Humanity is forever moving forward, or at least when you look at the bigger scale it looks that way. Yes, we as a society have progressed a great deal over the past centuries, even over the past decades since the end of the Cold War. When you look at it from the higher level, it looks like a smooth line upwards towards better. But that high level view can be very deceiving, because that’s just not how things have gone or will continue to go. For every leap forward, there have also been many steps backwards that have threatened to send us on a path backwards. And for everyone pushing for progress, there are others looking to take things back the other way.
That pressure creates new situations that challenge our values and force us to think about how we choose to react to those pressures. In Canada we are facing one such new situation that is tied to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and where we draw our lines for consequences for supporting Russia’s illegal actions. The case of Washington Capitals star winger Alexander Ovechkin is a situation that is truly unique to the time that we live in. The Ukrainian Canadian Congress has called for Canada to deny Ovechkin the visa he needs to enter Canada to play and earn his pay. On the other side, we’ve seen the likes of Don Cherry come to Ovechkin’s defence, recently telling the Toronto Sun that “He’s a hockey player… He has nothing to do with the war in Ukraine. None of this is his fault. He’s not involved in it.”
This is a situation that would have been easier to deal with during the Cold War, even at the end of it when you saw Soviet players like Alexander Mogilny risk their lives to defect and chase their dreams of playing in the NHL. Back in those days, it would have been unheard of to have someone from behind the Iron Curtain or another similar country like Cuba, come and pursue professional sports in North America while openly supporting those regimes. And there is a good reason for that. Can you imagine North American society being okay with that? I have a hard time believing it.
The fact is that back then, chasing that dream of playing professional sports at the highest level was seen as a betrayal to those who ruled back in their countries. They weren’t embraced and held up as examples for the nation. They were scorned, threatened and called traitors. The communist leaders of those days used them as propaganda tools, just as the bad example of what they wanted to see.
Never in the decades that we have seen professional sports in North America blossom from local obsessions to multi-billion dollar, global money-making machines have we had to face up to what we deal with today when it comes this particular situation with Ovechkin. Ovechkin is not just a hockey player, but he is a someone making hundreds of millions from his playing contracts and endorsements. That visa allows him to earn that living and make those millions. It also gives him a platform to promote issues that he feels should be, like other athletes have the chance to do.
But what sets Ovechkin apart is what he has decided to do with all of this. He’s used his money, his platform and his resources to unabashedly support Russian President Vladimir Putin. And it’s not been quiet support from behind the scenes. It’s been front and centre, starting in 2014 when he posted on his Instagram account support for Russia’s invasions in the Donbas, sharing propaganda calling the Ukraine government fascists and was all about protecting children from them. If you thought that might be an accident, that post is still up and live as of my writing this.
Later in 2017, he created a PAC called “Team Putin”, in which other athletes openly supported and campaigned for Putin. He shared that to his 1.7 million followers on Instagram, another post that is still there, which shows that he surely wasn’t ashamed of it. And since the Putin regime continued with further incursions into Ukraine, Ovechkin hasn’t backed off his support for Putin, repeating after last years invasion that “Putin is my President”.
For Putin, this kind of support is highly valuable beyond any financial donations Ovechkin might make. Having national sporting heroes singing his virtues to the populous is extremely valuable, to the point you can’t put a dollar figure on it. Imagine if someone like Wayne Gretzky, at the height of his play in the late 80’s/early 90’s, had done similar things in support of any Canadian politician in this way. It would have been seen as a massive coup for that party of leader and would have likely brought great attention and new supporters to them.
But that never happened with the likes of Gretzky or even Michael Jordan because, as Jordan put it, “Republicans buy sneakers too”. The point being that to take a personal stand based on your beliefs, you were going to upset someone and that could mess with your money. Some would do it, like Colin Kaepernick, but they would do it feeling it was worth it in their minds.
And that is part of what makes this situation with Ovechkin so different when you put it in the context of today. If he were silent on his political views, there would be no need to call for his work visa to be pulled. There are many Russian players in the NHL who aren’t out there openly supporting anyone, and even a handful like New York Ranger Artemi Panarin, who spoke out against Putin and paid a serious personal cost for it. The story of the attempted repression of Panarin by the Russia government puts Ovechkin’s support of Putin in a very different light, which raises more questions for Ovechkin than anyone else.
I would argue that Ovechkin really isn’t in the same category as “athlete” when it comes to this story, mostly because of his means and what he is doing with them. Other athletes have paid the price for Putin’s actions. The IIHF banned Russian teams from their championships after the invasion of Ukraine. FIFA and UEFA banned all Russian teams from their national team and club competitions too, effectively ending Russia’s attempt to qualify for the World Cup in Qatar in the process. Putin has been very chummy with both international sporting organizations and subsequently added a lot of money to their bottom lines. And yet both the IIHF and FIFA did the right thing here. Imagine how bad it looks when FIFA has taken the moral high ground from you.
I would put Ovechkin more in the category of the oligarchs that Canada has sanctioned the heck out of since the invasion. Ovechkin is more akin to Roman Abramovich than any Russian NHLer today. Abramovich has been a stronger supporter of Putin for a long time, owes a lot of his fortune to it and has since started to pay the price for that support. He was forced to sell one of the top football teams in the world in Chelsea FC (which pains me to say as a Newcastle supporter) due to the British sanctions against him. Here in Canada, he held a significant stake in the steel maker Evraz, and the Canadian sanctions forced him to divest of that.
As Prime Minister Trudeau put it when those sanctions were put in place, it was being done so that these individuals supporting Putin “cannot profit or benefit from economic activities in Canada”. That seems pretty clear and straightforward, so I’m left to wonder why that same statement wouldn’t apply to someone like Ovechkin who is making a fortune, playing a good number of those games in Canada. Surely he is “benefitting from economic activities in Canada”, right?
It's for that reason I see the Ukrainian Canadian Congress’s call to deny Ovechkin that ability to benefit from economic activities in Canada as the right one. This may be the first time that we find ourselves looking at a professional athlete in this way, but I feel very safe in saying it won’t be the last. Now that high level professional sports is such a big business, with many athletes making very big money, it makes sense that in cases like these we look at them more in line with business people than the humbly-paid athletes of decades in the past. Just as there were consequences for the actions of the likes of Abramovich for his support of Putin, there should consequences for Ovechkin for the same. Like those other oligarchs, he owes a lot of his fortune to it and he should not be able to continue to benefit financially for actively helping an anti-democratic person like Putin and consequently, his vile actions against the innocent people of Ukraine.