'Sport is entirely different to war; it is not war remade and nor is it preparation for war'
Young boys play football in the town of Novoluhanske, eastern Ukraine on Saturday. Earlier today, Russian forces have launched a major military assault on Ukraine, with reports of missile strikes and explosions near major cities
Nobody wrote like George Orwell. And he was right about so much. But, of course, not about everything.
When it came to writing about the relationship between sport and war, he had astute observations to make, but his basic thesis was wrong.
In his essay ‘The Sporting Spirit’ (which you can find free on the internet), Orwell wrote: “At the international level sport is frankly mimic warfare.” This untypical lapse into popular nonsense sits into the claim that sporting contests are an imitation of war and that this is something that is made plain in the language that is routinely used to describe matches.
This is the language of battle, of defence and attack, of aerial bombardments, of fighting in the trenches, of howitzer boots and sniping and shots fired.
And you can see why that language works as a lure to believing that war has been remade as sport. But the chasm between that belief and reality is vast.
The best thing that can be said is that at least Orwell didn’t lapse into that other gross historical cliché that sport was promoted because it was essentially complementary to war, that it cultivated and sharpened warlike tendencies and, by extension, served an educative function in preparing people to fight.
This is a notion that is rooted in centuries of rhetoric that find their greatest exposition is phrases such as Duke of Wellington’s supposed claim that the Battle of Waterloo was really won on the playing fields of Eton.
Again, it is the kind of pithy claim that is appealing because it offers a neat explanation for both success in war and for the value of sport. But, of course, it is so flimsy as a theory that it collapses under the slightest scrutiny.
The context for Orwell’s writing on sport and war offers some explanation for his frame of understanding. He wrote it in late 1945 in London in the aftermath of a war so brutal and so immersive that it almost defied comprehension. It was then exceptionally hard to look at any aspect of life and avoid seeing it through the blooded prism of the previous six years.
When Orwell was writing, a tour of Britain had just been undertaken by Dynamo Moscow.
The tour ended with Dynamo beating Arsenal 4-3 in a match played in a thick fog before more than 50,000 people. There is footage of the match on youtube – if you like looking at fog, it’s a great watch.
But still the crowd came and stayed, fuelled by an immense passion to go again to matches.
The English leagues had stopped at the beginning of World War II and did not properly recommence until 1946.
Orwell noted that at least two of the four matches played by Dynamo had ended in bad feeling and wrote: “sport is an unfailing cause of ill-will, and … if such a visit as this had any effect at all on Anglo-Soviet relations, it could only be to make them slightly worse than before.”
Of course, Orwell understood that sport was not the cause of the problem: “I do not … suggest that sport is one of the main causes of international rivalry; big-scale sport is itself, I think, merely another effect of the causes that have produced nationalism.”
But he stuck to his point that sport did indeed “make things worse”. To this end, he rightly laughed at what he called the “blah-blahing about the clean, healthy rivalry of the football field and the great part played by the Olympic Games in bringing the nations together”.
And yet there is a profound difference between the idea of sport being a cause of ill-will (which it is) and sport being some sort of proxy for war.
Reading Orwell’s essay this week was an unsettling experience as the Russian leader Vladimir Putin again described the neighbouring Ukraine as not a real country and Ukrainians as not a real people. His claims that “Russians and Ukrainians were one people – a single whole” stand as the pretext for war and his ultimate justification for sending troops across the border.
News reports of the first deaths in the wake of the Russian invasion were a reminder of the extent to which sport is entirely different to war; it is not war remade and nor is it preparation for war.
Indeed, the notion that playing sport in some way replicates war or prepares you for war is trite and absurd. These are claims made, for example, by Admiral Lord Jellicoe, one of the Britain’s military leaders from World War One. He believed that rugby was vital to the making of “good fighting men”.
A great way of examining the merit of this claim is to look at those men – including international players – who went over the top of actual trenches rather than rolled around on a muddy field wrestling for possession. They died, one after the next, in a hail of bullets.
Their bodies lie under white crosses on European fields or are mixed into the mud, with only their names surviving on the Thiepval Memorial.
That memorial lists 72,000 names of men who lost their lives at the Battle of the Somme and have no known grave.
They include men such as the Scottish rugby international Eric Milroy, who was one of more than 30 Scottish internationals to die in the war. His body was never found. He was 29 when he died.
In the slaughter of war, it is irrelevant if you have played rugby or the piano or poker or the fool or even the hero.
It is, of course, the case that many sports teams have – and will continue to – draw on war to find ways to help them win. Some of the most famous examples come from golf, as if to emphasise the incongruity of it all.
There is Major Dan Rooney, the F-16 fighter pilot who flew three combat tours in Iraq and twice served as a “motivational speaker” for American Ryder Cup teams.
Rooney was invited to speak to American golfers and caddies by 2010 captain Corey Pavin, who in 1991 had been a rookie and key player on the American Ryder Cup team that won at Kiawah Island in a contest that was termed 'the war at the shore'.
Against the backdrop of the Gulf war which had just ended, Pavin wore a military-style camouflage hat on the course that week. The merger of military jingoism and epic histrionics in a golf match played between wealthy white men could not have offered a more clear demonstration of how ridiculous it is to see sport as any form of war, or proxy for war, or training for war, or imitation of war.
Back in the real world, Putin has used sport and identified with sports people throughout his political career. From Conor McGregor to the International Olympic Committee and FIFA, he has attached himself to sporting celebrity and sporting spectacle. Choosing Putin is a travesty. No doubt they will find a way to equivocate, to manufacture a truth that denies or excuses the obvious meaning of their allegiances.
But the question should still be asked: what do they think of him now, of his disregard for human life, of his willingness to send people to their death in servitude to his warp of history and his personal ambition?
