Overturning Soccer Apartheid

Morales 1, FIFA 0

FIFA, football's world governing body, overturned their controversial ban on playing at altitude at their summit in Sydney recently. The rationale for the ban was to protect players from potential health impacts but it was resisted strongly by South American nations. Bolivian President Evo Morales played a prominent role in the protests.

Bolivia play their international home matches in the capital city La Paz, at 3,600 meters above sea level. The FIFA ruling banned all matches above 2,750 meters. The ban would also have affected Ecuador (capital Quito at 2,830 meters) and Colombia, all three nations in the Andes mountains of South America.

Announcing the decision of the 58th FIFA Congress to postpone the ban for two years, FIFA President Sepp Blatter said: "The FIFA Medical Committee have recommended that teams must acclimatise properly if they are to play at high altitude. The Committee wants to examine this, and other playing conditions such as heat, pollution or humidity. 

"The chair of the Medical Committee wishes to consider the wider implications of football under extreme conditions, so the Executive Committee has provisionally suspended last year's decision against playing at altitude."

President Morales had accused FIFA of soccer apartheid for imposing the ban in 2007. Nine of the ten South American confederation nations lobbied to revoke the ban. (Brazil declined.) 

The South American footballing organisation CONMEBOL had already refused to follow the FIFA guidelines. Qualifying matches for the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa have already been played at 3,637 meters altitude in La Paz. Despite home advantage, the Bolivian team have yet to score in their 2 home games, drawing 0:0 with Columbia in October '07 and losing  0:2 to Chile on Sunday June 15th. Tonight (June 18th '08) they play Paraguay in La Paz, a difficult assignment as Paraguay are top of the qualifying table after 5 games. Paraguay impressively despatched Brazil 2:0 on Sunday. In a sense, the ban had to be lifted as it was ignored by the affected nations.

Morales effectively galvanised support for the lifting of the ban through his robust rhetoric and his personal passion for soccer. He has played soccer all his life and honed his organisational skills by forming a youth team when he was 14 and later being elected as General Secretary of the Footballing union in his province. Bolivia's largest Coca Union named him head of sports after his performances on the field. He later became head of the Union, a position that effectively pushed him into national politics as the resistance to erradication of Coca grew.

Morales still plays the game competitively. He signed for second division team Litoral in March 2008 and the 47 year old President wore the number 10 jersey on his debut against Deportivo Municipal in April. He played for 41 minutes and his team prevailed 4:1. Interestingly his team Litoral are a police club - a fascinating choice of club for a President from a rural peasant background.

A game of football seems to always be on Morales agenda. He has formed a president's team which plays exhibition and charity matches throughout Bolivia. In 2006 the BBC reported that he had broken his nose during a collision with a goalkeeper during an indoor football match. "In the games' 32nd minute, with the score tied 2:2, the local team (Independence Warriors of Cochabamba) goalkeeper committed a foul against the President of the Republic that produced the injury to his nose," read a statement from the President's office. Following treatment at a local clinic, Morales was advised to rest for 2 days. The BBC report speculated that Morales might not be able to participate in a match to mark the inauguration of the Constituent Assembly the following weekend.

Diego Maradona led a team of retired Argentina stars in an altitude match to raise awareness of the FIFA ban and to raise funds for victims of the major flooding that affected Bolivia in Spring 2008. Morales captained the team of former Bolivian players. 20,000 fans came to the match in the Hernando Stiles stadium in La Paz, paying an entrance fee of a pack of rice, pasta of powder milk. The supplies would go to people displaced or disadvantaged due to the flooding.

Argentina won 7:4, Maradona scored a hat-trick and Morales got 1. After being presented with the Simon Bolivar award at half time (Bolivia's highest honour) Maradona addrerssed the FIFA ban saying: "You have the right to play where you were born. That cannot be decided by God nor much less by (Sepp) Blatter."

Evo Morales played centre forward for the Bolivian team that day. The deputy sports minister Milton Melgar also played. He represented Bolivia the last time they qualified for the World Cup, in USA, 1994.

As part of the campaign against the FIFA ban, Morales organised and played in a match at 6,000 meters last year, demonstrating that it could be done. Many athletes come to the Andes, Bolivia, Ecuador or Columbia for altitude training. There is a tradition amongst Mexican walkers to train there and a belief that training at altitude strengthens the lungs and improves performance and stamina.

Morales called the now revoked FIFA ban: "an aggression against the peoples and aggression against sport. Football unites people but this decision seems to be confronting peoples." The Bolivian football organisation led the campaign to revoke the ban at the 58th FIFA summit in Sydney.

Now that Morales has an international victory in the governance of football, he will be hoping that the national team can improve their performance on the field of play. Due to their poor start it is unlikely (but not impossible) that Bolivia could qualify for FIFA World Cup 2010 in South Africa. But FIFA World Cup 2014 in Brazil is the medium term target for all South American nations.

FIFA have moved their position from a ban on football at altitude to putting together a package of rules regulating "Football under Extreme Conditions" including heat, humidity, extreme cold and pollution. This will not of course be in place for the forthcoming Olympics in Beijing, a location where pollution may impact on performance. Haile Gabresalassie, the champion marathon runner from Ethiopia has already opted out of the Olympics due to pollution.

President Evo Morales celebrated FIFA's change of policy on a "Day of Defiance" in La Paz on May 29th. He jogged 3 miles from the Government Palace in Murillo Square to the Siles Suazo stadium. There he participated in a soccer match including soccer journalists and political correspondents. He said that sport is "the best entertainment of human beings" and called on young people to "Study and study" but also to "practice sports, more sports and more sports."

Morales public profile positions him as an ordinary man of the people, advocating the rights of indigenous people and the poor in the face of a globalised world. He continues to play soccer at an age when most people leave it behind him, using it to advocate fitness and team work as much as a popularity tool. The success of the campaign to revoke the FIFA ban is part of an ongoing series of wins, seemingly against the odds. Already a master of "Politics Under Extreme Conditions" Morales, playmaker no. 10, seems set to captain Bolivia in more crucial confrontations.