ABSTRACT
Although Britain is an island, an island whose people have given many sports to the world, it can no longer develop its sports culture without having regard to the way sport is organized internationally and to the role sport increasingly plays in international politics. The traditional British ethos of sport still carries weight internationally but this ethos is declining under the unremitting pressure of commercial and national interests. Today politics are inextricably linked with sport both in the national and in the international context. On the one hand there are the ‘sports’ politics which involve the wheeling and dealing over power in the international sports bodies, and on the other hand there are the ‘political’ politics that seek to use sport as an instrument of national foreign policy.
