The World Cup football match and the Olympics are held worldwide with great
national support and expectations. As a fan of those competitions, I agree with
the idea that sporting events can be necessary for international relations and
national unity.
In this essay, I will think about the effects of these popular
sporting events.
First of all, the World Cup, Olympics and other international games work for
easing tensions among different nations. For example, South and North Korea
have football games regularly which give two nations a chance to understand
each other deeply. In the mid 1990s, a hundreds of North Korean supporters came
to South Korea
with the footballers and they were very excited during the sporting events.
Even if it sounds ridiculous, many South Koreans were quite surprised at that
moment when North Koreans shouted and cried during the match. We all realized
that they were very normal sports fans even though they were occasionally very
secretive. Through the sports, two divided nations could reduce their political
and ideological tensions and could feel the patriotic unity.
On the other hand, some sports matches can make international relations
worse. For instance, football or baseball games between Korea and Japan are always big matches in two
countries where full of tensions overflow. Sometimes, after the matches, the
two rivals blame each other and their patriotic emotions explode in an
aggressive way. Even much worse scenario is that the troubles caused by losing
games affect the players directly. As far as I know, a couple of Korean players
in Japan
are suffered from invisible discrimination after the match between two
countries.
In conclusion, I think that international sporting occasions can be one of
the good ways to ease tensions or to release patriotism safely. However, I
believe that games can not be the fundamental ways for the sound patriotism or
peaceful international relations.
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