The fight for equality. Racial conflicts. Political, ideological disputes or territorial rivalries. Honor, money, lies, cheating or doping. The sweet defeats and the bitter victories. Everything can be counted with and through sport. Something that has always been there and will always be in our lives, as Marcos Pereda states.
The writer publishes Princes and Slaves, a social and cultural history of sport (Ariel), a book that is not only addressed to sports fans. Among other things, because he considers that one of the ideas he tries to convey is that sport transcends 90 minutes, or 80, or however long each discipline lasts, to enter into more social, historical, and cultural issues. “In the same way that many people can read books about classical music or about a sculptor without having to be very crazy about those topics,” he emphasizes.
To facilitate this, Princes and Slaves… is presented through “flashes”, moments or photographs of specific moments that represent a before and after in the history of sport. Pereda is a defender of the pedagogical possibility of the anecdote, of “fixing something in the mind based on an anecdote and then giving way to a development that will be much easier to understand.”
This is a rigorous test… and at the same time very fun. How do you get the perfect mix?
I believe that being fun is not the opposite of rigorous, and rigorous is not synonymous with boring. You can talk about everything from a certain humorous point of view, it is a kinder way of reaching the reader. In the end we cannot forget that we are talking about sport, from very diverse areas, but about sport. If there is a moment when it stops being fun and enjoyable, it becomes something else. And then we have a problem.
Sport has always been there, can everything be told from your perspective?
You can talk about culture taking sport as an example. We can talk about racism, class struggle, fight against machismo. I found it to be an interesting and profound way to talk about all these topics. Absolutely everything can be told, perhaps with the exception of homosexuality in football (and that I understand clearly what I mean), because it seems that it does not exist and you sometimes find embarrassing statements from the protagonists.
Aside from this issue, which I mention almost in a shamefully joking tone, I believe that everything can be told, because, really, sport has accompanied us since the world was the world, since humanity was humanity. It has been the driving force and mirror of all the social and cultural changes that have taken place.
Why are we so fascinated by sport?
In it you can see practically everything that happens to you in life reflected, and, at the same time, it is a space of brutal expansion for feelings. Also to gregarize, with all the good and bad that that word has. The good thing is that it allows us to establish community ties that are almost stronger than the community ties themselves. And the bad thing is because one falls into gregariousness and false anonymity, and thus the one who is cocky is more cocky and the one who is stupid is more stupid.
Although traces can be guessed in previous cultures, can it be said that the kilometer zero of sport, as we know it, starts with the Greeks?
Sport as we understand it, of two or more people competing in a more or less physical activity, is inherent to the human race. Whenever we think about their origins we think of the Greeks in a somewhat naive way, because we represent them in an elevated way, we imagine the Olympic Games, focusing on the most religious, cultural or sacred aspect (which it is true that they had it), but forgetting that they were athletes like those of today and that there were cheats, with their doping, with people who got rich because they were very good at what they did, just as happens today.
Of all the historical moments that you reflect in the book, which do you consider the most significant?
I’ll stick with the famous Mexico 68 podium with Tommie Smith and John Carlos raising their fist with a black glove while the American anthem played. It is very shortly after the massacre in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas. Smith and Carlos went there against the opinion of some black athletes, who had held a meeting before the Olympic Games and had proposed a boycott. These two athletes are expelled from the Olympic Village and even a United States newspaper accuses them of having given a Nazi salute. They are treated little more than like criminals. It is a moment that has many nuances and many edges.
What episode surprised you the most in your research to write this book?
I have loved the Cotswolds Games, those crazy rural Olympic Games that exist in Great Britain and appear in Shakespeare’s plays and that have been revived half a century ago. They have tests like smashing pianos, or hitting each other with a rag soaked in beer, or tests of singing while getting kicked in the shins. That union of anthropological, ethnographic manifestations and festivities has always enchanted me.
Throughout history, sport has served as a tool of social control, as an instrument of racial or sexual discrimination and, at the same time, for the opposite: vindication, protest and the improvement of society. Are they the two eternal faces of sport?
Yes. It is something we can see every day. A very simple example: you can carry banners with political content on Spanish league soccer fields, but they are going to be taken away because they are prohibited. And even if you could take them out, the televisions are not going to focus on you. The sport continues to function in that dichotomy between those who want it to be pure bread and circuses and those who take advantage, or would like to take advantage of it, to make it something more. Sometimes, from a positive point of view, and other times negative. But all the demonstrations on a football field, even if they exist, we are not going to see because they are being deliberately stolen from us.
Sport and power. Sports and politics. Sport used by power. Is it inevitable?
Yes, definitely. But just like the literature used by power. Just like theater or cinema. Sport is a huge economic activity. I always give the same example: when Madrid and Barça face each other, two entities are facing each other that have, between them, more than a billion euros in budget. It’s as if Zara and Mercadona were facing each other.
What we see are twenty-two guys in their underwear and many times we miss everything behind them. Obviously, the powers that be want to get into this and use it. And then, as a purely spectacle manifestation, it is something that moves many people. A very sweet element to manipulate, or to use, or to lean on.
It has also seduced multiple artists. Can we say that sport is an art?
I think it can have a significance beyond mere athletic visibility, so to speak. It is a perfect mechanism as a narrative argument from a literary or pictorial point of view, although I also think it can be enjoyed without going into too many epistemological turns.
What is true is that it has seduced many artists and creators throughout history. Furthermore, there is something very important, and that is that in recent years, for example, in our country, we are seeing how this feeling of superiority, of snobbery of the writer or of the writer, has been naturally eliminated with the arrival of a new generation. intellectual who said “no, sport is for brutes.”
Are the princes and slaves from before that you talk about in your book the same princes and slaves as now?
Well it’s a good question. I believe that princes have remained the same all their lives and slaves remain the same as two thousand years ago, although they let us think otherwise. In some cases, not thanks to sport, but by relying on sport, improvements have been achieved. For example, racial minorities have achieved improvements, as have women in their rights or through greater visibility for their problems.
And how do you imagine the future? What will sport be like in a hundred years?
I reflect precisely on that in the last chapter. I have closed the book with that idea and left it floating there, so that everyone could interpret what they wanted. But I focus on the fact that there has always been sport, with other connotations, with another vision, with another name, but there always has been. I don’t know what it will be like, it will probably be very different, but I am sure that in a hundred years we will have sport.
