What are your favorite sports to watch and play?

Firstly, last start with a confession – I am mostly a sports watcher, not a player. My sporting glory days, if you can call them that, are long behind me. Watching other people play sport is actually my main preoccupation these days.

Secondly, being an Australian born citizen, I can see the main sports my fellow countryfolk are obsessed with; cricket, rugby league, Australian Rules Football. None of these are particularly appealing to me. I have tried them, but I just don’t enjoy them. However, watching them is part of the mass culture in Australia, so if people enjoy being spectators, good luck to them.

Indeed, as the traditional churches and collective activities have declined, sport is the one avenue that provides a shared identity. Cheering for the Western Sydney Wanderers, a soccer/football team based in western Sydney, provides an outlet for a shared identity. A region normally marginalised, and where social atomisation is prevalent, the Red-and-Black bloc brings a sense of belonging to something larger than oneself.

Soccer has had to fight long and hard to be accepted as a national sport, beyond its perceived narrow ‘ethnic’ (meaning non-Anglo Celtic) origins. That is a bit strange, because Australia, draws its main Anglophone culture from England, the latter known for its national sport of soccer/football. Soccer clubs in Australia, originally introduced by and sustained by migrant communities, was seen as the ‘wogball’ inferior counterpart to the two Australian football codes.

Athletics is the main sport I play and watch – well, more so watch, now that I too old to be an athlete. In school, running and jumping over things was my main sporting outlet. Sprinting was my bag; long distance running, not so much.

I cheered wildly when Cathy Freeman, the indigenous athlete, won the 400 metres race at the Sydney Olympics. I always cheer for athletes from poorer nations who win in their particular competition. The Olympics, while it is a host to competing nationalist chauvinisms, can also be a place where talented athletes can shine.

Julien Alfred, a native of St Lucia, won the gold medal in the 100 metres sprint at the 2024 Olympic Games. The first gold medallist for her nation, she defeated the heavily favoured runner, American Sha’Carri Richardson. No offence to American readers, but the US can afford to settle for less than gold.

2024 was the first Olympics for Julien Alfred, a black woman. St Lucia, one of the few nations in the world named after a woman, erupted in unprecedented celebrations. No, I have never been to St Lucia, nor do I have any relatives there. But I was ecstatic that they won their first ever gold medal, courtesy of athletics. It was a moment of triumph for athleticism, as well as for the ability of smaller countries to surpass their larger, financially stronger rivals.

Athletics can be a great leveller, bringing nations with grandiose notions of their superiority down to size. In that regard, we have all heard the story of African American athlete Jesse Owens, the black sprinter whose victory in the 1936 Berlin Olympics disproved pseudoscientific claims of Aryan racial superiority in front of Hitler. Except that, this story is largely myth.

True, Owens won his competition, but he was not snubbed by Hitler, but by his own American society. Upon returning to the United States, Owens, along with all the black American competitors, were rejected by the white political and sporting establishment for whom they competed. Excluded from the wider society by legalised segregation, their story is an important one in the larger struggle for civil rights.

This brings me to an issue which is going to be controversial, but necessary to address, even in a short article such as this one – sporting boycotts. There is a systematic effort in western nations to ban Russian (and Byelorussian) athletes and competitors. For instance, in the most recent Australian Open tennis tournament, Russian and Belarusian players participated, but as neutral athletes. No Russian flags or symbols were displayed.

This ban is in line with the decision of international Olympic bodies to sanction Russian sporting teams due to Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine. That is all well and good, but that raises a number of questions. Should individual athletes be held responsible for the actions of their governments? Israeli athletes have competed internationally, even though there have been calls to sanction them on account of the Israeli military’s genocidal assault against the Palestinians of Gaza.

If we are to go down this path – and banning sporting teams from international competitions is nothing new – then let’s be ethically consistent. Afghani athletes should be banned, because of the horrendous mistreatment of women and minorities under Taliban rule. Saudi Arabian competitors must be banned due to that regime’s continued use of beheadings as punishment for internal dissidents. Let’s ban Morocco for its ongoing and illegal occupation of Western Sahara.

While we are at it, let’s ban the United States athletics team for their nation’s numerous illegal and destructive wars and occupations of Middle Eastern, African and Asian countries.

There is another solution – do not ban any athletes from the Olympics.

There was a time when two pariah states, Israel and Russia, did send their respective athletes to compete. Well, Russia was then still the Soviet Union, and Israel was only a new state. In the 1950s, Yemeni-born Israeli basketballer Zacharia Ofri (1932 – 2018) competed against Soviet Russian athletes, both at the Helsinki Olympics in 1952, and again at the European Cup held in Moscow in 1953.

Ofri, along with his teammates, travelled by train across the Eastern bloc, representing their new state in the USSR. Stalin had died earlier that year, and relations were still cordial, if not exactly friendly, between the two nations. Ofri and his friends squared off against the Soviet basketball team under the watchful portraits of Lenin and Stalin.

Never give up on your sporting ambitions. Physical health is the solid foundation for good mental health, and regular exercise is part of a healthy regimen.

Who knows, I may even take up running again.