepted.
It is much too late in the day now, but there can be no space in the world of sport now or in any conceivable future for Putin’s Russia.
That this will hurt the careers of innocent people is regrettable and unfair, but it is the consequence of Putin’s war and his control of Russia.
It should have happened after Georgia, it should have happened after Crimea, it should have happened after fomenting war in Ukraine in 2014; it has to happen now.
