They tell us that the Olympics are a celebration of the people. They speak of brotherhood, peace, merit, and individual sacrifice. But behind the waving flags and national anthems, the reality is different: high-level sport, increasingly, is a sector integrated within the state and military apparatus. Not a free and popular sphere, but a propaganda, recruitment, and discipline device. In Italy, the phenomenon is evident to all, even if it is rarely questioned. At the 2024 Paris Olympics, over 70% of Italian athletes-more than 280 out of 403-are enrolled in military or police sports groups. Army, Carabinieri, Guardia di Finanza, State Police: medals are counted in uniform. This is not an administrative detail. It is a political fact.
The Athlete as a State Official
Italy employs approximately 2,500 athletes, coaches, and managers within its armed forces and police forces. In many cases, enlistment is not an ideological choice, but a material necessity: without the "uniform," there is no salary, no continuity of training, no social security coverage. The message is clear: if you want to compete at a high level, you must join the ranks.
Sport, thus, is no longer an autonomous space, but a branch of the state apparatus. The athlete becomes a public employee, framed within hierarchical structures, subject to military discipline, inserted into a system whose ultimate goal is not collective emancipation, but national prestige.
This transformation is not new. During the Cold War, the Soviet bloc regimes developed the "state athlete" model as a tool for geopolitical competition. But today, in the midst of advanced capitalism, we are witnessing a paradoxical convergence: formally opposed models find themselves united in the same logic of control and nationalization of sport. Russia, China, Germany, and many other countries maintain sports structures linked to the armed forces. Italy is not a folkloristic exception: it is one of the most structured cases in Western Europe.
Nationalism, discipline, propaganda
The problem is not public support for sport. The problem is what kind of support, and with what logic.
When sport is embedded in the armed forces and police, it inevitably becomes intertwined with the culture of obedience, hierarchy, and nationalism. Medals become instruments of soft power. Athletes become symbols to be displayed in institutional parades. The rhetoric of sporting sacrifice overlaps with that of military sacrifice.
In a context where defense spending is growing everywhere, and where the arms race has once again become a political priority, the absorption of sport into the military takes on an even more disturbing significance. The same organizations that manage training and armaments also finance gyms and athletics tracks. The line is becoming blurred. It's no coincidence that many disciplines historically supported by military groups are those that serve a certain idea of virility and national strength: shooting, fencing, athletics, winter sports. Meanwhile, grassroots sports, those of the suburbs, popular gyms, and self-managed associations, survive with insufficient funding and chronic insecurity.
A false alternative: enlist or quit
This mechanism creates a profound distortion. Those who don't join military sports groups remain marginalized. Private sponsors are few and far between, focused on the more media-rich sports. Federations don't guarantee sufficient support. Thus, enlistment becomes almost obligatory. It's a form of structural co-optation: the state absorbs talent by offering economic security in exchange for membership. Explicit coercion isn't necessary; widespread insecurity is enough. The result is a double inequality: on the one hand, between athletes "in uniform" and civilian athletes. On the other, between sports supported by the state apparatus and sports left to decay. Sporting merit is filtered through an institutional access system. In this context, Olympism loses any pretense of neutrality. Flags do not represent peoples, but states. Anthems do not celebrate communities, but apparatuses of power.
Reclaiming a social and self-managed sport
If sport is to truly be a space of emancipation, it must be removed from military and nationalist logic. It's not about privatizing it, but about socializing it.
Public resources currently channeled into the armed forces could directly finance: independent amateur sports associations, with scholarships and salaries for athletes without the obligation to enlist; self-managed neighborhood sports facilities, accessible free of charge or at nominal costs; inclusive local programs that prioritize mass participation over Olympic showcases; cooperative networks between sports clubs, free from military hierarchies and police controls.
At the same time, a radical debate should be opened on the very model of international competitions. Why continue to organize sport around competing nation-states? Why not imagine transnational federations, territorial representations, mixed teams?
A liberated sport is not a sport without organization. It is a sport freed from the logic of command.
Against the Olympics in uniform
The issue is not the good faith of individual athletes, who often have no real alternatives. It concerns the structure that encompasses them. As long as the path to the sporting elite passes through enlistment, sport will remain a cog in the state apparatus. As long as medals are counted as national trophies, Olympism will be a competition between powers, not between people. Returning sport to society means disarming it. It means separating it from barracks, police stations, and the logic of geopolitical prestige. It means bringing it back to neighborhoods, schools, and community gyms.
Sport can be cooperation, mutualism, and collective growth. But only if it stops marching in step.
Parpajon
https://umanitanova.org/olimpiadi-in-divisa-quando-lo-sport-diventa-un-ingranaggio-dello-stato/
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Link: (en) Italy, FAI, Umanita Nova #6-26 - Olympics in Uniform. When Sport Becomes a Cog in the State's Wheel (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]
Source: A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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