Iran has banned a weightlifter from sports for life and dissolved a sports committee after the athlete greeted an Israeli counterpart on a podium.
Mostafa Rajaei, a veteran weightlifter, finished second in his category in the 2023 World Master Weightlifting Championships in Poland and stood on a podium with an Iranian flag wrapped around him on Saturday.
On anther step of the podium stood Maksim Svirsky from Israel, who finished third.
The two athletes shook hands and took a picture together, which led to the Iran Weightlifting Federation banning Rajaei from all sports for life due to what it called an “unforgivable” transgression.
Yeah none of that politics stuff like how Jackie Robinson playing baseball definitely wasn’t political, and the US vs Soviets 1980 Olympics definitely wasn’t politically charged, and people definitely were expressing their dislike of the Soviets during the game or the entire point of the Olympics being a peaceful gathering of nation states for competition ia definitely not political, or all the taxpayer money that goes to building stadiums also isnt political, or that the owners of sports teams are politically active isnt… political. Oh… wait.
They said, it should be, not that it is.
Eh I tend to find that nothing is truly apolitical. Everything that exists is affected by politics. If you start looking you can find how politics plays a role in everything.
Like this bottle of Coke I’m currently drinking. The corn syrup used in it is super cheap because the agriculture industry is heavily subsidized to grow corn, the logos and branding falls under trademark and copyright law, the plastic that makes up the bottle has regulations on the types of plastic used and can only use food safe plastics, and that plastic is a product of petroleum, so fossilr fuel lobbying isninvolved too, the water that Coca Cola uses could very well have come from a source that was plundered by a PMC (look up Nestle for that one) and stolen from locals. And then just because I throw the bottle into recycling, doesn’t mean as soon as it leaves my hand that it’s properly handled along the entire processing and doesn’t just end up in a landfill anyway. And that’s not talking about all the different lobbyists from all the various industries that play a role in making, shipping and disposing of a bubbly brown liquid in a bottle made of polymerization petroleum.
I do agree, but I also imagine, they did not literally mean that politics should never occur in all of sports.
They probably meant that sports competitions should be held with mutual respect, independent of politics. If you can’t shake someone’s hand, you’re not either going to be cool with them winning, so there’s a big risk of you not competing fairly. That’s the bare minimum where politics need to be kept out of sports.