It never did anything else but play an important role in sports. Nations create big cultural habits around sports. Nations start wars because of it. Sports create modern forms of slavery, sports is business, sports is madness. All this is highly political. And even the boring sports are sleeping pills for those who seek to escape the daily dose of local political mess, which makes the boring sports an essential political sport. The question is not if politics should play such a role, the question is how one possibly could pull sports back to the harmless level of childhood fun.