The Ethical Use Of Boycott In Sports

What is a boycott? Rothbard Murray defined the term “Boycott” in his book The Ethics of Liberty as a legal voluntary and persuasive action that people show in a specific action towards a specific decision or incident that they consider against their moral values. Hence, the boycotters decide to develop and express the attitude of refuting an idea by simply boycotting it. Together, the boycotters having the same purpose, they eventually express themselves and put some pressure on the targeted person, government or decision maker in order to reflect their feedback and show their opinions towards a specific issue that they find not proper. Boycotts can simply be seen when people refuse to buy certain products, dealing with persons, organizations

Being so powerful and being watched by almost all the people around the globe, being as well strong in gathering the people together and affecting their emotions, politicians have decided to make use of this powerful tool in order to reach the people and convince them with their ideologies and to promote their regimes. As a result of that, sports has been effectively used a strong political tool. (Abraham Mark 2011) (3)
Still, in the contemporary world, sports have turned into an immense industry and include global, financial and political characteristics. Therefore, the governmental issues are affecting sports on the basic financial and political aspects. (Mughal) (4)
The use of sports in the modern age was introduced during the modern times by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics “USSR” seeing that this regime was the first to promote the communist ideology through sporting programs. In 1928, the USSR created their own type of Olympic games and called them the “Spartakiads” which revealed the support of the communist regime to its sports initiative. (Lin Yang) (5)
When defined in sports, the boycotting of the Olympic Games was defined by Flavio de Almeida in his book “The Moscow Olympic Games Boycott” as the demonstrations that characterize the liaison between sport and political aspects.

First, to have an impact on Europe, USA used Helmut Schmidt -who was Chancellor of West Germany from 1974 to 1982- in order to convince the publics to boycott the Moscow Games where he instructed the West German citizens to simply comply with what they were being asked to do. Second, the famous professional American boxer Muhammad Ali was appointed by the US administration to travel to Africa and convince the African countries to join the boycott. Among his major tasks, he was asked to go to Tanzania, Nigeria and Senegal. However it was discovered that Ali’s mission in Africa was a diplomatic disappointment.