Notebook #2

Turkey's athletes, the Instagram ban, looking back on Kılıçdaroğlu

This is a semi-regular post where I make short notes on recent events, or things I’ve been reading or watching lately. The first part is free, the rest is for paid subscribers. Enjoy.

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Team Turkey underperformed in the Olympics. Why?

It hasn’t been a great year for sports in Turkey. First, the men’s soccer team lost in the UEFA quarter finals. And now, Turkey is walking away from the Olympics without any gold, with some of the country’s most hopeful athletes failing to get any medals at all.

What’s interesting here is the gap between expectation and reality.

Turkey is a middle-income country of 85 million people. It’s also extremely competitive place, especially in the recent decade. Turkey’s political class has proclaimed that the 21st century will see Turkey’s revival as a great power. They see sports as one area where the country has to prove its mettle, and push very hard for international victories. Having been a soccer player himself, Erdoğan often calls athletes upon their victories and builds relationships with them.

There’s a clear political objective to this. Turkey’s new ruling class still isn’t seen as fully legitimate among a big and influential segment of the population. I think they see sports as an area where that kind of opposition softens up. Both the elite, as well as the public at large, of all political persuasions, absolutely love winning major sports events. This year’s UEFA generated a level of excitement comparable only to the 2000s. If there was a successful soccer team that embraced the Erdoğan regime, it would have been a huge political boon to the palace.

For the Paris Olympics too, Turkey had great expectations, especially in fields like archery and volleyball, where we’ve been doing well in recent years. None of it worked out for some reason.

I asked ChatGPT to create a chart of Turkey’s Olympic medals over the past 60 years.

It’s a delicate thing to talk about, but people are a bit upset. I think younger people especially keep expecting a sudden rise in performance, something real to match the soaring nationalistic rhetoric they see around them, but it’s not happening.

Osman Ertürk Özel, who’s a leader among young Turkist/center-right circles (and a friend of mine) recently tweeted:

The issue of the Olympics is important. Looking past the Yusuf Dikeç poses, we need to focus on the essence of the matter. And that is that we don't even have a gold medal. If it wasn't for a few individual athletes and the women's volleyball team, it was as if we didn't exist. There are foreign athletes who have won as many [actually, many more] medals as our country alone.

The incumbency of mediocrity [vasatlığın iktidarı] has now permeated every fiber of our being. Ministries and Federations have become farms and no one feels the slightest responsibility. Unfortunately, the Turk[ish nation] is neither ahead nor behind. This is not historical misfortune [makus bir talih], it is downright incompetence. It must change!

There’s a growing recognition that something is very wrong with the ecosystem that the government has created.

I think part of the answer is in the way we treat our most successful athletes. Once an athlete is recognized for his or her excellence, like Mesut Özil, the famous striker, or Mete Gazoz, the archer, they’re inundated with attention, not just from companies and TV shows, but from the political elite as well. Certain disciplines, like wrestling, weightlifting, and even soccer, are more right-wing to begin with, so they’re already integrated into the AK Party/MHP ecosystem. I’m guessing that this has a negative influence on those athletes.

I’m no athlete and don’t even follow sports closely, so I’m sure I’m missing important things here. Still, I can’t help thinking that if you’re this focused on medals, you’ll lose sight of excellence.