Por enquanto é uma proposta de investigação, não uma conclusão. A questão é: por que os esportes são competitivos? Por que o vencedor leva tudo e o velocista que chega em segundo lugar, por 0,1 milissegundos atrás do primeiro, acha que é (e é visto por muitos como) um loser? Por que os torcedores se comportam como fieis fundamentalistas, nutrindo ódio contra os adversários, tomados – em muitos casos – como inimigos?

Quem já viu o antagonismo entre as torcidas do Internacional e do Grêmio, em Porto Alegre, sabe bem do que se trata. Para não falar dos hooligans. Ah! Mas essas são disfunções. Nas Olimpíadas as competições não são assim. Será?

Suspeita-se que tudo isso tem a ver com a cultura patriarcal. Havia jogos competitivos na Creta minoica, antes da chegada dos aqueus? Havia jogos competitivos nas comunidades agrícolas da Europa antiga e nas cidades pré-patriarcais, como Çatalhüyük (6.700 a.C.), Hacilar (7.040 a.C.) e Jericó (9.000 a.C.) nos seus dois ou três primeiros milênios?

E as Olimpíadas, surgidas na Grécia arcaica? Foram organizadas por influência jônia ou dória (indo-europeia)? Quais os padrões hierárquico-autocráticos do tribalismo patriarcalista dório que podem ser identificados na organização dos jogos olímpicos?

De qualquer modo, é preciso investigar melhor essa história das Olimpíadas. Diz-se que a organização dos jogos foi de responsabilidade da pólis de Élide. Em 668 a.C. Fídon de Argos conquistou Olímpia e teria entregado o controle do santuário à cidade de Pisa, que organizou os jogos até 558 a.C., ano em que Élide retomou o controle sobre Olímpia graças à intervenção de Esparta (êpa!). Depois, o núcleo de Olímpia passou a ser o Áltis, um bosque sagrado. No centro do bosque existia um templo em estilo dórico (ôpa!) dedicado a Zeus, que foi construído entre 468 e 456 a.C.

Segundo a mitologia grega, o herói Hércules criou as Olimpíadas por volta de 2.500 a.C., na Grécia antiga, para homenagear seu pai, Zeus. Contudo, os primeiros registros históricos das Olimpíadas são de 776 a.C. É significativo que no imaginário arcaico dos gregos patriarcais um herói tenha sido o responsável pela criação das competições. O herói é aquele que ultrapassa os limites da condição humana comum. É um ser in-comum, quer dizer, anti-commons no sentido político do termo. Se dependesse de heróis só haveria autocracia, nenhuma democracia (que é o regime das pessoas comuns).

Tudo isso se reflete no chamado espírito esportivo. Por que as pessoas são chamadas a sempre superar a condição humana (quer dizer, a bater os resultados obtidos por seus pares)? Por que têm que quebrar os recordes anteriores? Para quê isso?

Não seria mais humano, em vez de competir para se distanciar dos outros, colaborar para se aproximar deles, para gozar melhor com eles (ou elas) e se comprazer na convivência amistosa (sem o quê jamais teria surgido a democracia)?

Ah! Mas os esportes – alegam muitos – aproximam os povos. A competição esportiva nos salva da guerra, pois exclui a violência. OK! Mas quem disse que guerra é violência? Guerra é construção (e manutenção – não destruição, como se pensa) de inimigos. A guerra perfeita é aquela onde a violência que mata é um indesejável efeito colateral. Assim como a prisão perfeita (e mais cruel) não tem grades e são raros os espancamentos e torturas (como nos gulags stalinistas e nos campos de prisioneiros na Coréia do Norte). Assim como a ditadura perfeita é aquela em que as pessoas não precisam ser coagidas a agir sob comando porque já pensam sob comando.

O fato é que as competições esportivas, olímpicas ou não, insuflam emoções adversariais que sustentam o nacionalismo e o patriotismo (que são óbices à construção da humanidade como um simbionte social). E tudo com base no antagonismo. Aprendemos a odiar os argentinos a partir do futebol (embora muitos possam dizer que esse seria o menor dos motivos, hehe). Durante as Copas do mundo nos vestimos de verde-e-amarelo, penduramos bandeiras nacionais nas janelas, nos derretemos em juras de amor ao Brasil e gritamos “Chupa Filho da Puta” para tripudiar sobre os adversários que levaram a pior no embate conosco. Diga-se o que se quiser dizer, essas emoções não são muito compatíveis com a democracia, que é um modo pazeante de regulação de conflitos, que procura converter inimigos em amigos políticos – nem com a genética, de vez que praticamente todos nós, humanos, fazemos parte de uma única grande família (e somos primos até o grau 50).

Para encerrar esta introdução, pode-se dizer que não há dúvida de que essa alegação de que o esporte tem que ser competitivo é uma herança da cultura patriarcal, do herói que supera a condição humana, do mundo épico, dos que se alimentam da vitória (quer dizer, da derrota do outro, pois que um tem sempre que perder para o outro ganhar). Mas não tem que ser sempre assim. Ou será que o lírico frescobol não é um esporte?

Dois textos podem nos ajudar a começar essa exploração. O primeiro deles, de George Orwell (1945) sobre o tal espírito esportivo, e o segundo, de Peter Beck (2013), sobre a abordagem de Orwell do tal espírito esportivo.

THE SPORTING SPIRIT

George Orwell, Tribune, 14 December 1945

The Orwell Foudation

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Now that the brief visit of the Dynamo football team has come to an end, it is possible to say publicly what many thinking people were saying privately before the Dynamos ever arrived. That is, that sport is an unfailing cause of ill-will, and that if such a visit as this had any effect at all on Anglo-Soviet relations, it could only be to make them slightly worse than before.

Even the newspapers have been unable to conceal the fact that at least two of the four matches played led to much bad feeling. At the Arsenal match, I am told by someone who was there, a British and a Russian player came to blows and the crowd booed the referee. The Glasgow match, someone else informs me, was simply a free-for-all from the start. And then there was the controversy, typical of our nationalistic age, about the composition of the Arsenal team. Was it really an all-England team, as claimed by the Russians, or merely a league team, as claimed by the British? And did the Dynamos end their tour abruptly in order to avoid playing an all-England team? As usual, everyone answers these questions according to his political predilections. Not quite everyone, however. I noted with interest, as an instance of the vicious passions that football provokes, that the sporting correspondent of the russophile News Chronicle took the anti-Russian line and maintained that Arsenal was not an all-England team. No doubt the controversy will continue to echo for years in the footnotes of history books. Meanwhile the result of the Dynamos’ tour, in so far as it has had any result, will have been to create fresh animosity on both sides.

And how could it be otherwise? I am always amazed when I hear people saying that sport creates goodwill between the nations, and that if only the common peoples of the world could meet one another at football or cricket, they would have no inclination to meet on the battlefield. Even if one didn’t know from concrete examples (the 1936 Olympic Games, for instance) that international sporting contests lead to orgies of hatred, one could deduce it from general principles.

Nearly all the sports practised nowadays are competitive. You play to win, and the game has little meaning unless you do your utmost to win. On the village green, where you pick up sides and no feeling of local patriotism is involved, it is possible to play simply for the fun and exercise: but as soon as the question of prestige arises, as soon as you feel that you and some larger unit will be disgraced if you lose, the most savage combative instincts are aroused. Anyone who has played even in a school football match knows this. At the international level sport is frankly mimic warfare. But the significant thing is not the behaviour of the players but the attitude of the spectators: and, behind the spectators, of the nations who work themselves into furies over these absurd contests, and seriously believe – at any rate for short periods – that running, jumping and kicking a ball are tests of national virtue.

Even a leisurely game like cricket, demanding grace rather than strength, can cause much ill-will, as we saw in the controversy over body-line bowling and over the rough tactics of the Australian team that visited England in 1921. Football, a game in which everyone gets hurt and every nation has its own style of play which seems unfair to foreigners, is far worse. Worst of all is boxing. One of the most horrible sights in the world is a fight between white and coloured boxers before a mixed audience. But a boxing audience is always disgusting, and the behaviour of the women, in particular, is such that the army, I believe, does not allow them to attend its contests. At any rate, two or three years ago, when Home Guards and regular troops were holding a boxing tournament, I was placed on guard at the door of the hall, with orders to keep the women out.

In England, the obsession with sport is bad enough, but even fiercer passions are aroused in young countries where games playing and nationalism are both recent developments. In countries like India or Burma, it is necessary at football matches to have strong cordons of police to keep the crowd from invading the field. In Burma, I have seen the supporters of one side break through the police and disable the goalkeeper of the opposing side at a critical moment. The first big football match that was played in Spain about fifteen years ago led to an uncontrollable riot. As soon as strong feelings of rivalry are aroused, the notion of playing the game according to the rules always vanishes. People want to see one side on top and the other side humiliated, and they forget that victory gained through cheating or through the intervention of the crowd is meaningless. Even when the spectators don’t intervene physically they try to influence the game by cheering their own side and ‘rattling’ opposing players with boos and insults. Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words it is war minus the shooting.

Instead of blah-blahing about the clean, healthy rivalry of the football field and the great part played by the Olympic Games in bringing the nations together, it is more useful to inquire how and why this modern cult of sport arose. Most of the games we now play are of ancient origin, but sport does not seem to have been taken very seriously between Roman times and the nineteenth century. Even in the English public schools the games cult did not start till the later part of the last century. Dr Arnold, generally regarded as the founder of the modern public school, looked on games as simply a waste of time. Then, chiefly in England and the United States, games were built up into a heavily-financed activity, capable of attracting vast crowds and rousing savage passions, and the infection spread from country to country. It is the most violently combative sports, football and boxing, that have spread the widest. There cannot be much doubt that the whole thing is bound up with the rise of nationalism – that is, with the lunatic modern habit of identifying oneself with large power units and seeing everything in terms of competitive prestige. Also, organised games are more likely to flourish in urban communities where the average human being lives a sedentary or at least a confined life, and does not get much opportunity for creative labour. In a rustic community a boy or young man works off a good deal of his surplus energy by walking, swimming, snowballing, climbing trees, riding horses, and by various sports involving cruelty to animals, such as fishing, cock-fighting and ferreting for rats. In a big town one must indulge in group activities if one wants an outlet for one’s physical strength or for one’s sadistic impulses. Games are taken seriously in London and New York, and they were taken seriously in Rome and Byzantium: in the Middle Ages they were played, and probably played with much physical brutality, but they were not mixed up with politics nor a cause of group hatreds.

If you wanted to add to the vast fund of ill-will existing in the world at this moment, you could hardly do it better than by a series of football matches between Jews and Arabs, Germans and Czechs, Indians and British, Russians and Poles, and Italians and Jugoslavs, each match to be watched by a mixed audience of 100,000 spectators. I do not, of course, suggest that sport is one of the main causes of international rivalry; big-scale sport is itself, I think, merely another effect of the causes that have produced nationalism. Still, you do make things worse by sending forth a team of eleven men, labelled as national champions, to do battle against some rival team, and allowing it to be felt on all sides that whichever nation is defeated will ‘lose face’.

I hope, therefore, that we shan’t follow up the visit of the Dynamos by sending a British team to the USSR. If we must do so, then let us send a second-rate team which is sure to be beaten and cannot be claimed to represent Britain as a whole. There are quite enough real causes of trouble already, and we need not add to them by encouraging young men to kick each other on the shins amid the roars of infuriated spectators.

Tribune, 14 December 1945

‘War Minus the Shooting’: George Orwell on International Sport and the Olympics

Peter J. Beck, Democratization (30/01/2013)

Received 27 Nov 2012, Accepted 18 Dec 2012, Published online: 30 Jan 2013

https://doi.org/10.1080/17460263.2012.761150

Abstract

George Orwell, the author of Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), wrote relatively little about sport, but is nevertheless quoted regularly on the topic. Today, his descriptor of international sport and the Olympics as ‘war minus the shooting’ has become almost a reference point for those talking or writing about sport in public life, academia or the media. More recently, Orwell’s contemporary sporting role has acquired an additional dimension, given the way in which the deliberate erasure and rewriting of the past in Nineteen Eighty-Four has featured increasingly in media and other commentaries about sporting scandals such as that involving Joe Paterno. Although Orwell touched briefly upon sport in several publications, his principal text on the topic was ‘The Sporting Spirit’, an article published in Tribune in December 1945. The title’s overt emphasis upon sport obscured Orwell’s underlying political message reflecting his hostile attitude towards the Stalinist totalitarian regime in the Soviet Union; his growing recognition of the political symbolism of sport, particularly as a highly visible tool of nationalism; and his strongly critical response to the 1945 British tour conducted by the Dynamo Moscow football team.

Today, George Orwell is regarded as one of the most prominent and influential figures in twentieth century literature. Moreover, despite writing relatively little on the topic, he is quoted regularly on sport, particularly with respect to his descriptor of international sport and the Olympics as ‘war minus the shooting’. Indeed, this phrase has become almost a reference point for international sport figuring regularly over the years in public life; academic studies; press articles, commentaries and editorials; and on Internet websites and blogs.1 In fact, the phrase has become so ubiquitous, almost part of present-day politico-sporting vocabulary, that few users cite the quotation’s original source. Most users seem unaware of the actual context of Orwell’s assertion, let alone to have read the source article, ‘The Sporting Spirit’, published in 1945. More recently, another dimension has been added to his contemporary sporting role, given the way in which the deliberate erasure and rewriting of the past highlighted in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four has featured increasingly in media and other commentaries about sporting scandals such as those involving Lance Armstrong and Joe Paterno.

Orwell today

Orwell (1903–50) died over 60 years ago, aged 46, yet – to quote Geoffrey Wheatcroft – ‘every time you open Orwell, there is a flash of illumination, of acute contemporary value’ on a range of topics, including sport (2). Of course, his iconic status results largely from Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) and extensive political journalism. Nor has his literary, journalistic and political reputation dimmed over time. In 2008 The Times ranked him second only to Philip Larkin on a list of ‘The 50 greatest British writers since 1945’ (3). The Economist declared him ‘perhaps the 20th century’s best chronicler of English culture’ (4). In June 2002 Simon Schama used Orwell alongside Winston Churchill in the final programme of his 15-episode BBC television A History of Britain to tell Britain’s story in the twentieth century (5) Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four remain in print; in fact, they have never been out of print. Apart from proving influential works of literature, figuring frequently in lists of the best books and notching up massive worldwide sales, both novels have been adapted for the cinema, radio, the stage and television. Also, they have exerted significant impacts upon language, so that ‘Orwellian’ is now universal shorthand for anything repressive or totalitarian. Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell’s vivid dystopian representation of the future, introduced terms like ‘Big Brother’, ‘Room 101’, ‘the Thought Police’, ‘unperson’ and ‘doublethink’ (6).

Until 1945 Orwell’s main impact had been exerted largely within British left wing circles. Animal Farm and then Nineteen Eighty-Four transformed both his reputation as a writer and his book sales at home and overseas, while fostering widespread interest in all things Orwellian, not excluding his views about politics and sport (7). In this vein, his status as a political journalist is commemorated through the prestigious annual ‘Orwell Prize’ as well as through such books as The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) and Homage to Catalonia (1938). Nor in death has Orwell lost his ability to prompt controversy and divide opinion, as highlighted in 2012 when it was revealed that the BBC refused to allow a statue of him in front of Broadcasting House in London. Proposed by the George Orwell Memorial Trust and supported by such celebrities as Rowan Atkinson, Joan Bakewell and Melvyn Bragg, the statue was designed to mark Orwell’s work as a political journalist, including his Second World War role working as a BBC talks producer. Reportedly Mark Thompson, the BBC’s now departed director-general, vetoed the proposal on the grounds that Orwell was too left-wing for the BBC to honour in this way (8). Perhaps also Thompson was aware that Orwell based Nineteen Eighty-Four’s infamous Room 101, a place where unpleasant things happened, on a BBC conference room used for tedious meetings, ‘the worst thing in the world’. Currently the Orwell Trust is seeking an alternative nearby site.

From Eric Blair to George Orwell

Orwell’s views about international sport, the focus of this article, remain equally controversial and continue to prove a significant element in contemporary debates about the pros and cons of the Olympics and other international sporting events. However, before examining his attitude towards sport, let us look more closely at Orwell himself, since his thinking upon the topic proved largely a function of his personal background, and particularly his literary and political writings (9).

Born Eric Arthur Blair in June 1903 in Bengal, India, where his father worked in the Indian Civil Service, Orwell was educated at a preparatory school in Eastbourne and then at Eton. Rather than going to university, he joined the Indian Imperial Police. Having served five years in Burma (now called Myanmar), Orwell resigned in 1927, since his growing reservations about Britain’s imperial presence were compounded by an appreciation of his unsuitability for police work. More influential, however, was Orwell’s ambition to write, as evidenced by his subsequent struggles to make his way in the literary world. Despite succeeding in getting a few articles published in Britain and France, his early novels and short stories failed to find a publisher, thereby forcing him to undertake a series of ill-paid jobs, including dish-washing, hop-picking and teaching.

Eventually, Down and Out in Paris and London, though rejected already by a couple of publishers, was accepted by Victor Gollancz and published in 1933. Represented as fiction, the book was overwhelmingly autobiographical, and reads more like a memoir of Orwell’s attempt to make his way as a writer. Other novels followed: Burmese Days (1934), A Clergyman’s Daughter (1935) and Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936). Paradoxically, fears of his real name appearing in print led him to publish under the pseudonym George Orwell, reportedly a surname based on the River Orwell near his parents’ home at Southwold, Suffolk (10). As evidenced in this article’s endnotes, Orwell, though still writing as Blair such as to friends and Leonard Moore, his literary agent, often used his pseudonym for correspondence as well as for all publications.

Although a public-school education and imperial police work led some to question his socialist credentials, Orwell claimed that he had always been left wing politically. For example, he pointed to the anti-imperialism attitudes underpinning his resignation from the police service and featured in Burmese Days. Even so, as Orwell acknowledged, he became more committed and active politically during the 1930s, a period characterised by economic depression and ideological conflict between left and right. Orwell’s’ travels in the depressed industrial areas in and round Wigan (February–March 1936), participation on the front line fighting fascism (December 1936–July 1937) in the Spanish Civil War, and membership of the Independent Labour Party (June 1938–September 1939) served to reflect as well as to prove formative to his political outlook (11). Viewing democratic socialism as the best way out of current difficulties, his sympathies for communism waned through a growing appreciation of the horrors of the Soviet Union’s totalitarian regime. In addition, Orwell’s experiences yielded material for influential political studies: The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) and Homage to Catalonia (1938). During the Second World War, he worked for the Indian Section of the BBC Eastern Service (1941–3) before moving on to become literary editor of Tribune, a left-wing weekly journal offering a voice for the Labour movement. His hard-hitting regular column, ‘As I Please’, covered a mixed bag of topics, ‘some serious and some comic, some political and some literary’ (12). Sport rarely figured.

In February 1945 Orwell joined the Observer as a war correspondent, but continued to write for Tribune. Thus, in December ‘The Sporting Spirit’ offered its readers – during the mid-late 1940s Tribune’s readership fluctuated between 35,000 and 40,000 – a highly critical commentary about international sport in general and football and the Olympics in particular (13). However, the title’s overt emphasis upon sport obscured Orwell’s underlying political message. In many respects, the article, following on from the recent publication of Animal Farm, complemented his writing of Nineteen Eighty-Four, then a work making slow progress. In turn, this 1,457-word article, or rather phrases therefrom, for which Orwell was paid three guineas (£3.15), has become one of the most quoted publications about the politics of international sport. Published on 14 December 1945, the article’s timing was determined by the recent tour of Britain conducted by Moscow Dynamo, the leading Soviet football team. More generally, the recent end of the Second World War in which the Soviet Union became a wartime ally of Britain in 1941 meant that the closing months of 1945 saw extensive debate about the future course of British relations with Moscow, given their problematic course since the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.

Influences upon Orwell’s thinking

Despite being frequently depicted as Orwell’s first, indeed only, proper literary excursion into the world of sport, ‘The Sporting Spirit’ touched upon and developed several points raised in his previous publications. Four factors underpinned Orwell’s thinking: his hostile attitude towards the Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union; his personal experience of sport; his growing recognition of the political symbolism of sport, particularly as a highly visible tool of nationalism; and his critical response to the 1945 Dynamo Moscow tour of Britain.

Orwell and the Stalinist regime

What undoubtedly motivated Orwell to write about the Dynamo tour was his long-standing interest in the Soviet Union. However, whereas his left-wing beliefs encouraged a sympathetic, even supportive, attitude towards communism, events in the Soviet Union during the 1930s, as well as those in Germany and Spain, had resulted in a growing horror of totalitarianism, whether practised by left- or right-wing regimes (14). Experience of fighting fascism with the Marxist POUM (the Partido Obrero de Unificacíon Marxista) militia in Spain – here the Soviet Union’s attempt to eliminate dissident communist groupings such as POUM led Orwell to be charged with being a Trotskyist and to the impounding of his Spanish diaries – merely reinforced his opposition to communism’s totalitarian tendencies. Orwell’s active participation in the Spanish Civil War ended in May 1937 when he was shot in the throat by a sniper at Huesca, but his Spanish commitment continued through his political journalism, most notably Homage to Catalonia.

Unsurprisingly, the repressive nature of the Stalinist regime emerged as a central focus for his writing. Written during 1943 and 1944, Animal Farm represented an allegorical take on the Soviet Union, with the revolution launched by the farmyard animals against the farmer betrayed by the pigs. One pig, named Napoleon, represented Stalin, the Soviet leader. Animal Farm was a literary work with a clear political message pointing to the way in which a power-hungry and corrupt Communist Party leadership destroyed popular hopes raised by the overthrow of the Tsarist regime and the 1917 revolutions. As Orwell asserted, ‘I particularly want this book published on political grounds’ (15). Although the wartime bombing of his flat left his typescript in a ‘slightly crumpled condition’, Orwell’s principal problem was to find someone who would publish a book which was, to quote Orwell, ‘strongly anti-Stalin in tendency’ and hence ‘so not OK politically’ in terms of attacking Britain’s wartime ally (16). Following several rejections by publishers, Animal Farm was eventually accepted for publication by Secker & Warburg. Published in August 1945, the book appeared the following year in the USA where it was made Book-of-the-Month Club choice. Sales of his novels published during the 1930s had proved relatively modest, totalling only a few thousand or so. Selling 250,000 copies in the first year, Animal Farm gave Orwell a vast readership at home and abroad, plus an ever growing stream of royalties.

In late 1944 Orwell began writing Nineteen Eighty-Four, a novel set in the future but based upon the present-day Soviet regime. A key prompt appears to have been hearing about the Soviet Union’s persecution of scientists at the PEN (Poets, Essayists and Novelists) conference held in London during August 1944 (17). For Orwell, this paralleled the Stalinist regime’s mistreatment of historians and writers. But the novel’s first draft progressed slowly partly because of the shock of his wife’s sudden death in March 1945 and partly because he was ‘constantly smothered under journalism’ (18). As a result, in May 1946 Orwell moved to Jura in Scotland’s Inner Hebrides to push ahead with Nineteen Eighty-Four as well as to get away from London’s unhealthy climate. In the event, the completion of the first draft was hindered by the everyday demands of living on a remote Scottish island – his diaries record the time and energy spent upon growing food from seed, catching fish and collecting fuel and supplies from Craighouse, 23 miles away – as well as by his rapidly declining health (19). Nor did chain-smoking roll-up cigarettes help his health. At last, in November 1947 Orwell finished the first draft, but soon afterwards was hospitalized at East Kilbride with tuberculosis. Seven months later, he returned to Jura upon his release from hospital and managed to finalize the book by the end of the year. Orwell spent 1949 initially at a sanatorium in Gloucestershire, and then in University College Hospital, London, where he died in January 1950.

Representing Nineteen Eighty-Four as both ‘a show-up of the perversions’ of communism and a stark warning that such an oppressive society could be established anywhere, not excluding Britain, Orwell drew a picture of a totalitarian regime controlled by the party, a society at war, and a population subject to extensive government surveillance and repression (20). The lead character, Winston Smith, was a civil servant working in the Ministry of Truth with responsibility for protecting and enhancing the ruling party’s image, such as by rewriting history to ensure that the party was always seen as correct and shredding inconvenient material down a memory hole. Also the ministry produced rubbishy newspapers, full of crime, sex, sport and astrology, to keep the people occupied. Published on both sides of the Atlantic in June 1949, Nineteen Eighty-Four was dramatized two months later in the USA by NBC radio, with David Niven starring as Smith. Unsurprisingly, this scathing critique of the Stalinist regime followed Animal Farm in being banned within the Soviet bloc (21).

Playing sport

The Tribune article proved a rare sporting intervention for Orwell. Hitherto, he had written little about sport, but this should not be taken to mean that he was either uninterested in sport per se or unaware of its extra-sporting role in contemporary society. Indeed, over time he exhibited a long-standing personal interest in a range of sports. Letters written to his parents from St Cyprian’s preparatory school, Eastbourne, indicate his enjoyment of cricket and football notwithstanding Orwell’s much-quoted claim made when looking back in the 1940s that he loathed playing football there (22). Subsequently, Eton offered young Orwell further exposure to muscular Christianity and all that by providing plenty of opportunities to play sport, including the school’s infamous Wall Game, a combination of football and rugby (23). However, claims that on 6 October 1920 Orwell scored one of the Wall Game’s rare goals must be discounted (24). When recording ‘a superb goal neatly shot by Blair from the halfway line’, the handwritten report, headed ‘In the Field’, was in fact covering Eton’s other form of football, the Field Game (25). After leaving school, Orwell continued to play and watch sport – for example, he played football when serving in Burma and whenever possible attended the annual Eton–Harrow cricket matches at Lord’s – while engaging also in fishing, shooting and swimming. Reportedly, when he died, Orwell’s rods were in the corner of the hospital room, given his plans to go fishing upon his discharge from University College Hospital.

Sport occupied centre stage in ‘Wall Game’, a poem appearing anonymously in Eton’s College Days magazine in 1919. Parodying Rudyard Kipling’s ‘If’, ‘Wall Game’ articulated a somewhat mixed view of sport, given its emphasis upon ‘an afternoon of mud, and blood, and rain’ combined with fists, ‘fearsome feet’ and swearing (26). Peter Davison, the editor of the 20-volume Complete Works of George Orwell, claimed that the poem, like several College Days articles about cricket, is ‘reasonably attributable’ to Orwell (27). Certainly the poem’s opinionated, frequently cynical, tone seems to fit well with his later writing, but extreme caution is necessary when attributing an anonymous text published in College Days to a specific person, even someone such as Orwell known to be associated with producing the magazine. Although Davison reproduces the text in the Complete Works as ‘probably’ authored by Orwell, the ‘Wall Game’ poem has been ignored by several of Orwell’s biographers (28).

Generally speaking sport occupied a peripheral role in his writing, and rarely figured in his work, even if, as in ‘The Sporting Spirit’ and The English People (1947), Orwell acknowledged the national obsession with sport. For instance, football, though representing alongside the football pools a central element in British working class life, was glossed over in The Road to Wigan Pier: ‘His [working man] vision of the Socialist future is a vision of present society with the worst abuses left out, and with interest centring round the same things as at present – family life, the pub, football, and local politics’ (29). Nor did sport feature very much in his regular ‘As I Please’ columns in Tribune. However, in April 1944 Orwell employed the ‘shocking’ behaviour of the local squire in a boyhood village cricket match as a reference point to critique Winston Churchill, the prime minister, for unsporting parliamentary tactics intended to thwart equal pay for women teachers (30). In ‘Such, Such Were the Joys’, published posthumously but probably completed circa 1947–8, Orwell looked back critically on his school days at St Cyprian’s, depicting football as less an enjoyable game and more a form of fighting in which the larger players knocked down and trampled on the smaller boys, the strong overcoming the weak (31).

Nationalism and sport’s political symbolism

‘Shooting an Elephant’, a short story published in New Writing in 1936, included a brief sporting dimension typifying Orwell’s use of sport to advance political messages. Set in Burma, ‘Shooting an Elephant’ was related by an unnamed narrator working as a sub-divisional British police officer. In fact, the story, though fictional, is seen as largely an autobiographical account based on Orwell’s police career. Pointing to the fact that he was hated by large numbers of people, the narrator remarked that a police officer was a natural target for strong anti-British feeling. Reportedly, football matches offered the Burmese, whether players or spectators, regular opportunities to confront the British imperial presence by victimizing the poor narrator: ‘A nimble Burman tripped me up on the football field and the referee (another Burman) looked the other way, the crowd yelled with hideous laughter’ (32). The strong passions aroused upon the part of players and spectators, especially the animosity displayed on the football pitch between the British and Burmese, led Orwell to express concern about not only declining standards of sportsmanship but also the manner in which sport became an instrument for nationalism. Significantly, when writing ‘The Sporting Spirit’, Orwell drew upon another Burmese anecdote to make his point: ‘In Burma, I have seen the supporters of one side break through the police and disable the goalkeeper of the opposing side at a critical moment’ (33).

For Orwell, international sport represented one of the most visible peacetime manifestations of nationalism, a divisive force within and between countries. He represented nationalism, a central factor in two world wars, as one of the worst enemies of peace. Orwell’s concern about the negative impacts of nationalism, most notably the resulting quest for power and prestige, occupied centre stage in an article entitled ‘Notes on Nationalism’ published in Polemic in October 1945 (34). Writing against the background of the breakdown of international order during the 1930s and the advent of the Second World War, Orwell defined ‘nationalism’ as involving a mindset recognizing the distribution of people into separate national units; the identification of people with their respective national units; the belief in the nation’s superiority over other units not only politically, militarily and economically but also in other spheres including sport; and a duty to advance national interests through acquiring more power and prestige. What caused problems, Orwell argued, was nationalism’s competitive nature, and its impact upon existing states as well as nations seeking to break free from empire. Whereas ‘The Sporting Spirit’ and his writings about Burma are regularly cited, hitherto Orwell’s ‘Notes on Nationalism’ article, though providing the theoretical foundation for ‘The Sporting Spirit’, has made little impact in studies about nationalism, as highlighted by its omission from Eric Hobsbawm’s historiographical overview in Nations and Nationalism (1992) (35).

Dynamo Moscow’s British tour

In November 1945 Dynamo Moscow, winners of the 1945 Russian league title, undertook the first-ever official tour of Britain by a Soviet football team (36). Undefeated in four games – victories over Arsenal (4–3) and Cardiff (10–1) were complemented by draws versus both Chelsea (3–3) and Glasgow Rangers (2–2) – the Soviet visitors played before over 250,000 spectators. Large-scale media and public attention towards sport proved a prominent feature of post-war British society. Nor should the novelty value of what many perceived to be the ‘mystery’ Soviet team be underestimated, given the Soviet Union’s self-imposed isolation from international sport, including the Olympics and the World Cup, following the 1917 Revolution (37). In addition, for many Britons, Dynamo Moscow was seen as representing the Soviet Union, a valued wartime ally helping Britain to defeat Hitler’s Germany. When the team arrived at Croydon Airport the international situation remained relatively fluid, and the Soviet Union, although proving an increasingly difficult partner, had yet to become perceived as a Cold War rival (38). Conversely, for Orwell, Moscow Dynamo – the team was closely associated with the Interior Ministry and the secret police, especially its head, Lavrentiy Beria – symbolized everything that was abhorrent about the Stalinist regime.

On 4 December 1945 the Lord Mayor of London entertained Soviet players and officials, together with the Soviet ambassador, at the Mansion House to mark the end of the tour. Philip Noel-Baker, minister of state at the Foreign Office in the Labour government, represented the British government. Having been one of the principal moving forces responsible for bringing about the tour – this aspect was not known publicly – naturally he employed the occasion to express pleasure about the presence in Britain of Dynamo’s footballers as well as to express hopes that their visit would provide a foundation for not only close working relations between governments but friendship between the nations themselves (39). Noel-Baker’s speech, though capable of dismissal as merely the usual type of official courtesy statement made upon such occasions, was in fact also a sincere expression of his deep-seated personal belief in the cooperative potential of international sport in general and of the Olympics in particular (40). A former Olympian, he was a prominent disciple of Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the modern Olympics. Noel-Baker proved also a long-standing advocate of good British-Soviet relations.

‘The Sporting Spirit’

Ten days after the Lord Mayor’s reception, by which time Dynamo had returned home, Tribune published Orwell’s ‘The Sporting Spirit’ article offering a radically different view of both international sport in general and Moscow Dynamo’s tour in particular to that articulated by Noel-Baker and much of the media. There is not space here to examine media coverage – this has been detailed elsewhere in the publications by Kowalski and Porter as well as by Downing as referenced in note 36 – but three headlines from the Manchester Guardian typify the general tone: ‘Saying it with Football’ (15 November 1945), ‘Brilliant Play by Dynamo’ (18 November 1945) and ‘Just About the Best in the World’ (22 November 1945). Indeed, Orwell’s negative commentary might have been more appropriately entitled ‘The Unsporting Spirit’. Orwell admitted responding to those, like Noel-Baker and the press, espousing the positives about international sport in general and the Dynamo tour in particular. Thus, his article was in part the response of Orwell the polemicist to what he represented as the naïve optimism of Noel-Baker and company. However, it was much more than this, given the manner in which he viewed Dynamo’s visit largely within the context of his own preconceived political attitudes.

Writing to a friend a few days before ‘The Sporting Spirit’ was published, he pointed to the constant need to fight the ‘Russianisers’, Britons sharing Soviet habits of thought and helping to prepare the ground for the spread of Soviet totalitarianism (41). Today, it is easy to dismiss Orwell’s fears as exaggerated, but during this period pro-Soviet sentiment proved relatively strong. Timothy Garton Ash has pointed to Orwell’s belief that the British people had been blinded to the true nature of Soviet communism:

In part, this blinding was the product of understandable gratitude for the Soviet Union’s immense role in defeating Nazism. However, it was also the work of a poisonous array of naive and sentimental admirers of the Soviet system, declared Communist Party (CP) members, covert (‘crypto-’) communists, and paid Soviet spies. It was these people, he suspected, who had made it so difficult for him to get his anti-Soviet fable Animal Farm published in the last year of the last war (42).

British Communist Party members and sympathizers included Iris Murdoch and Kingsley Amis as well as such historians as Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm and E.P. Thompson (43). Subsequently in May 1949 Orwell sent the Foreign Office the names of suspected Communists, but the fact that none of the above-mentioned names figured on his list – this included Charlie Chaplin, Kingsley Martin, J.B. Priestley and Michael Redgrave – shows its limited nature (44). Anxious to check any attempt to represent Dynamo’s tour in a favourable political light concerning the British-Soviet relationship, Orwell alleged that it had merely made relations between the two countries ‘slightly worse’ than before (45). In particular, whereas Noel-Baker’s Mansion House speech glossed over the embittered controversies surrounding, say, Dynamo’s fixtures, the composition of British teams consequent upon the absence of some regular players on military service and on-the-pitch incidents resulting from contrasting styles of play and interpretations of the laws of the game, Orwell placed such problems centre stage. The fact that he had not attended any of Dynamo’s games failed to prevent Orwell’s barbs, which were based in part upon accounts provided by informants present at the matches involving Arsenal and Rangers as well as upon match reports in newspapers.

Apart from Soviet totalitarianism, Orwell targeted nationalism. Moving on from the ‘Notes on Nationalism’ article, he asserted that the ill-will arising during Dynamo’s tour proved ‘typical of our nationalistic age’ [author’s italics]. Extending his attack beyond football, represented as the worst sport for provoking ‘vicious’ nationalist passions, Orwell pointed also to cricket – by way of example, he cited the infamous Anglo-Australian body-line bowling issue (1932–3) – and boxing. Nor did he exclude the Olympic movement, as evidenced by his specific reference to such ‘orgies of hatred’ as the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Despite conceding that it was still possible to play sport simply for fun and exercise, Orwell complained about the way in which competitive sport placed a high premium upon winning rather than just playing. Even worse, governments, the media and public opinion linked national power and prestige with the competitive performance of national sports teams. In this regard, what was of interest in Orwell’s commentary was his attempt to move on beyond the players to identify the way in which spectators, the media and governments treated international sport as testing national virtue and power. Once this happened, he observed, ‘the most savage combative instincts’ were aroused upon the part of the whole nation. Moreover, international sport’s political ends were regarded as justifying the use of unsporting means upon the part of both players and spectators.

The competitive, divisive, frequently violent and unsporting nature of international sport meant that even in peacetime:

At the international level sport is frankly mimic warfare … you do make things worse by sending forth a team of eleven men, labelled as national champions, to do battle against some rival team, and allowing it to be felt on all sides that whichever nation is defeated will ‘lose face’.

In brief, ‘it is war minus the shooting’. Claiming merely to be saying publicly what ‘many thinking people’ had been saying privately for some time, Orwell took the opportunity offered by the end of the Second World War and Dynamo’s tour to respond to, even to attack, people – he mentioned no names – ‘blah-blahing’ about the healthy rivalry prevalent on the football field and the Olympic Games’ ability to bring nations together. In his opinion, Dynamo’s visit had merely created ‘fresh animosity on both sides’. Orwell urged that no British team undertake a return trip to the Soviet Union: ‘there are quite enough real causes of trouble already, and we need not add to them by encouraging young men to kick each other on the shins amid the roars of infuriated spectators’.

As a Labour Party Member of Parliament, Noel-Baker would have ready access to Tribune, and hence Orwell’s article. However, hitherto my visits to the Orwell Archive at Special Collections, University College London Library, and the Noel-Baker Papers at Churchill Archives Centre, University of Cambridge, have yielded no evidence regarding a personal exchange of views about ‘The Sporting Spirit’. Rather than attacking Orwell directly, Noel-Baker, it appears, preferred to make his case by articulating positive messages about international sport. More significantly, when Orwell’s article appeared, Noel-Baker was engaged already in confidential exchanges with the British Olympic Association (BOA) and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) preparing the way for the British government to announce, one month after ‘The Sporting Spirit’ was published, full support for London’s bid to host the 1948 Olympiad (46). Subsequently, following the award of the Olympics to London, Noel-Baker’s assumption of ministerial responsibility for the Olympiad provided numerous opportunities to give global visibility to his beliefs, most notably by aiming to stage a trouble-free event establishing his vision of Olympism. Requested to help draft prime minister Attlee’s welcome speech for broadcasting to competitors, Noel-Baker confronted Orwell’s view head-on, but without mentioning his name: ‘Sport today is truly international and a common love of sport creates a bond of friendship between men and women separated by distance and by the lack of a common language. It over-steps all frontiers’ (47). In this vein, Noel-Baker sought to build on Moscow Dynamo’s tour by securing Soviet participation in London 1948. In the event the Soviet Union, though mentioned in the Olympic souvenir programme as one of the countries ‘expected to take part’, failed to respond to the resulting invitations and pressure to join the IOC and to enter the Olympiad (48).

By contrast, Orwell was given a rougher ride by some of Tribune’s readers. In particular, his emphasis upon the politicization of British sport challenged the traditional carefully cultivated view that in Britain, unlike Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and the Soviet Union, sport was sport – fair play and all that – and not a political activity involving the government (49). As a result, Orwell’s article sparked off a mini-debate conducted during the next month or so by readers on the Tribune’s letters page. Dismissing his views as ‘bilge’, one reader accused Orwell of displaying ‘intellectual contempt’ for people playing or watching the national game, and particularly for those praising sport’s ability to bring nations and peoples together (50). Nor, this correspondent argued, did the knocks and bruises of a hard game necessarily ‘rouse passions of hatred or a vicious desire to atomise some distant fellow-creature’. One week later, another reader, complaining about his over-reliance upon unreliable ‘second-hand information’, challenged Orwell’s actual experience of sport when expressing fears that his musings on the subject might harm Anglo-Soviet relations: ‘International sports … are a potential source of vast streams of good-will, provided they are not polluted by ill-informed outpourings of politicians and intellectuals’ (51). A fortnight later, Tribune restored the balance by publishing two letters supportive of Orwell. For these readers, Orwell deserved praise for highlighting the absence of sporting spirit exhibited during Dynamo’s recent tour and the divisive political impact of international sport, since ‘quite a lot of evidence’ established that sport promoted patriotic, competitive and aggressive attitudes (52). Orwell made no response to such correspondence. Nor did he comment subsequently on the 1948 London Olympics, although this was more the consequence of serious illness – he was released from a seven-months stay in hospital on the day before the games started – and remoteness from London than of a change of view about either the politics of international sport or the Soviet Union (53).

Orwell in perspective

In ‘Why I Write’, published in Gangrel in Summer 1946, Orwell recorded that his writing possessed a clear purpose, perhaps warranting the descriptor ‘downright propaganda’:

What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make political writing into an art. My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice. When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, “I am going to produce a work of art”. I write it because there is some lie I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing (54).

In effect, his pen and typewriter proved tools to fight totalitarianism: ‘Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism’. However, ‘The Sporting Spirit’, like ‘Notes on Nationalism’, showed that his concerns ranged more widely, particularly his strong belief that the problems caused by nationalism also required ‘a hearing’. For Orwell, the fundamental problem was not so much sport but nationalism. From this perspective, ‘The Sporting Spirit’ was less an outright condemnation of sport, but rather yet another piece of Orwell’s political journalism, a critique of the Soviet Union – Moscow Dynamo was viewed as epitomizing the repressive Stalinist regime – accompanied by a warning about treating international sport as a tool of militant nationalism. What Orwell’s ‘war minus the shooting’ phrase highlighted was sport’s symbolic importance, the fact that national sports teams had come to be seen as one of the most visible, vivid and engaging manifestations of the nation operating on the world stage. For D.J. Taylor, ‘The Sporting Spirit’ highlighted also Orwell’s unworldiness:

International soccer, for Orwell, was simply nationalism in disguise – young men kicking each other in front of thousands of baying spectators in a pantomime representation of wider political conflicts. The pivotal role played by football in early twentieth-century working class life scarcely occurs to him. Coming from a writer so consistently engrossed in the ebb and flow of popular culture this apparent myopia is unusual, but it demonstrates the way in which great abstracts were beginning to dominate his thinking at the expense of detail (55).

Orwell’s article reflected the manner in which international sport was trapped, from its beginnings, in a major tension. On the one hand international sport was a cosmopolitan activity offering a meeting ground for peoples and cultures from around the world, as highlighted by the employment of the Olympic rings to emphasize the universality of Olympism in a nationalistic world. On the other hand, international sporting venues proved highly visible battlegrounds for testing national strengths and the pursuit of competitive prestige. Sportsmen and women might see themselves as engaged in purely sporting activities, but frequently they were viewed by governments, the media and public opinion as jumping, playing, punching, running, scoring or throwing for their respective nations in terms of projecting national values, strengths and weaknesses.

Orwell’s ‘The Sporting Spirit’ article figured prominently in the writings of Eric Hobsbawm, who proved instrumental in drawing sport into the historiography of nationalism when writing about the gladiatorial sporting contests held during the inter-war period: ‘Between the wars, international sport became, as George Orwell soon recognized, an expression of national struggle, and sportsmen representing their nation or state, primary expressions of their imagined communities’ (56). Hobsbawm pointed to the ease with which people, even the least political individuals, could identify with the nation when symbolized by the national football team: ‘The imagined community of millions seems more real as a team of eleven named people.’ Hobsbawm’s quote is even more valid today, when sport continues to offer the people mass spectacle. In particular, football stadia serve as theatres in which dramatic events unfold, albeit not always according to the script, and in which players seeking to influence referees often display brilliant acting talents worthy of an Oscar alongside their footballing skills. In this vein, Ian Buruma echoed Orwell when discussing international football as ‘a theatre of war’ between rival nations:

Territory is defended, or invaded; young men are cheered on to do battle; flags are waved and national anthems sung; and coaches are hailed as brilliant strategists. One of the pleasures of international football is the way revenge can be wreaked on old foes. And for those who grew up in times of peace, football is as close as they get to an experience of collective bellicosity (57).

The academic, media and public visibility achieved by Orwell’s commentary has obscured the fact that ‘The Sporting Spirit’ represented merely another chapter in a long-running debate about international sport, including the Olympic movement, as a force for peace or conflict. Despite claiming that he was the first to say publicly what many had thought privately, Orwell was not in fact the first to critique international sport, even if he argued the case more sharply than most and with greater impact. Whereas Noel-Baker, among others, followed de Coubertin in viewing international sport as the peacemaker drawing together a world of nation states, Orwell echoed those in Britain who had advanced more negative viewpoints in government and the media, as detailed in studies by Matthew Llewellyn, Martin Polley and the author.

Within Whitehall the official memory was dominated rightly or wrongly by enduring press images of British-American discord at the 1908 London Olympics, the so-called ‘Battle of Shepherd’s Bush’ (58). For British officials working in government, international sport, especially the Olympics, proved ‘fertile sources of international misunderstanding and squabbling’ (59). Nor during the period prior to the Second World War did most of the British media see things differently, as demonstrated by Blackwood’s Magazine’s reference to London 1908 when urging that ‘the Olympic Games should never be held again’ (60). This demand for ‘No More Olympic Games’ was echoed by The Times in 1924 in response to incidents at the Paris Olympics: ‘The peace of the world is too precious to justify any risk … of its being sacrificed on the altar of international sport’ (61). ‘Hitler’s Games’, Berlin 1936, gave fresh life to the critics, fuelling Winston Churchill’s fears that ‘sport, when it enters the international field in Olympic Games and other contests between countries, may breed ill-will rather than draw the nations closer together’ (62). Public opinion is less easy to evaluate, particularly given the paucity of opinion polls, but looking back to the period leading up to London 1948, Jack Crump, the manager of the 1948 British Olympic team, opined that the British public proved largely indifferent towards the Olympic movement (63). The relative lack of enthusiasm and apathy, even hostility, shown in Britain for international sport, including Olympism but excluding, say, the cricket Tests versus Australia, proved a perennial irritant for those adopting a more positive line, as shown by Noel-Baker’s frequent reliance upon journalism to spread Olympism’s message. Likewise, the constant struggle to secure sufficient funds from public appeals to send teams to the Olympics forced the BOA to launch repeated publicity campaigns (64).

Conclusion

Readers interested primarily in Orwell’s views about sport, particularly as articulated in ‘The Sporting Spirit’, might question the case for this study’s relatively lengthy treatment of the literary and political background, especially as he is quoted regularly on sport without any reference to the context. In reality, Orwell’s views on sport were more a matter of literature and politics, and hence need to be framed by his political journalism and discussed alongside such books as Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. For Orwell, sport served a symbolic purpose in terms of offering an alternative means for pursuing his political agenda, most notably his support for democratic socialism, his hostility to totalitarianism in general and to the Stalinist regime in particular, and his fears about the dangers of nationalism. Notwithstanding a modest personal interest in sport, Orwell did not regard the topic as a writing priority, except occasionally such as when prompted by the 1945 Dynamo tour. In turn, ‘The Sporting Spirit’, though still frequently quoted, has attracted little or no attention from his biographers, excepting D.J. Taylor, as typified by Crick’s coverage of the article in less than one line! (65)

Today, the precise nature of the links, if any, between international sport and international relations continues to be the subject of controversy. As was the case in 1945, when ‘The Sporting Spirit’ was published, no consensus exists on the subject, even if Orwell is almost always mentioned during the course of any contemporary debate. In his Tribune article, Orwell predicted that ‘no doubt the controversy will continue to echo for years in the footnotes of history books’. Orwell died in 1950, but his ‘war minus the shooting’ descriptor has endured and been much quoted over the years. Moreover, far from being relegated to the footnotes, the issue often occupied centre stage, especially as during the Cold War sport provided a high-profile battlefield upon which both sides of the Iron Curtain competed for primacy and were so presented in the media to a global audience. Unsurprisingly, what Christopher Chataway, a British Olympian turned broadcaster and politician, described as ‘Orwell’s savage summary’ of international sport was frequently employed as not only a general descriptor but also a reference point for discussion (66).

More recently, Orwell’s role in sporting issues, hitherto concentrated upon ‘The Sporting Spirit’ article and his writings about Burma, has been enhanced, given the media’s employment of Nineteen Eighty-Four in commentaries centred upon the erasure and rewriting of sporting history in such cases as that involving Joe Paterno, the head coach of Pennsylvania State University’s Nittany Lions football team. Following a child sex abuse scandal implicating Paterno and his coaching staff, in July 2012 the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) imposed sanctions including a $60 million fine, while ruling that all Penn State’s football victories from 1998 to 2011 must be airbrushed from the historical record (67). As a result, Paterno, who had died earlier in the year, no longer held the major college coaching record for career wins. Commenting on the NCAA’s actions in the New York Times, Northwestern University’s Gary Fine opined that ‘George Orwell would be amused’: ‘In his magnificent dystopia, “1984,” Orwell understood well the dangers of “history clerks.” Those given authority to write history can change the past. Those sweat-and-mud victories of the Nittany Lions – more points on the scoreboard – no longer exist. The winners are now the losers’ (68). Despite accepting the need for Penn State to be penalized, Fine questioned whether rewriting American footballing history over 14 seasons to ‘create a fantasized history’ was the right answer: ‘Men in suits should not undo what boys in uniforms have achieved’:

We learn bad things about people all the time, but should we change our history? Should we, like Orwell’s totalitarian Oceania, have a Ministry of Truth that has the authority to scrub the past? Should our newspapers have to change their back files? And how far should we go? While the shame of honoring flawed people in a record book is understandable, covering up what happened is never the solution. Building a false history is the wrong way to recall the past. True and detailed histories always work better.

Of course, this was not the first time that past sporting records had been erased and rewritten by a sporting organization seeking to ensure that its official history should reflect its preferred public image. Nor will it be the last, a point reaffirmed in October 2012 when a report from the United States Anti-Doping Agency led the International Cycling Union to strip Lance Armstrong of his seven Tour de France victories between 1999 and 2005. In turn, this repeated rewriting of sports history suggests that George Orwell, though writing only a few thousand words on sport, will provide academia and the media with a sporting reference point for some time to come on far more than his ‘war minus the shooting’ descriptor.

Acknowledgements

George Orwell’s correspondence and publications are quoted by kind permission of the Estate of the late Sonia Brownell Orwell. Extracts from The Annals of Lower College Foot-Ball and College Days are reproduced by kind permission of the Provost and Fellows of Eton College. I should like to acknowledge also the help and advice offered by Penny Hatfield, the archivist of Eton College, Michael Meredith, the curator of the modern collections at Eton College, Denise D’Armi, the collections administrator at Eton College, Bill Hamilton, John London and the anonymous referees.

Notes

1. Recent examples include David Goldblatt and Johnny Acton, ‘War Minus the Shooting’, The Huffington Post, July 24, 2012, available at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-goldblatt/war-minus-the-shooting_b_1699476.html (accessed November 2, 2012); ‘The Olympics: Playing Political Games’, University of Warwick Modern Records Centre, http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/services/library/mrc/explorefurther/images/olympics (accessed 20 July 2012); John Horne and Garry Whannel, Understanding the Olympics (London: Routledge, 2012), 126.

2. Geoffrey Wheatcroft, ‘Comment: Not a Socialist but a Radical’, The Guardian, August 25, 2012, 40.

3. ‘The 50 Greatest British Writers since 1945’, The Times, January 5, 2008, 15.

4. ‘Still the Moon Under the Water: an Exploration of the National Pastime’, The Economist, July 30, 2008, available at http://www.economist.com/node/11826680 (accessed September 14, 2012).

5. Simon Schama, A History of Britain, vol.3, The Fate of Empire, 1776–2000 (London: BBC, 2002), 454–558.

6. Juliet Gardiner, The History of the Future: 9. George Orwell. BBC Radio 4, September 20, 2012.

7. John Rodden, The Politics of Literary Reputation: The Making and Claiming of ‘Sir George’ Orwell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 42–6.

8. Joan Bakewell, ‘Forget the Politics and Build George Orwell a Statue’, Daily Telegraph, August 21, 2012, 24.

9. Orwell to Usborne, August 26, 1947, in George Orwell: A Life in Letters, ed. Peter Davison (London: Harvill Secker, 2010), xi–xii. Biographies include Michael Shelden, Orwell: The Authorised Biography (London: Heinemann, 1991); Bernard Crick, George Orwell: A Life (London: Penguin, 1992); D.J. Taylor, Orwell: The Life (London: Chatto & Windus, 2003); Jeffrey Meyers, Orwell: Wintry Conscience of a Generation (New York: W.W. Norton, 2000).

10. Blair to Moore, n.d., [November 19, 1932], in Davison, Orwell: A Life in Letters, 22–3, note 4.

11. Peter Davison, ed., George Orwell: Diaries (London: Harvill Secker, 2009), 23–73.

12. Bernard Crick, ‘Blair, Eric Arthur [George Orwell] (1903–1950)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), available at http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/31915 (accessed 4 November, 2012).

13. Antony Peyton, ‘“Tribune” Magazine Saved from Closure at Eleventh Hour’, The Independent, October 31, 2011, 22.

14. Orwell to Usborne, August 26, 1947, in Davison, Orwell: A Life in Letters, xi; George Orwell, ‘Preface to Ukrainian Edition of Animal Farm’, March 21, 1947, in Orwell and Politics, ed. Peter Davison (London: Penguin, 2001), 315–21.

15. Blair to Moore, May 9, 1944, in The Complete Works of George Orwell, vol. 16: I Have Tried to Tell the Truth, 1943–1944, ed. Peter Davison (London: Secker & Warburg, 1998), 182.

16. Orwell to T.S. Eliot, June 28, 1944; Orwell to Moore, March 19, 1944; Orwell to Struve, February 17, 1944, in Davison, Orwell: A Life in Letters, 236, 229, 226.

17. Orwell to Darlington, March 19, 1947, in Davison, Orwell: A Life in Letters, 346–7.

18. Blair to Plowman, February 19, 1946, in Davison, Orwell: A Life in Letters, 290.

19. Davison, Orwell: Diaries, 369–477; Robert McCrum, ‘The Masterpiece that Killed George Orwell’, The Observer, May 10, 2009, 8.

20. Orwell to the United Automobile Workers, USA, n.d., quoted in Life, July 25, 1949, 4, 6. Note ‘The Strange World of 1984’, Life, July 4, 1949, 78–85; but see Crick, ‘Blair, Eric Arthur’.

21. John Rodden, ‘Soviet Literary Policy: the Case of George Orwell, 1945–1989’, Modern Age 32, no. 2 (1988): 131–7.

22. Peter Davison, ‘Orwell and Sport’, Finlay-Publisher, March–May, 2009, 1, available at http://www.finlay-publisher.com/archives/Mar-May%202009%20-%20Peter%20Davison%20-%20Orwell%20and%20Sport.pdf (accessed September 12, 2012); George Orwell, ‘Such, Such Were the Joys’, circa 1947–8 [first published 1952], in Orwell’s England, ed. Peter Davison (London: Penguin, 2001), 394–5.

23. Davison, ‘Orwell and Sport’, 1–7; Orwell’s Wall Game team, 1921, George Orwell Archive Gallery, http://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/orwellimages (accessed October 12, 2012). The British Pathé website has several clips showing Eton’s Wall Game over time: see http://www.britishpathe.com/.

24. Meyers, Orwell, 36, 46; The Complete Works of George Orwell, vol. 10: A Kind of Compulsion, 1903–1936, ed. Peter Davison (London: Secker & Warburg, 1998), 56–7 note 1; Davison, ‘Orwell and Sport’, 1.

25. Roger Mynors, ‘In the Field’, October 6, 1920, The Annals of Lower College Foot-Ball, vol. 13, 1916–21, College Archives, Eton College.

26. ‘The Wall Game’, College Days, no. 3, St. Andrew’s Day [November 30], 1919, 78, The College Archives, Eton College.

27. Peter Davison, George Orwell: A Literary Life (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1996), 13.

28. Exceptions include The Complete Works of George Orwell, vol. 10, 53–4, 56; Meyers, Orwell, 36.

29. George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (London: Victor Gollancz, 1937), 208–9.

30. George Orwell, ‘As I Please’, Tribune, April 14, 1944, in The Complete Works of George Orwell, vol. 16, 152.

31. Orwell, ‘Such, Such Were the Joys’, 394–5.

32. George Orwell, ‘Shooting an Elephant’, in Complete Works, vol. 10, 501.

33. George Orwell, ‘The Sporting Spirit’, Tribune, December 14, 1945, 10.

34. George Orwell, ‘Notes on Nationalism’, October 1945, in The Complete Works of George Orwell, vol. 17: I Belong to the Left, 1945 (London: Secker & Warburg, 1998), ed. Peter Davison, 141–57.

35. Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism: Programme, Myth, Reality, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 1–13.

36. Ronald Kowalski and Dilwyn Porter, ‘Political Football: Moscow Dynamo in Britain, 1945’, International Journal of the History of Sport 14, no. 2 (1997), 100–21; David Downing, Passovotchka: Moscow Dynamo in Britain, 1945 (London: Bloomsbury, 1999); Peter J. Beck, ‘Anglo-Soviet Relations 1930–1954: The British Government and the Footballing Dimension’, in Sport and Politics, eds Katalin Szikora et al. (Budapest: Semmelweis University, 2002), 90–2; Matthew Taylor, The Association Game: A History of British Football (Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2008), 203–4.

37. James Riordan, ‘Worker Sport within a Worker State: The Soviet Union’, in Arnd Krüger and James Riordan, eds, The Story of Worker Sport (Leeds: Human Kinetics, 1996), 60–4.

38. Anthony Eden, May 24, 1945, FO371/47854/N6038, The National Archives (hereafter TNA); Thomas Brimelow, October 17, 1945, FO371/47857/N13812, TNA.

39. ‘Dynamo Team at the Mansion House’, The Times, December 5, 1945, 2.

40. Peter J. Beck, ‘Confronting George Orwell: Philip Noel-Baker on International Sport, Particularly the Olympic Movement, as Peacemaker’, The European Sports History Review 5 (2003): 193–8.

41. Orwell to Sayers, December 11, 1945, in Davison, Orwell: A Life in Letters, 275.

42. Timothy Garton Ash, ‘Orwell’s List’, New York Review of Books, 25 September, 2003

43. David Kynaston, Austerity Britain, 1945–1951 (London: Bloomsbury, 2007), 133–5, 342–3; Peter J. Beck, Presenting History: Past and Present (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 72–8.

44. Orwell to Kirwan, May 2, 1949, in Peter Davison, ed., The Lost Orwell (London: Timewell Press, 2006), 140–51; FO1110/189, TNA.

45. Orwell, ‘The Sporting Spirit’, 10–11.

46. Ernest Bevin to Portal, January 15, 1946, FO371/54785/W454, TNA.

47. Quoted in Peter J. Beck, ‘Britain and the Olympic Games: London 1908, 1948, 2012’, Journal of Sport History 39, no. 1 (2012), 32–3; Beck, ‘Confronting George Orwell’: 198–201.

48. Olympic Games London 1948. Official Souvenir (London: Futura, 1948), 12–13; Peter J. Beck, ‘The British Government and the Olympic Movement: The 1948 London Olympics’, International Journal of the History of Sport 25 (2008), no. 5: 631–3.

49. Peter J. Beck, Scoring for Britain: International Football and International Politics, 1900–1939 (London: Frank Cass, 1999), 334, 276–84.

50. E.S. Fayers, letter to the editor, Tribune, December 28, 1945, 11; Fayers, letter to the editor, Tribune, January 25, 1946, 12.

51. J.A. Mills, letter to the editor, Tribune, January 4, 1946, 12. Having attended the actual game, Peter Davison questioned Orwell’s overly negative account of the Dynamo-Rangers match as a continuing free-for-all: Davison, ‘Orwell and Sport’, 6; Complete Works of George Orwell, vol. 17, 446, note 2.

52. T. Brown and ‘J.M.’, letters to the editor, Tribune, January 18, 1946, 12.

53. Davison, Orwell: Diaries, 485.

54. George Orwell, ‘Why I Write’, 1946, in The Complete Works of George Orwell, vol. 18: Smothered Under Journalism, 1946, ed. Peter Davison (London: Secker & Warburg, 1998), 319.

55. Taylor, Orwell, 367. See also my comment, linked to note 29, about The Road to Wigan Pier.

56. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism, 142–3.

57. Ian Buruma, ‘What Football Fans Can Learn from Geese’, The Guardian, June 18, 2002, Section 2, 5.

58. Beck, ‘Britain and the Olympic Games’, 30–6; Matthew Llewellyn, ‘Rule Britannia: Nationalism, Identity and the Modern Olympic Games’, International Journal of the History of Sport 28, no. 5 (2011), 188–90; Martin Polley, ‘“No Business of Ours”?: The Foreign Office and the Olympic Games, 1896–1914’, International Journal of the History of Sport 13, no. 2 (1996): 107–11.

59. Stephen Gaselee, April 25, 1938, FO370/551/L2857, TNA.

60. ‘Musings Without Method: The Folly of International Sport’, Blackwood’s Magazine 192 (August 1912), 255; Matthew McIntire, ‘National Status, the 1908 Olympic Games and the English Press’, Media History 15, no. 3 (2009): 271–86.

61. Editorial, The Times, July 22, 1924, 15; Beck, Scoring for Britain, 91–4.

62. Winston Churchill, ‘Sport is a Stimulant in Our Workaday World’, News of the World, September 4, 1938, 12–13.

63. Jack Crump, ‘The Real Result of the London Olympic Games, 1948’, Bulletin du Comité International Olympique 19 (January 1950), 18.

64. Llewellyn, ‘Rule Britannia’: 703, 739–40, 760–3, 782.

65. Taylor, Orwell, 367; Crick, George Orwell, 333.

66. Christopher Chataway, ‘An Olympian Appraises the Olympics’, New York Times Magazine, October 4, 1959, 50; Philip Goodhart and Christopher Chataway, War Without Weapons: The Rise of Mass Sport in the Twentieth Century – and its Effect on Men and Nations (London: W.H. Allen, 1968), 158.

67. Pete Thamel, ‘Real N.C.A.A. Penalty for Penn State, but no Cheers yet’, New York Times, July 23, 2012.

68. Gary Alan Fine, ‘Op-Ed: George Orwell and the N.C.A.A.’, New York Times, July 24, 2012. The Nineteen Eighty-Four link had already been made in a blog: Mark Rhoads, ‘NCAA Partly Right and Partly Wrong’, Illinois Review, 23 July, 2012, available at http://illinoisreview.typepad.com/illinoisreview/2012/07/ncaa-partly-right-on-penn-state.html (accessed October 12, 2012). Nor was this the first time that the NCAA had been linked with Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four exposé: Joe Nocera, ‘Op-Ed: Orwell and March Madness’, New York Times, March 30, 2012.