Molding Athletes Behavior: Punishments as a Lesson
Sport leaders worked hard to thoroughly politicize sport, under the close guidance of the top members of the Hungarian Communist Party.[1] Their plan to capitalize off of sport success partly depended one key but unreliable element: the behavior and activities of individual athletes and coaches. In order to ensure that the state developed the best athletes, sport leaders attempted to shape (many would say control) athletes behavior. Leaders developed what I call a “carrot-and-stick” game with athletes for this purpose. In the game, leaders used a combination of rewards (carrots) and punishments (sticks) to motivate athletes to behave according to their rules. Sport leaders did not truly want to punish athletes harshly – their end goal was to produce results for their own bosses, the top Party leaders, with regard to the state's sport diplomacy goals. Their use of harsh punishments, particularly in the Stalinist 1950s, were intended as lessons to teach athletes to avoid specific kinds of behavior.
The activity that earned athletes the worst punishment was defecting (or planning to defect) to the West. Sport leaders largely focused on forcing, in the 1950s, athletes to remain in the country. The capture and execution of soccer player Sándor Szűcs in 1951 was the harshest punishment that an athlete received throughout the entire socialist period. Fortunately for athletes, the 1956 Revolution influenced sport leaders to soften their strategy towards athletes. Sport leaders began using more rewards with athletes to obtain their sport diplomacy goals, in an effort to motivate or convince them to stay, rather than forcing them to do so. The changing nature of the punishments that athletes could receive therefore also illustrates the evolution of sport leaders' carrot-and-stick game, and the sport leader-athlete relationship altogether.
The crime and evolving punishments for defecting are the focus of this project. My broader dissertation examines a broader range of activities that shed light on the evolution of the sport leader-athlete relationship, including those that caused athletes to get punished. They could and did receive punishments for smaller offenses, such as smuggling or refusing to act as an obedient mouthpiece for socialist propaganda.
[1] For more specifics on this, see Katalin Szikora, “Sport and the Olympic Movement in Hungary (1945-1989), in The Shadow of Totalitarianism: Sport and the Olympic Movement in the ‘Visegrád Countries’ 1945-1989, edited by Marek Waic, Prague: Charles University, 2015, 131-195; and Balász Rigó, “Egészpályás letámadás Kommunista hatalomátvétel a magyar sportban (1945-1948),” (Overhead Pressing in the Communist takeover of Hungarian Sport, 1945-1948), forthcoming.
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