sportswashing, the use of anathletic event by an individual or a government, a corporation, or another group to promote or burnish the individual’s or group’s reputation, especially amid controversy or scandal.

The term was coined in 2015 as aportmanteau ofsports andwhitewash to describeAzerbaijan’s use of the European Games to divert international attention away from concerns over human rights in the country. It came into popular use about 2018, whenAmnesty International began using it to draw attention to the correlation between the decline ofhuman rights inRussia in the 2010s and Russia’s hosting of theSochi 2014 Olympic Winter Games and the 2018World Cup. The term counters the notion ofsports competitions as apolitical and instead suggests that such contests often benefit governments that engage in unsavory policies.

Since then, accusations of sportswashing have been leveled against a number of events hosted byauthoritarian governments, such as theBeijing 2022 Olympic Winter Games, which were held against the backdrop of theChinese Communist Party’s systemic abuses of the MuslimUyghurs in theUygur Autonomous Region of Xinjiang.Qatar likewise tried to put on a positive face for the2022 World Cup despite a troubling human rights record, which included the extensive exploitation and abuse of migrants in preparation for the tournament. Moreover, the launch that same year of the LIV Golf series—which has included some of the game’s biggest stars, such asPhil Mickelson—also drew controversy, as its sponsor,Saudi Arabia, was accused of sportswashing its human rights violations.

The concept has since been applied retroactively to a number of historical sporting events that likewise coincided with human rights concerns. The most notorious example of sportswashing is theBerlin 1936 Olympic Games, sometimes pejoratively called the “Nazi Olympics.” The athletic festival faced unsuccessful calls for aboycott against theracist regime ofAdolf Hitler, which assured theInternational Olympic Committee that qualifiedJewish athletes would be part of the German team and that the Games would not be used to promoteNazi ideology. Nevertheless, when the Games were held, onlyone member of the German team was of Jewish descent, and Nazipropaganda was commonplace, as the Nazi government tried to portrayGermany as a peaceful and tolerant country to foreign visitors and internationalmass media.

At the conclusion of the competition,The New York Times praised the Nazi-runOlympic Games as “the biggest athletic games ever held, the most largely attended, the best organized, the most picturesque and the most productive of new and startling records.” The newspaper talked up the “good-humored, happy crowd” and added, “That is the picture that foreign visitors will take home, to the undoubted improvement of world relations and general amiability.” Three years later German armies invadedPoland, and by the end ofWorld War II in 1945 some six million Jews (and millions of others) had been killed by Nazi Germany in theHolocaust.

Like the 1936 Olympics, the 1978 World Cup was the subject of unsuccessful boycott efforts. It took place inArgentina, where the military had seized power two years earlier and was engaged in systematic human rights abuses—including killing between 10,000 and 30,000 people—in a campaign known as the Guerra Sucia (“Dirty War”; 1976–83). One of the leaders of the junta, Adm.Emilio Massera, said on the eve of the World Cup, “Holding the tournament will show the world that Argentina is a trustworthy country, capable of carrying out huge projects. And it will help push back against the criticism that is raining on us from around the world.” At the opening of the tournament, organizers released hundreds of doves, and Pres.Jorge Rafael Videla declared, “We hope these games will contribute to strengthen peace, which we desire for all the world and among all men.” The Argentine team ultimately won the championship, invigorating thenationalistic spirit that had fed into the Guerra Sucia, which ended only as the junta’s hold on the government began to wane in the early 1980s.