Refusal to perform in sport
Refusal to perform in sport , also known as a slow strike or postponement , depending on the connotation , occasionally takes up a large part of sports reporting.
This does not speak of a reduction in performance due to personal deficits such as illness, burnout , motivation problems or the like, but the intention of an immoral , fraudulent or protest-politically motivated under-performance.
Differentiation between fraudulent and sport-political underperformance
Common terms in sports fraud are "pushing" or "packing". If, however, an athlete protests z. B. against training conditions and deliberately runs very slowly, in order to draw attention to this grievance, this is called a "strike", "slow strike" or "refusal to work". Fraud is mostly related to bribes (see football betting scandal 2009 ) that a mafia-like group of betting fraudsters pay to athletes or officials and expect a reduction in performance in return.
Often the cause of poor performance is the lack of or lack of incentive to win, for example when a qualification limit has already been reached and additional effort only brings about the risk of injury and exhaustion. In some sports, a betting system can also be tactically desirable in the further course of the tournament not to win an intermediate round competition (for example in order not to meet a certain strong opponent in the next round). In many competition rules there are rules that require all participants to strive for the best possible personal performance, otherwise disqualification threatens .
Some athletes who want to collect an entry bonus, but are not fit or are already hopelessly behind after a partial competition, behave in the same way. Employed athletes of a club, who have internally alienated themselves from the club or its officials, sometimes regard a competition as an annoying compulsory exercise and respond with service according to regulations .
In sport-political protests, athletes on the go on strike obviously want to achieve a sport-political or personal goal, such as resignation of officials, changes to rules, training conditions, protests against unfair competition, referee decisions, doping controls , racism or other procedures that are perceived as unworthy, security improvements and the like.
Examples
- The 1998 Tour de France went on a go-slow strike during Stage 17 and the whole field was deliberately slow and illegal.
- In 1982, the footballers involved in the Gijón non-aggression pact were satisfied with the end result early on and only played the ball in a circle.
- The football match AS Adema - SOE Antananarivo 2002 ended with 149 own goals.
- France played miserably at the 2010 World Cup because of internal disputes, boycotted training and hardly offered any resistance to the early elimination.
- At the 2012 Olympics, eight badminton players were excluded for deliberately playing poorly.
- At the Le Mans start in 1969, Jacky Ickx deliberately walked slowly to the car and started with a long delay, but won the race anyway.
- In 2009, the Giro went on a slow strike because road conditions were considered unsafe.