Barbaric Sport by Marc Perelman

Author:Marc Perelman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2014-04-22T04:00:00+00:00

10. THE GLOBALIZATION OF SPORT THROUGH DOPING

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 contained the promise of a benign globalization. It had seemed too much to hope for, given the rapid development of a pure, hard-core capitalism crossed with a mafia-like socio-political order in the former strongholds of ‘real socialism’. But in the East, in just a few years and almost without violence, an empire collapsed into itself without outside intervention. Something that had seemed indestructible – a vast society spread over a gigantic territory with its military, its police, nuclear technology and so on – splintered apart in quite a short time. Something that had been thought eternal fell to pieces without a sign of regret from a society willing to accept a Western economy, amid a new profusion of merchandise now being supplemented from the heart of the former Soviet empire and its satellites.

The abrupt implosion of the so-called socialist regimes liberated the consumers’ thirst for goods and their overwhelming desire to embrace capitalist values and to sweep away anything that might still recall the former system. Great hordes of people rushed to satisfy their long-frustrated desire to consume, flocking into the inviting supermarkets, immense hangars stuffed with goods available to all. On returning home, sated and somewhat nauseated by these visits to the new temples of consumer debauchery, people slumped in front of a mind-sapping screen. Slowly the countries of the former Soviet bloc were liquidating their past, leaving a clear field for the new values and the inexhaustible availability of consumer products, from the basic to the sophisticated. The ex-communists – party chiefs, members of the different police bodies, patented bureaucrats and so on – learned a good deal from their Western counterparts and incorporated most of the values of a system whose essentials they adopted with panache, while developing or maintaining their own way of doing things with a certain crafty knowhow. For it is well known that while the dominant system is capitalist (generalized and violent competition, obsession with profits, limitless market expansion, crises galore, warmongering …), the new businessmen of the former Soviet rampart were able to entrench their existing methods in readiness for the new markets starting to appear.

Now we see them taking an interest in sporting affairs, starting with British football: the owner of the Chelsea team is Roman Abramovich, a Russian oil magnate. Russians, but not only Russians, are coming to ‘old Europe’ to take up powerful positions in the world of finance, and currently in sport. A US billionaire, Malcolm Glazer – the 278th richest person in the world – holds 28 per cent of the shares in Manchester United, and today controls 57 per cent of them. Glazer also owns one of the better American football franchises, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Other English teams part- or majority-owned by US citizens are Aston Villa (Randy Lerner); Sunderland, Liverpool, and Arsenal (bought in 2011 by Stan Kroenke). Manchester City belongs to the half-brother of the Emir of Abu Dhabi,

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