The ‘Great Game’ and Sport: Identity, Contestation and Irish–British Relations in the Olympic Movement

Abstract

She has published extensively on the nexus of sport and identity, including gender, national identity, and pain and injury. Professor Joseph Maguire is past-President of both the International Sociology of Sport Association (ISSA) and the International Sociological Association Research Committee 27. He has published extensively on sport, culture, and society and has received two major awards: from the North American Society for the Sociology of Sport for Distinguished Service and ISSA.highly visible manifestation of nationalism (Campbell, 2000;Mangan, 2003;Maguire, 2012): a source of unity and division, within and between countries/nation-states and regional units; mobilized or even weaponized (Coates, 2017) in battles for political and cultural supremacy. Indeed, by the 1980s, the sixth President of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), Lord Killanin, an Irishman who served as Brigade Major in the British Army in World War Two, acknowledged his 'complete defeat in […] attempts to make the spirit of the Games less nationalistic ' (1983: 9). War and sport were thus potent forces in the creation of imagined communities (Hobsbawm, 1990;Mangan, 2003;2003a) in which sportspeople were patriots at play. Indeed, as Mangan has observed (1985), the games ethic underpinned notions of imperialism and military endeavour. Sport was therefore central to twentieth-century questions of identity, diplomacy, and statecraft, and to understanding war with other means.Set in this context, three fundamental questions underpin this case study. Who represented 'Ireland' at the 1948 London Olympics, as competitors and officials, and for what purposes? Who was attracted to or repelled by this representation, and why?And, what does this reveal of international sport as war with other means? These questions were directly connected to political, diplomatic and international relations, whose relevance was important for the trajectory of Irish state formation. The actions of protagonists in our case study demonstrate that Olympic and international sport was, for them, a diplomatic, cultural and symbolic means of projecting a 32-county 'Ireland' on the international stage in the aftermath of World War Two (WWII). Here, we focus on the quest for exciting significance by non-state actors / sportive diplomats, who were the forerunners of a more specialized diplomacy of international sport todaysportcraft (Liston and Maguire, 2020). This was both a 'patriot game' and a struggle for 'soft