For years Bloody Elbow’s Karim Zidan has reported on the intersection of sports and politics. Specifically, Zidan has identified incidents where powerful (and often despotic) regime use sports to advance their goals.
Sometimes those goals include distracting the international community, and corporate partners, from human rights abuses. This practice has been coined ‘sportwashing’.
Recently Zidan appeared on a panel, organized by the Oslo Freedom Forum, to discuss Saudi Arabia and their sportwashing practices. Appearing alongside Zidan was Russian chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov and Saudi dissident Areej al-Sadhan.
Al-Sadhan works for the humanitarian group Red Crescent Movement.