Vol. 27 No. 291 (2022)
Everything changes
These days, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) returned the gold medals to Jim Thorpe, winner of the pentathlon and decathlon events at the Olympic Games of Stockholm in 1912. Thorpe, who died in 1953, was stripped of his titles as he was considered a cheater, for violating the strict rules of amateurism in those days, since he had earned some money playing baseball in a minor league team. For years the communities of native American people to which the athlete, considered in those years as the best in the world, belonged, fought to vindicate him in the face of tremendous injustice. The event reveals one of the many examples of the enormous transformations that have taken place in the last century.
Undoubtedly, we will witness enormous innovations with the popularization of technology, applied sciences, professionalization, the fight for equal rights, and other social and cultural changes. At the same time discussions, debates, complaints, hopes, disputes between conservatives and progressives, are all the ingredients that always make sport something striking and convening.
These days the Chess Olympiad is taking place in Chennai, in the south of India, with the participation of 350 teams from 186 countries and it involves two categories of competition: Open (regardless of gender) and Women. The event offers a format that all sports federations should reproduce, considering those who today have no chance of accessing the major prizes awarded by sport and may choose to do so, and those who want to continue competing in a protected category, could also keep competing there. This is a fairer and more equitable alternative, surpassing the ancestral model of segregated sport, which should not wait 110 years to be represented.
Tulio Guterman, Director - August 2022
Published:
2022-08-08
