Last Tuesday, on the same day crown prince Mohammed bin Salman was accorded a trillion-dollar genuflection in the White House by the uncrowned prince of darkness, it was also announced that French golfer Victor Perez and broadcaster Henni Zuel were joining LIV Golf – one of Saudi Arabia’s lipstick-and-mascara projects.
Their statements were full of pretentious motives and the usual blizzard of buzzwords such as “purpose”, “vision”, “creativity”, “energy”, “innovation”, “pushing boundaries”, “meaningful progress” and a host of others that could have been drizzled on the page, in any order, and still mean nothing. Everybody who has joined LIV Golf since its inception has portrayed their move in preposterously self-aggrandising terms.
But there is no longer any pushback or uproar. The ultimate purpose of “sportswashing” is normalisation. When Saudi Arabia set out on its mission to invade sport on many fronts and colonise as much of sport’s territory as money could buy, there was widespread hand-wringing and moralising, but over time the protesters have been outlasted. Money has inexhaustible stamina.
Saudi Arabia’s invasion of sport trained a spotlight on human rights abuses, their treatment of women and the LGBTQ+ community and their grotesque record of executions. But that attention would have been budgeted into the plan. Anyway, they didn’t care. Their assumption that everybody had a price was a percentage call.
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When Saudi Arabia was setting out on this mission, one of the atrocities thrown in its face was the gruesome murder in 2018 of Jamal Khashoggi, a critic of the Saudi regime in his Washington Post column, and the founder of DAWN (Democracy for the Arab World Now), a campaigning organisation that still exists today.
Khashoggi’s memory was desecrated by Donald Trump in the Oval Office last Tuesday in the process of licking the boots of the crown prince.
In the seven years since his murder, sportspeople who had hitched their wagon to the Saudi gravy train were sometimes asked about Khashoggi. Naturally, those questions petered out too.
Despite that and everything else, Saudi Arabia continued to strike deals with shimmering global stars and major global sports to build a sporting Disneyland in their kingdom. Some of it was a karaoke version of the real thing, but that didn’t matter. Sport afforded them some soft power and soft light.
Along the way, Shane Lowry has been one of the sportspeople exposed to this kind of stuff. The Saudi International, staged again last week, used to be a megabucks tournament known for its lavish appearance fees. After he won The Open in 2019, Lowry signed a three-year deal to play at the event.
At the time, it was on the European Tour schedule, but when that deal expired in 2022, LIV had been born and the Saudi International had taken refuge on the Asian Tour.
Lowry, though, was still under contract to play. Before the Saudi International that year, he took part in a conference call with reporters to promote the event. Just like the other players on that call, he was asked about “sportswashing” and Saudi Arabia’s human rights record.
“Look,” said Lowry, “obviously there’s no hiding from the people writing about this tournament or what they’re saying about us going to play. But at the end of the day, for me, I’m not a politician, I’m a professional golfer. I earn a living for myself and my family and try and take care of those, and this is just a part of that.”
However, in an interview on the No Laying Up podcast eight months later, Lowry expressed regret at some of the things he had said in defence of his participation. “When I said the ‘I’m not a politician’ remark, my first thought was ‘why did I say that?’. It was the wrong thing to say. The thing is I played the Saudi International for the last three years so, for me, I would have been very hypocritical if I sat here and said ‘it’s about where the money is coming from’.”
Lowry said, too, that he had “misjudged the room.” So, how should we read the room now?
When Lowry won the BMW PGA Championship at Wentworth in 2022, he said of certain LIV players that he “couldn’t stand them being there”.
Yet, two months ago, he won the Ryder Cup on a team that contained two LIV players. Rory McIlroy changed his tune on LIV players being on the team too.
At the DP World Tour’s season-ending event recently, Tyrrell Hatton – who took the Saudi shilling at the beginning of 2024 – was one of only two players who could have caught McIlroy in the Race to Dubai standings.
The lunacy of that clarified the power of sportswashing. In their desperation to win the Ryder Cup, the DP World Tour choreographed a dance with Hatton and Jon Rahm so that they could both be on the team in Bethpage. Despite all the conflict, and LIV’s despised role as a disruptor, the sight of LIV players at DP World Tour events has become normal.
Sportspeople carry the brunt of these conversations and there is a certain unfairness in that. In the world of trade and commerce, for example, there are no such spasms of conscience. In 2023, the two-way trade between Ireland and Saudi Arabia exceeded $4.3 billion, according to government figures.
Four years ago, then-tánaiste Leo Varadkar led a trade mission to Saudi Arabia that included representatives from 60 different Irish companies. Questions about the morality of doing business with Saudi Arabia were floated before the trip, but just like all the sportspeople who have done business with the murderous regime, a justification was baked for public consumption.
A spokesperson from Enterprise Ireland acknowledged the seriousness of the human rights issues, but assured us there was “ongoing dialogue” on a “bilateral level” – words that could have been uttered by Nigel Hawthorne on Yes Minister.
“The role of Enterprise Ireland is to grow exports and sustain jobs and companies around the country,” the spokesperson told RTÉ.
In other words, only the bottom line mattered. That is how sportswashing works too. The protests wax and wane, but the bottom line never moves.
So now, the protests have died. Saudi Arabia has sunk its claws into boxing, tennis, snooker, golf, Formula One and football. The Olympics is next. Sportswashing wins because sportswashing writes its own rules.
We lost.
