The new edition of the New Yorker pertinently reminds us FIFA awarded Qatar the right to host the World Cup on December 2, 2010. On the same day, the organization’s executive committee voted to give Russia the 2018 edition. Of the twenty-two men who voted, fifteen were later indicted by American or Swiss prosecutors, banned from soccer, charged by FIFA’s ethics committee, or expelled from the International Olympic Committee External advisers pointed out that Qatar did not have a single suitable stadium, that it was a potential security risk, and that temperatures in the summer reach a hundred and ten degrees.

In the following twelve years, the World Cup catalyzed a breathtaking construction boom in Qatar, which relied overwhelmingly on migrant workers from South Asia. Human-rights organizations reported (allegedly some 500) deaths, poor workplace safety, and misery among unpaid workers, who were trapped in Qatar’s unequal immigration system. Gay and trans people expressed shock that the World Cup would be held in a country where homosexual activity and all forms of extramarital sex are punishable by up to seven years imprisonment. “It’s not just sad, it’s sick,” Thomas Hitzlsperger, a gay former member of the German national team, told the Guardian.

Abandoned by politicians, who don’t like to offend Qatar, which is the world’s largest exporter of liquid natural gas, players and coaches had to juggle an impossible multiplex of sports, human rights, and authoritarian capitalism.  A group of European team captains, including England’s Harry Kane, who had planned to wear rainbow-colored “One Love” armbands, to show their support for L.G.B.T.Q. rights, changed their minds when they were threatened with yellow cards by fifa. The Iranian players showed their Western counterparts what actual courage looked like, by refusing to sing their national anthem, in solidarity with recent protests against the clerical regime.

As the Tournament draws to an end it’s hard to find anyone who has come out well of this whole debacle.  Certainly not Brit celebrity footballer David Beckham who accepted $200 million from the Qatar Government to white-coat their global reputation:  or Tony Blair the ex-Brit PM  who lectured the world ‘Don’t disrespect Qatar’ and said it’s time to ‘move on’ from World Cup protests about LGBTQ+ rights; FIFA World Cup ambassador and former footballer Khalid Salman has said homosexuality is “damage in the mind,” in an interview with German broadcaster ZDF ; and then there is former Brit footballer John Fashanu who went on TV to blast the World Cup protests and claimed it was ‘culturally inappropriate to wear a ‘OneLove’ armband.  That hurt even more than most as Fashanu’s brother Justin, also a pro footballer, who committed suicide aged 37 after he received so much negativity when he came out as gay.

It’s particularly worrying then that some of the 69 countries where being gay is still illegal have plans to mount major Sport Events.  Such as Cameroon, where gays could face five years in prison for sexual intimacy, who will preside over the 2024 African Athletics Championships, while Morocco, which also provides a five-year sentence for erotic contact between people of the same gender, is set to host next year’s ISSF World Cup Shotgun Morocco.

Next year  Uzbekistan will host the AIBA Men’s World Boxing Championships. Men in that country could face three years of prison time for having sex with other men, though sexual contact among women is not criminalized.  Also in 2023, Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, will oversee next year’s Wheelchair Basketball World Championships. The laws there provide severe punishments for same-gender sexual activity, including the death penalty.

And if we haven’t had enough of Qatar, its galling to learn that they have a number of other major sporting events lined up after the World Cup. They include both the ISSF World Cup Shotgun Qatar and the World Judo Championships in 2023 and the FINA World Championships in 2024.

Trying to make some sense of why this should happen we reverted back to the latest edition of The New Yorker for an explanation. Evidently, the correct expression is  “sportswashing,”. It describes the activities of sovereign wealth funds like Saudi Arabia’s, which recently acquired Newcastle United, an English Premier League soccer team, and plans to spend two billion dollars on liv, a breakaway golf league. The term suggests using sports to launder a lousy reputation. But, in the case of Qatar, staging the World Cup was more about gaining a reputation at all. Even bad publicity—around labor practices and human rights—is publicity. 

Personally, we believe in the possibility that we all need to not just keep up all the pressure we can, and the very least keep sharing all the bad publicity as extensively as we can.  Queerguru talks off our hats to Outsports, the world’s leading LGBTQ-sports publication. They do an excellent job highlighting the stories of LGBTQ athletes, coaches, and other people in sports who show us all that Courage Is Contagious

http://www.outsports.com/

Posted by queerguru  at  20:01

Labels:  2022, homophobia, LGBTQ sports, Qatar, World Cup