The audience sees only the spectacle provided by Olympic athletes and ends up having a distorted view of the life they experience. The pictured day-to-day glamor with mishaps is not the reality, according to Professor Katia Rubio, from USP's School of Physical Education and Sport (EEFE), and a participant in the 2nd edition of the IEA Sabbatical Year Program.

'The professional athlete of today is a nomad who goes where there are job offers and these displacements affect their identity,' says Rubio, who is developing the research project 'The Influence of National Displacements and Transnational Migration in the Formation of the Identity of Brazilian Olympic Athletes.'

The corpus of the research is the more than 1,300 biographical narratives of Brazilian athletes that participated in the Olympic Games from 1948 to 2016, a material produced by the researcher in the last 17 years.

Public policies

Rubio's perspective is that her research becomes a contribution to the generation of public policies in support of athletes. One of them would be professional regulation: 'But it will have to be a differentiated policy, even in terms of retirement, because the athletes have a much shorter professional life than other workers. In addition, they often begin their career before the age that is determined as the minimum for the work of minors.'

Another outcome of Rubio's research will be the production of subsidies for the academic and applied works of the specialists that accompany the trajectory of an athlete, which in the case of psychologists, physicians, physiotherapists, nutritionists, social service staff ('mainly for the youth system'), anthropologists and sociologists.

She believes that the work can also provide indications for the full preparation of athletes, something 'already existing in some training clubs that are concerned in providing athletes with information about the world they are facing.'

Katia Rubio

The institutional structure of sport also profoundly affects athletes, according to Rubio. 'The dedication to sport is born as an activity of the individual, but then they must submit to the hierarchical structure of the country, from the need to be linked to a club to playing regional tournaments for their city and achieving the national team, which participate in international tournaments.'

She compares this situation to 'an iron ball attached to the athlete's foot,' so that from the moment they enter the system 'they lose freedom to move as a citizen the way they would like to.'

Professionalization

With professionalization in the 1980s, sport has become a transnational labor market like few others, says Rubio. 'It does not matter what language the athlete speaks. What is expected of them is that they will train, compete and be champions.' That has completely changed the dynamics of the Olympic sport, she says.

'While developing my research, I will analyze the whole process of these individuals that leave their place of origin, become citizens of the world and at the same time lose the reference of themselves during the numerous processes of displacement.'

Even the speed of travel today affects the athlete's life: 'Today, when it is possible to be on the other side of the world within 36 hours, the athletes do not experience the displacements as in the past. They do not have time to adapt to new places and cultures. They get there and start training, spending six to eight hours on it. Another eight hours remain for a social life that some of them are not able to develop. Some try to learn the language and get cultural information, making a minimum adjustment to food and climate. Others simply go without any previous preparation.'

Rubio points out that one thing is the athlete's desire to live this life. Another is when they realize that the level of expectation about that desire is much greater than the harshness of life in the place where they went to. 'It is not uncommon to know about an athlete who is an idol in Brazil becoming an outcast when going abroad, and ending up not meeting expectations. This turns into a snowball that affects them deeply.'

Photos (from the top): Danilo Borges/ME; Leonor Calasans/IEA-USP

Former FIFA President Joseph Blatter between Dilma Rousseff and Vladimir Putin, presidents of Brazil and Russia, during a ceremony in 2014 | Photo: Press Release / Kremlin

Physical educator Marco Antonio Bettine, a professor at USP's School of Arts, Sciences and Humanities (EACH) since 2013, started the development of his research project on the geopolitical dynamics involved in the choice of host countries for the FIFA World Cup. He has been one of the selected researchers to participate in this year's Sabbatical Year Program.

With "Soft Power: A Look at the Strategic Use of BRICS Hosting the FIFA World Cup - Analysis of South Africa, Brazil and Russia," Bettine will try to understand how FIFA has become an economic, political and legal power capable of governing a cultural asset such as football, the most popular and practiced sport in the world. At the same time, he intends to build relationships between the participation of three BRICS members - Brazil, Russia, and South Africa - as host countries of the World Cup and the variations in their soft power.

The concept of soft power has been developed by American political scientist Joseph Nye in contrast to hard power. According to Nye's definition, while hard power provides for the use of the economic and war power of a state to influence decisions of another state or political body, soft power presupposes the use of diplomacy and culture as instruments of influence. "Examples of hard power used by the USA government are the economic sanctions on Cuba and Venezuela, and the military actions in the Middle East," explains Bettine. "The American soft power, on the other hand, aims to reach other countries through persuasion, example and the film industry."

The researcher's analysis will focus on the World Cup editions held in South Africa (2010), Brazil (2014) and Russia (2018). News stories that were published during these events by some of the world's top media outlets will be the main source of information. With data from Google Trends, Bettine has compared the number of hits from eight outlets based in four countries to determine which ones would be analyzed. Le Monde (France), BBC (UK), and El Pais (Spain) have been chosen due to greater methodological adaptation.

Brazilian, Russian and South African outlets will not be considered for the project "because the objective of the work is the analysis of foreign visions on the BRICS. And who holds the power of international decisions in the political sphere are the foreign newspapers."

Researcher Marco Antonio Bettine | Photo: Personal archive

Mega-sport events and soft power

Bettine understands that sport, because of its undeniable cultural and social influence, has become a powerful instrument of soft power. As a result, organizations such as FIFA and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) have acquired a great capacity for persuasion towards potential host countries for events such as the FIFA World Cup and the Olympics. From the perspective of the countries, these competitions are commonly seen as opportunities to spread their culture, infrastructure and sovereignty to the world, as well as to strengthen local trade and tourism. For the researcher, the interest is mutual: to FIFA, the financial gains and the increase of its political force is very attractive, while for the host countries there is a desire of increasing soft power and international influence.

South Africa saw the event as an opportunity to become the representative country of pan-Africanism - a movement that seeks the emancipation and socioeconomic development of the African continent -, explains the researcher. Brazil wanted to consolidate the national image abroad. Among other things, the Brazilian government sought a permanent member position in the United Nations Security Council, a more active participation in international relations, and the gain of relevance within BRICS and MERCOSUR.

According to Bettine, Brazil was seen with disrepute by the foreign press, which believed the country was unable to carry out a mega-sport event. He recalls, however, that a week after the start of the matches, the outlets declared themselves deceived: without major problems, Brazil conducted the World Cup in an efficient way. For him, in terms of soft power, "the Cup was a success for Brazil and Dilma Rousseff's government."

In a contrary movement by the time of the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil had undergone a presidential impeachment process in addition to several economic and social fragilities which damaged the image of the event. The clear vulnerability of Brazilian democracy led international outlets to pay more attention to the malfunctions practiced during the Olympic Games.

"If the country is doing well internally and has a certain international strength, it is able to influence the ways and choices of the media," explains the researcher. "If it is destabilized, it can not create its own agendas for dissemination in international media."

Germany and Argentina face off in the final of the World Cup 2014 | Photo: Danilo Borges / Wikimedia Commons

BRICS and the World Cup legacy

The last three editions of the FIFA World Cup have been hosted by BRICS-member countries. According to Bettine, this is due to the fact that they are, in general, "nations with fragile democracies, but with great financial potentials and in search of greater international visibility". The democratic weakness of host countries is, according to him, a fundamental part of FIFA's decision-making process: "Jérôme Valcke, former FIFA secretary general who was dismissed on charges of corruption and misconduct in ticket sales for the 2010 and 2014 events, said that 'too much democracy hampers the holding of the World Cup.'"

One of the mechanisms of influence and co-optation used by FIFA to persuade countries to host the World Cup is the promise of structural reforms and the improvement of the country's infrastructure, according to the researcher. In the events hosted by BRICS members, however, the promises have been disregarded almost completely. The improvement of the regional HDI, public transport, and access to basic sanitation have been the main broken pacts. "Brazil and South Africa are countries that continue to have basic infrastructure problems, even around the big stadiums built for the matches," says Bettine.

The researcher points out that from 2015 FIFA's mistakes have come to an inflection point. Several high-ranking members of the organization started to be tried and convicted of crimes committed during the World Cups in 2010 and 2014, and in the choices of Russia and Qatar as host cities for 2018 and 2022, respectively. The convictions, however, were not motivated by noncompliance with promises made in the periods prior to the events, by frauds in ticket sales, or by gentrification processes influenced by sporting events, but by attempts at money laundering in shell companies In the USA.

Interdisciplinarity

According to the professor, the interdisciplinary character of the project comes from the simultaneous approach of themes such as international relations, global governance, media influence, Brazilian culture, and the cultural importance of football.

For him, the main focus of the research is to understand how all of these news stories can help "to define the role of FIFA, of sociological theory, and of soft power's and hard power's political theory during the organization of the World Cup by the BRICS members."