Paul Rouse: Lessons from sport lost on Putin - and Mick Wallace
Mick Wallace, then Wexford Youths manager, pictured at the launch of the 2011 Airtricity League. The MEP voted against a European Parliament resolution which condemned the Russian invasion and demanded Putin immediately pull his troops out of Ukraine.
Everyone who loves sport has a personal story that explains this love. This is a story which is usually built into the sheer physical pleasure that comes from the act of playing.
For most people who love sport, the connection goes far beyond the physical. It is, instead, embedded in the meaning of their lives.
Usually, also, there is a belief that sport is important to a person’s values, that it has helped create a work-ethic or sense of teamwork or volunteerism that has fed out into the rest of life, far beyond the boundaries of play.
This is something that routinely appears in the life stories of people who find power or wealth in all walks of life. Sport is presented time and time again as a force for good, as an environment that facilitates noble behaviour and gives people the skills to walk from darkness towards light.
One of the people who has profited from this frame of representation is Vladimir Putin. Two decades ago, when he was consolidating his power in Russia, Putin spoke about his love of judo, how it gave him a philosophy that he could bring out into his life:
“I started practicing this sport when I was 14, and as a matter of fact, what I did start engaging in was something called sambo, which is a Russian acronym for ‘self-defence without arms,’ which is a Russian wrestling technique. And, after that, I joined a gym that was teaching judo. And I was what they call a master of sports. We have our sporting ranks, and the equivalent of the black belt I received when I was, I guess, 18, in judo. And all my adult life I have been practicing judo and I do love the sport tremendously.”
And around this professed love of sport, Putin wrapped its meaning to him, how it saved him from falling in darkness, and also how it taught him respect and a way of living: “I think that there is more to it than just sport. I think it’s also a philosophy in a way, and I think it’s a philosophy that teaches one to treat one’s partner with respect.” Naturally enough, Putin continued to spout this nonsense year after year. He went further than that. He also “co-authored” books about judo and took the lead role in a 2008 instructional video, aptly titled “Let’s Learn Judo with Vladimir Putin.”
Because many of us can identify with a love of sport and because we can understand what it has given to our own sense of self, we are susceptible to this manipulation. There is a universality to the idea of sport that transcends borders and language.
In the year that this judo video was released, Putin had earlier led the Russian invasion of Georgia, with its catalogue of death, injury and the displacement of tens of thousands of innocent people.
The point here is that this notion that sport is an inherent force for good is complete sewage. It can help provide people with values – but not necessarily so. And to presume that it does is a dangerous, misleading mistake..
For all of those warm and fuzzy stories of how sport has provided people with a platform to behaviour with decency, there are many others which show the opposite.
In sports clubs – and in their governing bodies, nationally and internationally – there have been and are many extraordinary people who give over their own lives to improving the lives of others through sport. But there have also been murderers, rapists, child abusers and villains of all stripes.
What is also interesting is to examine the sense that sport is also supposed to help cultivate an understanding of people, a sort of practical humanity, to sit alongside the values that it is supposed to imbue. Too often, this, too, turns out to be rubbish.
For example, in respect of Putin’s latest war, decades of involvement in sport has not saved Mick Wallace, MEP, from an abject failure of judgement.
His position on Russia is now such that it is hard to know where to start. Even after the scale of the Russian onslaught on Ukraine became plain, Wallace – once a TD and now an MEP – voted against a European Parliament resolution which condemned the Russian invasion and demanded Putin immediately pull his troops out of Ukraine.
Wallace has explained his logic as being that he thought the motion was actually “important and necessary", as it "correctly condemns Russian aggression and calls for humanitarian support for Ukraine and Ukrainian refugees".
But he said he couldn’t support the motion because other aspects of it evidenced how the EU was “manipulating public anger to accelerate militarisation". He also said that he was acting "in the tradition of Irish neutrality and international support for peace" and had been elected on a platform of opposing war.
If the failure of the right of European politics in respect of Russia can be seen in the manner in which former Prime Ministers of various European countries (France, Finland and Italy) have enriched themselves on the boards of Russian companies, the failure of the “left” can be seen in the posturing and the theoretical arguments offered by those who pose as tribunes of the people.
In an article in The Irish Times which was an attempt to clarify the logic of his vote, Wallace (in tandem with Clare Daly, another Irish MEP who voted as Wallace did) again condemned the Russian invasion but wrote also: “Although Russia alone invaded Ukraine, both Russia and the West bear responsibility for creating conditions of instability and confrontation in Ukraine, in pursuit of their strategic and economic interests. … The country has been used as a pawn.”
Interesting word that: pawn.
Context is everything here. And the context of that vote by Wallace was that it came on an emotional day when Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, got a standing ovation following an address to the European Parliament by an online link from a city that was under bombardment from Putin’s army.
Did it not matter to Wallace what Zelenskyy asked for or what the Ukrainian people might want? It is notable that in their newspaper defence of their vote, Wallace and Daly did not see fit to mention Zelenskyy’s appearance or the words that he spoke in the parliament in which they sit.
Another context is that of death, including death on a soccer field.
This is something that can be understood wherever you are in the world. Just as sport is relatable, so are love and grief. Among the cascade of horrendous news that has filled our screens over the past fortnight is the story of a 16-year-old boy, Iliya, who died in Ukraine in the first days of war. He was playing soccer in the Ukrainian city of Mariupol, when the Russians started shelling the city. He was caught on the field in the shelling and hit. He was rushed to hospital but died on the operating table.
The truth of this war can be heard in the wail of grief that filled the hospital. Iliya’s father, identified only as Serhii in news reports, held his son’s dead body through a sheet and hugged his head, convulsed with grief. Strangled by their ideological straitjacket, the attempts of Wallace and Daly to explain their position on Ukraine have become increasingly absurd.
Abstractions offer no defence for moral failures; and sport offers absolutely no guarantee of basic ethics.
