Abstract
The national sport cultures of countries like Norway and Canada, which in part motivated international sport aid in the late twentieth century, also led to a generation of high-performance athletes concerned with social issues and schooled in the efficacy of sport-for-good. This increasingly activist generation argued for greater transparency in sport governance but also believed in the power of sport to address social ills. Prominent among them was Norwegian speed skater Johann Olav Koss, who founded the sport-for-development-focused non-governmental organization (NGO) Right to Play. The international profile achieved by NGOs like Right to Play and the Mathare Youth Sports Association, based in Kenya, illustrates the prominence that sport-for-development achieved in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Their rise to prominence also points to the influence that civil society organizations would come to have within the Sport for Development and Peace sector, as well as the challenges that sport NGOs would have in integrating into the mainstream development sector.
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Notes
- 1.
Fred Coalter, A Wider Social Role for Sport: Who’s Keeping the Score? (London: Routledge, 2007).
- 2.
For an example of athlete resistance in Africa, see Callie Batts, “‘In good conscience’: Andy Flower, Henry Olonga, and the death of democracy in Zimbabwe,” Sport in Society 13, no. 1 (2010): 43–58.
- 3.
David L. Andrews, “Michael Jordan Matters,” in Michael Jordan, Inc.: Corporate Sport, Media Culture, and Late Modern America, ed. David L. Andrews (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2001), xiii–xx.
- 4.
For more on the IOC 2000 Commission and the reforms of this period, see John J. MacAloon, “Scandal and governance: Inside and outside the IOC 2000 commission,” Sport in Society 14, no. 3 (2011): 292–308.
- 5.
Larry Maloney, “Lillehammer 1994,” in Historical dictionary of the modern Olympic movement, eds. John E. Findling and Kimberly D. Pelle (Westport, CT, and London: Greenwood Press, 1996), 330.
- 6.
Ibid., 331.
- 7.
It is worth noting the similarity to the Peace Corps experience in the Dominican Republic in the mid-1960s, where aid workers found that an ad hoc baseball team was the route that allowed them to engage in community development. See Chap. 4.
- 8.
While “tied aid” has specific implications in the contemporary international development context, Munro is using it here to indicate MYSA was not beholden to funding organizations’ mandates, methods, and monitoring and evaluation requirements.
- 9.
Munro also encountered corruption when dealing with local officials and land developers. “We learned early on Kenya had district development committees at the local level. So, we’d see some public lands in the slums and we’d go to the district development committees sort of excitedly and say ‘Look, this is sort of waste ground, can you give us permission to develop it? We’ll get some donors and put up some goalposts.’ And within a month, the land was gone. So, we realized we were just the scouts for the corrupt people, and they’d grab it.”
- 10.
Owen Willis, “Sport and development: the significance of Mathare Youth Sports Association,” Canadian Journal of Development Studies 21, no. 3 (2000): 845.
- 11.
Koss’s partner, Belinda Stronach of Magna, encouraged him to seek out Peel’s expertise.
- 12.
Olympic Aid/Right to Play would incorporate similar values in its 5 Rings approach, using the well-known Olympic symbol to promote a broad-based approach to children’s development, which associated each of the five colors of the Olympic Rings with a development goal: mind, spirit, body, health, and peace. “Right to Play (formerly Olympic Aid),” UNHCR, http://www.unhcr.org/3ee980d713.pdf, accessed 11 July 2018.
- 13.
According to Ann Peel, the fight over the name Olympic Aid had mostly to do with the IOC’s sense that they were losing control of their brand: “My speculation [over the name change] is because they [the IOC] weren’t in control. The IOC, quite fairly, wants to be in control of its brand. We were only building the brand - we were building asset value - so it wasn’t a crisis, but I think they wanted to take back control of their brand.” There are several possible explanations for this change in IOC support. One is that Rogge had risen to power as IOC president backed by Russian Olympic interests and the Russians did not support Olympic Aid’s efforts. Another explanation is that Koss—through his increasing profile and connections to the UN—was seen to be growing too powerful and overshadowing the IOC itself. A third, and related, explanation is that Koss was viewed to be angling for more political power within the IOC and his ambitions needed to be curbed. Koss does acknowledge that his profile increased significantly around this time given the work that Olympic Aid was doing, although he maintains: “I had no interest in political ambitions in the IOC, but people didn’t see it that way.” Regardless of the motivations or politics, it is worth noting the similarities to the IOC’s efforts to distance itself from other attempts at reform and/or development, including OATH (discussed above) and the IOAC (see Chap. 5).
- 14.
Gina McMurchy-Barber, When Children Play: The Story of Right to Play (Markham, ON: Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 2013), 18.
- 15.
Ibid.
- 16.
Ibid., 37.
- 17.
“Athlete Ambassadors,” Right to Play, http://www.righttoplay.ca/Learn/keyplayers/Pages/Athlete-Ambassadors.aspx, accessed 12 July 2018.
- 18.
McMurchy-Barber, When Children Play, 29.
- 19.
Ibid., 18.
- 20.
This was when Lorna Read joined Right to Play.
- 21.
Musheke Kakuwa, Zambian Traditional Games and Activities: Kicking AIDS Out Resource Book (Lusaka: Kicking AIDS Out Secretariat, 2005); Donald Njelesani, “Preventive HIV/AIDS Education through Physical Education: reflections from Zambia,” Third World Quarterly 32, no. 3 (2011): 435–52.
- 22.
Clement Chileshe, A child Empowerment through Sport and Traditional Games integrated with HIV/AIDS, Child Rights & Alcohol/Drug Abuse life skills concept: Sport in the Development Process Leadership Manual (Lusaka: Sport in Action, 2004).
- 23.
Oscar Mwaanga and Davies Banda, “A Postcolonial Approach to Understanding Sport-Based Empowerment of People Living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA) in Zambia: The Case of the Cultural Philosophy of Ubuntu,” Journal of Disability & Religion 18, no. 2 (2014): 173–91.
- 24.
Tess Kay, Louise Mansfield, and Ruth Jeanes, “Go Sisters: Year 3 evaluation report” (Unpublished report to UK Sport, 2012).
- 25.
“Goal Program,” Naz Foundation, http://nazindia.org/goal/, accessed 9 July 2018.
- 26.
Megan Chawansky and Lyndsay M.C. Hayhurst, “Girls, international development and the politics of sport: introduction,” Sport in Society 18, no. 8 (2015): 877.
- 27.
Aziz Choudry and Dip Kapoor, “Introduction—NGOization: Complicity, Contradictions and Prospects,” in eds. Aziz Choudry and Dip Kapoor, 2013 in NGOization: Complicity, Contradictions and Prospects (London: Zed Books, 2013), 1–23.
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Darnell, S.C., Field, R., Kidd, B. (2019). Athletes, NGOs, and SDP. In: The History and Politics of Sport-for-Development. Global Culture and Sport Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-43944-4_9
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