Jack Anderson: The boycott, born in Mayo, may be sport's answer to war
For now, all that is certain in the current geopolitical tumult is that we are all, to paraphrase Dante, once a medieval spectator at the Verona arena, on a “course set for an unchartered sea”.
It’s nearly a century and half since the people of Mayo first created the boycott. In spite of calamitous harvests in the late 1870s, Captain Charles Boycott, land agent for the Earl of Erne’s estates in the county, refused to reduce rents; instead, evictions began.
Spurred by the Land League and Parnell, the local population ostracised Boycott in every way they could and an English verb and noun was born. The word boycott has received considerable exercise lately in a sporting context even in “fair Verona” where the opening ceremony of the 2026 Milano-Cortina Winter Paralympics takes place today at that city’s arena.
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