They have to. It is ridiculous to suggest that they don’t. To resist political influence in sport is futile.
Governments fund sport. Funding without influence just doesn’t happen in the Real World.
Take FIFA or the IOC. Most of their revenue (over 90%) comes from the World Cup and the Olympic Games respectively.
Those events could not happen if they were not underwritten by governments and indeed they make it a condition that the host nations governments sign up to a plethora of guarantees and underpinnings on everything from security to taxation.
So unless we can say politics has nothing to do with government then it is obviously to do with sport and it will exert influence. Just the very notion of a country or city hosting a major event is mixing sport and politics.
Time to ditch this silly old cliché —
of course politics and sport are intertwined. Inseparable in fact. For federations and governing bodies to be screeching about undue political influence in sport is ridiculous.
