Permanent Secretariat

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sportcountries@gencat.cat

© Generalitat de Catalunya 2008

Sports and physical exercise are activities open to all, promoted and organized by private groups that respond to and reflect the predominant social and cultural values of each region at any given moment in history.

In contemporary time, the use of sports as a social practice has paralleled the development of industrialized societies, and has made room for networks of sport associations as the expression of lay values such as personal improvement, efficiency, and freedom of access. Regions in which an industrial model has been implemented subscribe to a certain approach not only to production and labor, but also to leisure and physical activity. Industrialized countries are the same ones that can be identified as "sports countries" in that the rules of play and values dictating the practice of sports are alike, giving rise to a particular sports system made up of the network of the associations that promote and organize sports practices in that particular territory.

The consolidation of the industrialized nations and the diffusion of its sports values led to the creation of private international federations for the coordination of sports association in different nations, regardless of political structures. The geography of sports at the beginning of the twentieth century in no way coincided with the political geography.

The values governing sports, in addition to the needs dictated by a wider ambit of practice and diffusion, were the factors influencing the progressive involvement of each territory's political institutions in the promotion of sports, leading them to lend support to their own sports associations. This public endorsement of sports as well as the very development of these political institutions has been responsible for the gradual practical adoption of a geography that is dictated by sports rather than political organization.

If we look closely at 52 of the 66 international federations that oversee the sports recognized by the International Olympic Committee, 51 of them have among their members representatives from the 44 sports countries that are not recognized as an independent states by the international community. Even though these 44 countries represent a significant number among the 195 politically sovereign nations, they are considered a minority within the larger scope of international federations, a circumstance which poses a challenge to incorporating these countries. Other federations which are either of more recent formation or dedicated to different styles of sports practice admit more readily sport countries.

Nonetheless, regardless of whether these states are recognized as independent political states by the international community, they do have their own sports infrastructures.

The First International Conference of Sport Countries will constitute a venue for exploring the international validity of the concept of a "sport country" and analyze in detail its advantages and disadvantages and from this standpoint, formulate options of dynamizing programs for sports cooperation between different countries.