ABSTRACT
Despite frequent claims that politics and sport do not mix, it has proved difficult to prevent sport from acquiring an extra-sporting dimension in the eyes of governments, the media and public opinion in today’s globalized society. Speaking as South African President in July 1996 and undoubtedly influenced in part by sport’s high profile in the anti-apartheid campaign, Nelson Mandela observed that ‘sport is probably the most effective means of communication in the modern world, bypassing both verbal and written communication and reaching directly out to billions of people worldwide’.1 Mandela was speaking in Britain, where throughout much of the twentieth century governments and the media professed to uphold, at least on paper, the autonomy of sport. Even during the 1980s British ministers for sport, glossing over the Thatcher government’s proposed boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics, proved regular exponents of this line.2 By contrast, the 1990s witnessed a change of course. Successive Conservative and Labour governments, motivated in part by prestige considerations, adopted a more overt and systematic approach towards sport in order to improve the international performance of national sports teams as well as to win the right to host major events, most notably the Olympic Games and football World Cup finals. Inevitably, in 2000 the Blair government, like the footballing authorities, was disappointed by the abortive British bid for the 2006 World Cup finals, but the personal role played by both John Major (Prime Minister, 1990-97) and Tony Blair (Prime Minister, 1997 onwards) in support of the bid established the political significance attached to staging such highprofile events. Unsurprisingly, in April 2000 the government’s sports strategy document, entitled A Sporting Future For All, recorded that ‘we will continue to work with national and international bodies to try to attract more events to the UK. We remain committed to supporting a viable bid for the Olympic Games’.3 Such sentiments were reiterated more recently in the Labour Party’s 2001 general election manifesto.4
