6 April 2022: International Day of Sport for Development and Peace
At the UN headquarters in New York on 23 August 2013, the UN General Assembly declared 6 April as the International Day of Sport for Development and Peace (IDSDP) – a decision that represented an historic step in recognising the transformative power of sport and its great potential in advancing positive social change.
Since 2014, this day has been commemorated all over the world by international, regional, national sport and development organisations to highlight and promote the social potential of sport as an agent of change, development, democracy, and peace building:
https://www.april6.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/fiche-lapaixparlesport-EN.pdf
Evidence of sport’s power to promote ideals of peace, fraternity, and non-violence could be found in the words of Joel Bouzou, Peace and Sport President and Founder, to mark the end of the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics. Mr Bouzou writes that “as well as playing a starring role in competitions in the Beijing Games, athletes also brought their voice to a political debate where their leaders had previously struggled to speak the same language. Rather than talk about division and diplomatic boycott, as certain Heads of State and governments did, they preferred words of sharing and solidarity. They embraced the idea of peace through sport with freshness and spontaneity, without anyone asking them. On snow and ice, they proved that the values of sport and the Olympic Truce were not just empty words.
Examples popped up throughout the Games in all competition venues: in Beijing, Yanqing and Zhangjiakou. In freestyle skiing, the reigning Olympic champion from Ukraine – Oleksandr Abramenko – won his country’s first medal in the jumping event. He held back his tears on the podium as he received his silver medal. Then he turned to the third runner-up in the event, Ilia Burov, a competitor from the Russian Olympic Committee (ROC) team. The two men hugged each other for a long time before congratulating each other. This image went around the world. ‘These medals are for our two countries, they make us proud,’ explained Oleksandr Abramenko, linking his happiness to the success of his Russian opponent.”
These were pictures that we do not know when we will see again, as after the recent appeal by the International Olympic Committee, Russian athletes are banned from competing in sport events in the wake of the country’s invasion of Ukraine. This means that both Olympic champion Anna Shcherbakova and her 15-year-old teammate Kamila Valieva, who was the focus of a still-unresolved doping dispute at the recent Winter Olympics, are excluded from the world figure skating championships in France, and that in Norway, Russian cross-country skiers — who won 11 medals at the Beijing Olympics —headed home after being excluded from competition by the International Ski Federation. At the same time, the hosting of several sports events has also been taken away from Russia, such as the case of the men’s world Volleyball championships in August. Volleyball also suspended Russian teams and clubs from international events, while rowing, badminton, canoeing, and triathlon decided to exclude Russian athletes from their competitions. From the point of view of Democracy and Human Rights, there can be no doubt: to claim that sport is not political is simply naïve or negligent. Athletes’ sporting actions are not in themselves political, but sport always reflects social ideas about the body, gender or origin. For example, the division into ‘typical’ men’s and women’s disciplines such as football or rhythmic gymnastics goes back to purely biological ideas and the corresponding gender roles dating from the 19th century. Over the last 50 years, such ideas have been overcome in some sports, and general socio-political struggles and developments have also made themselves felt in the world of sport. Nevertheless, athletes (but also politicians) use the stage of sport for their political messages because of the large audience and media interest. The awarding of sporting events alone is always a political issue: an award to authoritarian countries raises questions about human rights, especially in the Western world, and candidates to host events are also protected and financially supported by politicians. In short, sport moves in a triangle of mass (in the sense of spectator interest and corresponding media interest), markets (i.e. economic interests) and power (in the sense of social and political interests or influence). Sport is ideal for this because it is perceived as a sporting competition and not as a political event.
