No one familiar with the authoritarian history of national and international sports federations will have been shocked by the forced kiss that upended the politics of Spanish football at the conclusion of the recent Women’s World Cup.
In a grotesque act of male appropriation, the president of the Royal Spanish Football Federation planted an unwanted kiss on soccer star Jenni Hermoso’s mouth after Spain won the World Cup. This tradition of male arrogance and misogyny has long infected soccer’s world governing body, the comically corrupt FIFA, and has been embedded in the thinking of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) over the past century. Ta.
Breaking this male monopoly will require the heroic efforts of extraordinary women, empowered by dramatic and unpredictable events.
The IOC recently honored International Women’s Day, but since its founding in 1894 it has imposed a strictly male authoritarian mandate. All IOC presidents have been white European men, with the exception of Avery Brundage (1952-1972), who was a white American man with European sympathies. The fact that no woman has ever come close to being elected IOC president is beyond debate. IOC President Thomas Bach’s long history of currying favors with Russian President Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping has attracted some critical attention, but the authoritarianism of the men who have always run the IOC is not on anyone’s reform agenda.
Of the dozens of international sports federations that operate under the aegis of the IOC, only one has a female president. It is World Her Triathlon, formerly known as the International Triathlon Union (Marisol Casado). She is the president of two other women: the World Aquatic Federation (Anna Arzhanova) and the International Sled Dog Sports Federation (Helen Lundberg).
This is an alienation with a vengeance that has not provoked much criticism from the women who have been admitted to the Olympic family. The woman’s Olympic career will reach her 15-member executive board of the IOC and ultimately the end of her term. Juan Antonio Samaranch, a Spanish fascist who served as IOC president from 1980 to 2001, became Princess Nora of Liechtenstein in 1984 and Royal Anne, an equestrian and sister of Britain’s King Charles, in 1985. He preferred to have women, such as princesses, as ornaments of the royal family. However, Samaranch confirmed that his successor was European.
How did the IOC’s patriarchy survive the successive waves of feminism that swept the world?
To understand the unbroken dominance of men, we have no choice but to look to the 1936 Berlin Olympics, or the “Nazi Olympics.” The Olympics were made possible in part by the ideological alignment of the IOC elite and the Nazis, based on shared ideals of aristocratic masculinity and spirituality. A sense of value derived from praising physically perfect men as ideal human beings.
The masculine ideology that linked Olympic athletes to the Nazis in the 1930s is a code of masculinity whose misogynistic legacy continues to this day. Its perverse influence is the primary cause of the mass abuse, including sexual abuse and other abuses, that pervades elite sports around the world.
The next step will be for prominent sportswomen to step up their fight beyond eliminating the dirty Spanish bastard. They are a relentless propaganda campaign that has allowed the IOC to continue as a men’s club while making the world believe that the IOC is a champion of women’s rights and a diplomat working with tyrants to maintain world peace. must be addressed.
John Hoberman is a professor at the University of Texas at Austin and author of The Olympic Crisis: Sports, Politics, and Moral Order.
Versions of this editorial appeared in the Austin American-Statesman and the San Antonio Express News.