Ever since the finalists were known for this year's football Copa del Rey, there was speculation about the how supporters of teams from the regions with the strongest separatist sentiment in Spain would deal with an event named after the King of Spain. The answer came on Wednesday evening, as a sizeable percentage of Athletic Bilbao and Barcelona supporters greeted the Spanish national anthem with a chorus of whistling. I was listening to the game on the Cadena SER radio station and it was clear that the reaction was more than what the right wing press here describes as the action of a few radicals. The always voluble commentators of the SER were not quite lost for words, but clearly had problems dealing with what was happening until one of them finally said "well let's talk about football". You can listen to it here. On the public RTVE channel showing the game things were worse, as the station avoided showing the scene live and instead showed an edited version during the half time break. This decision, attributed to "a human error", has cost the head of the sports department his job. Who said sport and politics don't mix?
7 comments:
In my experience, people who say that politics and sport don’t mix usually have dubious political inclinations, and often are clueless about both politics and sport.
Once again, the only columnist in Marca worth reading gets it right, and his article is quickly "unlinked" from any other...
Ramon Trecet
At lunch with friends in Barcelona yesterday there was considerable support for the idea that the King should have gone home and taken the cup with him. It is his cup, after all!
I suggested a few months ago that we could get sponsorship and call it the Copa Chupa Chups - La Copa de la Liga just sounds boring.
@Rab - the people who I remember most complaining about mixing politics and sport were rugby or cricket players hoping to get rich out of breaking the boycott against South Africa in apartheid days.
@Peter, no it's ours now!
@Tom. And you can have it for all I care.
@Graeme. I was involved heavily in those Anti-Apartheid Movement demonstrations; whatever they were about they were not about rich sportsmen, and the actual boycott was for trade not sporting contacts.
In those days (pre Kerry Packer) cricketers were paid abysmally -- the professionals that is, the amateurs obviously got nothing -- and rugby union was all amateur.
The sportsmen did it because, well, it was what sportsmen did. And anyway, sportsmen in those days were hearty types who tended to support apartheid as a matter of course, with some obvious honourable exceptions.
Peter, it's simply not the case that the boycott was just about trade - as any google search on "anti-apartheid springboks" will remind you. There were huge protests over tours by South African teams. The point I was making was not really about the salaries they earned, rather that they used the sport and politics argument to try and justify what was in any rational assessment a highly political decision. The fact that they weren't paid what they are today doesn't make their decision any better.
@Graeme
I know very well that there were huge protests; I was one of the protesters. The actual boycott was on trade, through sanctions. Sporting links were controversial but were not legally affected by it (except for the special case of rebellious Rhodesia). That is why the games could go ahead though in the end, belatedly and unwillingly, the Wilson government did try to stop them.
I totally agree about politics and international sport. The two are inextricably linked. Look at the Olympic Games.
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