The De Coubertin ideal lulled the West into the illusion that sports could serve as a sanctuary for humanity—a peaceful limbo impervious to the upheavals of history. The 21st century has violently shattered this dogma, and the competitive arena has instead become one of the most sensitive barometers of the global geopolitical crisis.
Through an analysis of the privatization of sanctions in the Russia-Ukraine conflict, the ideological fault lines in the Middle East, and the sophisticated sportswashing strategies of the Global South, the metamorphosis of sports takes shape: from a universal utopia to a critical infrastructure of hybrid warfare and, at the same time, to the last, hard-fought bastion of educational and civic resistance.
The Twilight of Universalism: From the “Free Space” to Hybrid War
“The cathedral of sport is the only place where national borders
dissolve before the ticking of the same stopwatch.”
Jean Giraudoux
The 21st century has imposed a brutal and irreversible revision of the de-Coubertinian paradigm. That ideal horizon, which for over a century portrayed the competitive arena as an island of value-neutrality—a neutral zone removed from the miseries of ordinary diplomacy—has now been definitively superseded. Interstate conflicts in Eastern Europe and the dramatic resurgence of the crisis in the Middle East have demonstrated that the “cathedral of sport” is no longer a protected ecosystem, but rather a direct, choreographed, and media-driven extension of hybrid warfare and global polarization (Boniface, 2014).
To understand the depth of this epistemological rupture, it is useful to draw a historical parallel with the transition that preceded World War I. The revival of the Olympic Games in the modern era, championed by Baron Pierre de Coubertin at the end of the 19th century, took place during a period marked by apparent international stability following the 1878 Berlin Congress. Public opinion on the continent at the time, lulled by the certainties of the Belle Époque, lived under the illusion that war was a relic of the past. That prolonged period of European non-belligerence had fostered a generation convinced that the global balance of power was an immutable fact—a strategic blindness that caught European states unprepared in the face of the mobilization of 1914.
Mutatis mutandis, the contemporary geopolitical landscape bears dangerous similarities to that situation. The very long period of relative peace experienced by the West after World War II has fueled a new illusion of invulnerability. In this context, mass sports have been entrusted with a utopian responsibility: to serve as a perpetual, bloodless substitute for conflict.
However, the fluidity of today’s multipolar context has shattered the spell. Today, the competitive dimension does not passively witness the crisis of the international order but is subjected to its ideological colonization (Giniu, 2018). Sports competition has been transformed into a modern theater of confrontation in which global and regional powers no longer seek détente, but rather the symbolic reaffirmation of their spheres of influence. Giraudoux’s stopwatch, therefore, no longer dissolves boundaries; on the contrary, it has become the instrument for measuring their irrevocable polarization.
The Privatization of Sanctions: The Russia-Ukraine Case and the Status of the Neutral Athlete
The military aggression against Ukrainian sovereignty has forced the regulatory institutions of international sports law—first and foremost the International Olympic Committee (IOC)—to undergo a doctrinal metamorphosis without historical precedent. Faced with the need to sanction the violation of the Olympic Truce, the classic model of international response revealed all its structural limitations, necessitating a conceptual shift that redefines the relationship between the individual, the state of nationality, and the global sports system.
To grasp the scope of this revolution, we must look to the dynamics of the Cold War. The major reciprocal boycotts of the 1980 Moscow and 1984 Los Angeles Olympics took the form of macro-political sanctions involving government-led blockades. In those scenarios, exclusion or withdrawal was dictated by sovereign decisions of states: the athlete was a mere component of the state apparatus, and his or her absence from the competitive arena represented an act of diplomatic rupture between clearly defined geopolitical blocs. The sanction was collective, state-imposed, and two-dimensional.
The contemporary scenario, by contrast, has codified the “privatization” and individualization of sanctions through the introduction of the status of NAI (Neutral Individual Athletes). The admission of Russian and Belarusian athletes to top-tier international competitions has been removed from the jurisdiction of their respective National Olympic Committees—which have been suspended by the IOC—and made subject to a rigorous individual ethical and political vetting process (IOC, 2023).
From a psychological and legal perspective, this practice introduces an unprecedented mechanism: the scrutiny of the conscience and conduct of the individual citizen-athlete. To obtain the “neutral” sports passport, the athlete must not only renounce the symbols of their homeland’s identity (flags, anthems, national colors), but must also pass a test demonstrating no ties to their government’s military and propaganda apparatus. This screening extends to the verification of employment contracts (many Eastern European athletes have historically belonged to military clubs such as CSKA) and even to the monitoring of public statements on social media platforms (Rivista di Diritto Sportivo, 2024).
This reveals a profound philosophical paradox: the state is indirectly sanctioned, but the ethical and civic burden of the sanction is placed entirely on the shoulders of the individual athlete. The athlete is required to implicitly distance themselves from their government’s policies in order to exercise their right to work and compete. While this legal framework aims to preserve the principle of non-discrimination based on nationality, it also marks the definitive end of the illusion that the athlete is a neutral entity—a purely athletic figure devoid of civil responsibility.
On the chessboard of hybrid warfare, the athlete’s body ceases to be a temple of universalism and becomes the battleground on which the degree of ideological submission or resistance to state power is measured. Guaranteeing the support of sports institutions to individual athletes who accept neutrality undoubtedly represents an institutional choice aimed at protecting them from radical isolation, preventing the severing of channels of dialogue from facilitating their conscription—whether material or propagandistic—into the armed forces. Nevertheless, the codification of AIN status will go down in the history of public sports law as the moment when geopolitics claimed the right to scrutinize the private sphere and moral stance of the individual before allowing them to step onto the competition track.
The Middle Eastern Fault Line: The Podium as a Stage for Historical Traumas
While Eastern Europe has redefined the legal boundaries of individual sanctions, the dramatic and constant tensions in the Middle East have transformed the competitive arena into a stage where the deep polarization between the Western diplomatic bloc and the demands of the so-called Global South is played out. In this scenario, sports lose their cathartic and peacemaking function, transforming instead into a highly sensitive barometer of geopolitical escalation.
The most striking manifestation of this shift is the breakdown of protocols of sporting courtesy, foremost among them the systematic and codified refusal to shake hands with an opponent. The gesture of physical contact at the end of a competition—which, in classical doctrine, symbolized the recognition of otherness and shared submission to the same ethical code—is now rejected and transformed into an act of political hostility.
This refusal, observed repeatedly in the international circuits of judo, fencing, and tennis, follows a logic of pure relational boycott: acknowledging the presence of the other on the sporting stage would, in the perception of the athletes and their respective federations, amount to legitimizing the state they represent.
The disciplinary sanctions imposed by international federations to uphold sports regulations end up triggering a further breakdown in communication. In the eyes of public opinion in non-Western countries, the disqualification of an athlete who expresses solidarity on the podium or refuses to greet an Israeli opponent is interpreted as evidence of an institutional “double standard.” This generates an asymmetrical narrative: whereas the West sees the necessary defense of sports’ neutrality, the Global South perceives systemic hypocrisy that severely sanctions certain geopolitical behaviors while tolerating others.
The arena thus ceases to be a space where boundaries dissolve and becomes the site of a dramatic, choreographed reenactment of unresolved historical traumas. Through global digital platforms and social media algorithms, every single match becomes imbued with an excessive symbolic density. The playing field undergoes a veritable semiotic occupation: victory or defeat no longer belong to the realm of athletic merit but are immediately subsumed into their respective war propaganda.
In this context, the tragic memory of the massacre at the 1972 Munich Olympics—where a terrorist cell cut short the lives of the athletes on the Israeli delegation—serves as a constant warning. History shows that when the barrier of sports neutrality is broken down, the stadium is no longer a refuge but a target. It is essential to eradicate all forms of anti-Semitism and prejudice from sporting events, whether they manifest in violent forms or are concealed beneath disguised expressions of protest or ambiguous positions of institutional neutrality. [1 – continued]
