Reckoning beckons as athlete voices grow louder over sportswashing sponsors

For better and very much for worse, 2022 has been an apogee for sportswashing. The year began with the Winter Olympics in Beijing, as the International Olympic Committee insisted on its position of “political neutrality” about crimes against humanity faced by Uyghur people. The war in Ukraine then forced the IOC and Fifa to backflip, all-but conceding – many years too late – that allowing Russia to host the 2014 Winter Olympics and 2018 World Cup was ill-advised.

In the subsequent months, any lessons to be learnt from the Russian experience have been promptly forgotten by the global sporting elite. The International Cricket Council sold its soul to Aramco, the Saudi oil giant controlled by a brutal regime renowned for dismembering dissidents with bone-saws. There’s also the small matter of Aramco single-handedly causing 4% of global greenhouse emissions in recent decades.

Formula One continues to curry favour with repressive regimes, including the Azeris (crushing dissent at home and committing war crimes in Nagorno-Karabakh) and the very same Saudis (who are also enjoying their first year as owners of an English Premier League team). The global body for cycling even blacklisted a journalist for asking tough questions about the sport’s links to the repressive Turkmen regime and Russian oligarchs.

And all of this as we hurtle towards the world cup of sportswashing: literally, the men’s Fifa World Cup in Qatar, an autocratic state with few civil liberties, where LGBTQI+ relationships can lead to imprisonment and which has overseen the deaths of at least 6,500 migrant workers in the frenetic construction activity leading up to the tournament.

Against the gloomy backdrop, the recent athlete and fan-led resistance to