This idea of my identity, this idea that I get to walk around with pride, is about all the different ways we get to plug into sports. It’s what Jesse Owens did to Hitler in the Olympics. Here’s a guy saying, “I’m going to take over the world, and my pure race is better than all of the other races.” That included black people, and that included Jesse Owens. In front of the whole world, in Berlin, Jesse Owens dramatically disproved that theory in human, real, on the ground — literally on the ground — terms.
Two Jewish sprinters weren’t allowed to run, so that footnote should be made. But this is the way sports can amplify, magnify, and otherwise powerfully communicate social conditions in a way that very few other things can, differently than movies or books or plays, which are enormously powerful cultural vehicles. But they’re scripted. The author is intentional. The author is in control.
In global sports and sports management, we don’t know what will happen. And that’s the excitement. That is the humanity of it. We don’t know what will happen until it happens.
Sports management education courses tackle the theme of sports and national identity.
