Who washes, cleans something, for example, ensures that the dishes or clothes are fresh again. But who to sports washing does, strives for the opposite. Such a figure disguises stains and blemishes. He does not wash the sport, but hangs a screen of sport for iniquities in the hope that the clutter and misery hidden from view by that fence will also disappear from public opinion. A regime such as that of Qatar, which is organizing the World Cup this year, is trying to improve its image in this way.
Sportswashing, a term we have adopted from English, resembles in form brainwashing, but has a different meaning. Brainwashing is a word that came up in the 1950s in connection with attempts by communist regimes to wash the brains of suspicious people or spies in such a way that all thoughts of resistance and opposition disappeared and the brainwashed only yes and could nod amen.
So it was about washing the brain. Brainwashing is similar to mouth washing or eye washing, washing mouth or eye, although you can rinse mouth and eyes with water and brain not. With sports washing, on the other hand, there is no question of the sport being washed. Sport is used to wash away political stains.
Bee greenwashing it’s different again. Something green is not presented here to disguise environmental crimes, but a company pretends to be more environmentally friendly than it actually is. For example, Shell has been reprimanded by activists because the oil and gas giant claimed that we CO2– could continue to drive neutral if we paid an extra cent per liter.
The modern terms greenwashing and sportswashing are modeled on the much older one whitewashingwhich appears in English as early as the 17th century and stands for nothing more than ‘whitening by washing’.
A century later, however, the word could already be used figuratively and initially meant ‘to release a person from bankruptcy’ and then ‘to hide mistakes behind a facade’. And that is the meaning that corresponds to that of sportswashing.
Whitewashing itself has undergone a new development in recent decades and is now used in the film and media world to indicate that only white actors or models are requested. And a white washed person is someone from a minority who has become so assimilated to the white majority that he basically denies his own skin colour, origin and culture.
Whitewashing in the sense of money laundering is less common in English than money laundering† launderwhich was originally synonymous with wash, has largely lost that meaning and is now mainly used for bringing dubious funds to the financial world, ie our Dutch money laundering. This money laundering is actually a bit strange: you make black money white. So from negative to positive. Yet white is no longer generally accepted as evidence of a white soul.
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of June 28, 2022