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Play the Game conference 2007 Opening speech, Sunday 28 October 2007
by The President of Iceland, Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson (transcribed by Maria Suurballe)
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| President Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson of Iceland, opening the Play the Gam 2007 conference. Photo by Niels Nyholm. |
"Thank you very much indeed, and it gives me great pleasure to be able to welcome so many of you from different parts of the world to my country and in such a way encourage the discussion on the future of sport and the interplay between good society, civil governance and the fundamental role that sports not only can but must play in improving the lives of our people.
I noticed that in your opening speech you mentioned some of the difficulties associated with the future of the Play the Game conferences. Maybe it was a wise choice to come to a country where at least, as we see it, there is hardly any corruption at all in sport. I said hardly any, probably I should say any, given my position, but I just wanted to be on the safe side, so I phrased it in that way. And there are of course coalitions between people and the voluntary participation in the true democratic spirit has from the very beginning been an essence of the development of sport in our country.
Many people see Iceland as a kind of exception to the modern world, a country which is so open, secure and transparent that the president can move around freely and receive people without the barriers that in most other countries prevent the public from having access to the elected leaders. A society where the harmonisation between those who are elected and the people who elect them is such that there is really no separation. Where sport is primarily driven by voluntary participation by individuals all over the country. And where we have managed to transform our society from being one of the poorest in Europe for many hundreds and hundreds of years, to becoming one of the most affluent and prosperous and modern countries in the world.
And many people who come here, they are indeed baffled by the success, and they try to explain it away, perhaps in order to excuse challenges to themselves on their home grounds, by calling it the Icelandic exception. But I would encourage you in your dialogue and deliberation and talking about the future of sport, and the importance of good governance and the fight against corruption within the sporting world, not to look at Iceland as the exception, but to look at it as the inspiration of what can be done.
Because I fundamentally believe, that we are not that special, that our success can not be marginalized by saying okay, yes the Icelanders can do it, but there are other situations in different parts of the world because of our different size, because of our different historical legacy, because of the different cultures and so on and so forth.
Of course, there is a long tradition in this country of sport being an integral part of our society, you can even trace it back to the Viking discoveries, when those who came from Norway and other countries decided to settle in Iceland because they didn’t want to pay taxes to the Norwegian king – you can in a way perhaps say that they wanted to get rid of fair play of paying taxes by moving to Iceland, so it is a question of how you define it.
But some of them were not satisfied with being in Iceland so they continued across the ocean and more than a thousand years ago discovered a continent, which in modern times is called America. I don’t know if all of you have heard the story of how the Icelandic Vikings 500 years before Christopher Columbus discovered the American continent but didn’t tell anybody about it, only wrote about it in books written on calfskin, in a language which nobody could understand, except ourselves. So when Christopher Columbus finally arrived on the scene five hundred years later, there was no big news to the Icelanders, because we had known it for more than five centuries.
But in those old books, these ancient texts which we call the sagas, there are extraordinary sport heroes, individuals who excelled in such a way that the stories are still being told. And when I was a young boy in the Western Fjords of Iceland, in an isolated fishing village which still was part of the old society, I was brought up on those stories from the Viking times, to such an extent that it wasn’t really until I was ten or eleven, that I realized that these people were not our neighbours in the next fjord, but had lived a thousand years ago. Such was the true heritage of the integration between the culture and the history and the sport and the national aspirations.
And when our independence movements started in the middle of the nineteenth century, these stories of the heroes, of the great sports men and women of the ancient times, became a part of the Icelandic vision, of how this small country could indeed play a major role in the world – even if it had been for centuries literally the poorest country in Europe. A small nation of farmers and fishermen existing out here in the North Atlantic without really any connection to the rest of the world.
And that is why when the Icelandic Youth Association, which hosts your conference here today, was established 100 years ago at the site of our ancient parliament, Thingvellir, there was a strong ideological connection between the aims and the ideology and the policy of that new movement and the old Viking history and the independence movement. When the first Icelandic athletes started to participate in the Nordic and the European and the Olympic games, it was seen by the people as a firm continuation of more than a thousand years of history, and one of the victorious moments of the independence struggle.
So sport has never in this country been seen as a separate part of society, as a different venue from the fundamental national aspiration, or as something strange to our national vision. It has always been an integral part of how we see ourselves and how we define our role, not just as a society, but also as members of the international community.
So when we are asked the question ‘what is the governance in Icelandic Sport?’ and, ‘what is the state of play with respect to corruption in Icelandic Sport?’, it is to us a fundamental question not about sport but about our society, about who we are as a democracy and as a civil society. And it is a fundamental question, when we are talking about governance or corruption within sport in different parts of the world, can we isolate it from the rest of society in such a way that sport somehow becomes different from other social or business activity? And my answer, unfortunately is no. You can’t isolate it. So the struggle on the campaign against corruption in sport is fundamentally the campaign for good governance in our societies and in the rest of the world.
And that was why I saw the offer by China to host the Special Olympics this year, in fact this month, in Shanghai, one of the most remarkable events with respect to this question, because as we all know, China suffers on an enormous scale from corruption and bad governance. China is one of those societies often quoted as perhaps the fundamental challenge with respect to human rights, governance, the future of democracy or corruption.
So for them to offer to host the Special Olympics in Shanghai was a very interesting proposition and a great challenge – not just for the Special Olympics, but also for China. Because, what are the Special Olympics? It’s a very special area of sport activity, it’s for the mentally disabled, it’s for those people, which, ten, twenty years ago in nearly all of our societies, were on the periphery of society, were closed off in mental institutions, or special homes, or hidden by the families. They were the forgotten children of our human family. Even in the more civilized societies, they were so outcast that they didn’t really have fundamental, human or social rights.
And the beginnings of the Special Olympics were exactly founded in such an experience when Eunice Kennedy Schreiber, the sister of John F. Kennedy, visited her sister in a mental home in Boston while her brother was still the president of the United States. She found that her sister suffered from bad teeth, she called the dentist and asked him to come and help her. He said ‘No’ he dosn’t go to mental institutions. She called another dentist, ‘no‘, and she called another. She called more than twenty dentists in Boston, and even if the patient was a sister of the President of the United States, they all said ‘no’. Because they didn’t want to go to a mental institution, it was not within their image of how they saw themselves within the field of their responsibilities.
So she decided to do something about it. And she chose sport, in a perhaps typical Kennedy way, where they think most problems can be solved through kicking a football around on the ground. She chose sport. She started with less than twenty athletes in her backyard, and it has grown in to a remarkable international movement which earlier this month celebrated an international world games with participants from over 140 countries, with 7000 athletes, all of them intellectually disabled and hosted by the Chinese in such a grand style, that I think those of us who were there, including my friend, the chairman of the Icelandic Olympic and Sport Association who is here with us today, will never forget it.
Because this was perhaps one of the strongest signals that China has sent with respect to human rights. Because if you create this splendid framework for sports games for people with intellectually disabilities, the mentally handicapped, those who are most disadvantaged in our societies, and you bring them from all over the world, and their families and their trainers and their coaches, and you give them the surroundings which was almost on a par with the Olympics Games next year in Beijing, you are sending a very strong message. You are sending the message, that these people have to be treated in the same way as everybody else. They must be given the same opportunities as everybody else, and their surroundings for their sports activities must be the same in terms of splendour and grandeur, and sports halls and playing fields, as for everybody else.
And it made us in the international board of the Special Olympic conclude that we were thus responsible not just for an international remarkable sporting event, but we were also responsible for helping China to get out of the old system, to find a new framework, to face up to human rights and human responsibilities in a new way.
And the Games were executed in an enormously professional way, the governance of these world games in Shanghai for ten days was excellent, brilliant, even a model for what the rest of us can do. And the President of China, Hu Jintao, he took two days out of his programme to be in those Games; of course, he could had come for an hour or so at the opening, given a speech, declare them open, everybody was happy – he took two days. He visited the Games, the people where they participated, talked to them; that was shown all over China. A very strong human message.
So when I read in the newspapers about the corruption in China and the bad governance, and there certainly is a lot of both in that country, I have hope, I have hope. Because of what I have experienced, what we all experienced there. Of course it will not happen all of a sudden, of course it will take years, perhaps decades, but the transformation from China ten or twenty years ago to those world games in Shanghai earlier this month, is a remarkable journey.
And similarly, because everybody is now talking about climate change, the Olympic Games in Beijing next year is the toughest test that China has put itself up to with respect to climate change. Because if they don't clear the air in Beijing, the athletes might simply leave and not compete. And I mentioned that also to indicate, that sport can indeed be a very important reforming instrument of societies. So when we are assembled to talk about good governance and corruption within sport, we should see it as an instrument to reform the societies at the same time. Because, as I said before, I fundamentally believe, that the connection between society and sport is so integral, that you can't really reform the sport movements in this respect without having a positive impact or even reforming the societies to some extent.
And we have in this country also many other examples of how sport can be an important social reformer and campaigner. I was privileged last year to institute together with the Icelandic Youth Association and the Icelandic Olympic and Sports Association and the Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts and the local communities in our country, a drug prevention day, which became a kind of a national effort, where the sports movements, and the youth movements, all of them in our country, perhaps for the first time, came together in this campaign. And in every primary school in the country, whether it was in a small fishing village, or rural area or here in Reykjavik, we had a special programme. Based on academic research, conducted in our universities for over twenty years and Professor Thorolfur Thorlindsson, the leader of that research, is also with us here this morning.
And this remarkable Icelandic research, and we are the only country which over twenty years has conducted such a research among young people, demonstrates absolutely and clearly on the basis of the scientific evidence, that there are three elements which are the strongest messages in the campaign against drugs, and one of them is participation in sport. Not necessarily competitive sport, just any kind of sport. The other two are spending at least an hour a day with your families, and the third one is waiting at least until seventeen or eighteen to drink alcohol or smoke tobacco.
And if these three things go together, there is less than one percent chance that the youth will suffer from drug abuse later in his or her life. So in this country we have created a major national campaign, and we will repeat it next month on the 21st of November in every school in the country again, with the sports associations and all the municipalities and the media, to demonstrate that when we look at the great challenges of fighting against drug abuse in our countries, and I say clearly and strongly, this is perhaps the toughest fight that our modern societies faces, because the criminal elements who sell the drugs, are better financed, better organized, more determined and more successful than at any time before.
And with all due respect to peace authorities in my country or your countries I don't believe, that simply by strengthening the police authorities or increasing the numbers of police officers on the streets, we will be able to gain victory in our campaign against the drug lords, these organized crime gangs that are now all over Europe, established a stronger position than ever before – better organized, better financed. Doesn't matter how many police officers we put on the street, we will never be able to counteract the strength of these criminal gangs. And we feel that in this country for the first time in Icelandic history, we now have evidence of international criminal gangs that operate in our country that bring drugs into our country, sell them close to the schools, sell them to our young people and our teenagers.
The only prevention, the only defence mechanism that we can create is strengthening those measures that enable young people to say no. To condition them in such a way that they will not be tempted to buy. And when the salespeople turn up in front of them on the school lawn, on the streets and in the neighbourhood, they will simply say no. And we have scientifically proved through our academic research, that sport is one of the three strongest defence mechanisms in this campaign. And on the basis of that evidence we have in the last two years created an association of fifteen European cities, which are all now linked together in the fight against drugs based on this research, determined to make sport one of the three major elements in their defence mechanism.
I mention this here this morning because it demonstrates the positive side of sport, it demonstrates, as did the Special Olympics in China, the enormous power of sport as a social reformer, as a national campaigner. It is in fact an extraordinary instrument that we can use to improve our society.
Not just due to the essential nature of sport, but also due to the people who participate in sport. The millions of people all over the world, most of them volunteers, who come into the sports movements and the sports events, and even if we highlight the cases of corruptions and failure and drug abuse, and there are of course many and they are dramatic, we should not forget that on the whole the international sport movement can be an enormously strong instrument for social improvement, for democracy and international understanding. And the experience we gained in Shanghai a few weeks ago convinced me finally and strongly, that if we handle it correctly, we can utilize the participation in sport as one of the strongest instruments to fight corruption, to improve our societies and create a healthy and secure future for our young people.
And it is in this spirit which I welcome all of you to Iceland, and celebrate with you the dialogue that you have committed to engage in – both experts and scholars as well as journalists and leaders of sports movements. Because this interconnection which I have tried to outline here today, it can be brought out through the entire history of the Icelandic nation, it is one of the most important elements when we look towards the future and discuss how we can achieve the hopes and the positive vision, which we all have."
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