The recent celebration of the World Cup in Qatar, the signing of Rafa Nadal as ambassador of the Saudi Arabian tennis federation, and the LIV Golf tournament in Saudi Arabia, are all recent cases of sportwashing.
Sportswashing is a term used to describe the practice of nations, individuals, groups, corporations, or governments using sports to improve reputations tarnished by wrongdoing.
A paper1 published in Sport, ethics and philosophy in 2022, provides an interesting account of the nature of sportswashing
Let me highlight something we should bear in mind when watching a certain kind of sports events (my emphasis):
The distinctive wrongs of sportswashing are twofold: first, it makes participants in sport (athletes, coaches, journalists, fans) complicit in the sportswasher’s wrongdoing, which extends a moral challenge to millions of people involved with sport. Second, sportswashing corrupts valuable heritage associated with sporting traditions and institutions.
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(1) Fruh, Kyle, Alfred Archer, and Jake Wojtowicz. ‘Sportswashing: Complicity and Corruption’. Sport, Ethics and Philosophy 17, no. 1 (2 January 2023): 101–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/17511321.2022.2107697.
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