Introduction: Sport and the Transnational

Research on sport has traditionally prioritized the linkage between ‘sportization’ – understood as ‘the competitive, regularized, rationalized, and gendered bodily exertions of achievement sport’ (Maguire, 2007) – and both social modernity and the spread of nationalism. However, the rise of modern games was also intrinsically transnational:

While the British Empire may have dominated this process of diffusion, French pioneers also contributed significantly as sporting evangelizers, most obviously through the creation of international bodies and competitions which still dominate today's globalized ‘sportscape’. The Olympic Games were inaugurated in their modern form in 1896 by Baron Pierre de Coubertin, operating through the Comité Olympique International (COI), which he had established in Paris in 1894. The football World Cup was launched in 1930 by Jules Rimet, President of the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), which had been founded in Paris in 1904. These quadrennial mega-events were thus authentically French contributions to the sporting invention of tradition, providing the organizational framework for much that is most visibly transnational in modern sport.

As a committed imperialist, Coubertin was determined to use sport for colonial ends. He campaigned, unsuccessfully, for the establishment of an African Games, which he went so far as to schedule provisionally for Algiers in 1925 (Auger, 2000: 65–66). By this date, the quintessentially Olympic sport of athletics had been durably implanted in France's North African colonies, particularly in the sphere of distance running. The international competitive advantage resulting from this successful dissemination was highlighted by the victory of the Algerian-born Ahmed Boughera El Ouafi in the marathon at the 1928 (Amsterdam) Olympic Games, who became Africa's first gold medallist, albeit in French colours (Gastaut, 2003: 10–11). Athletics would continue to be exploited for the purposes of colonial consolidation and imperial promotion in the decades that followed, culminating in the glittering career of the resolutely pro-French runner Alain Mimoun (born Ali Mimoun Ould Kacha), who followed in El Ouafi's footsteps to win the marathon at the 1956 Olympic Games (Belal, 2000).