WHO ROOTS FOR BELARUS?

Winter Olympic Games in Sochi, success of Belarusian sportsmen, A. Lukashenko’s gestures towards the Triple Olympic Champion Darya Domracheva, approaching World Hockey Championship in Belarus – all these events made actual the problem of connection between sport and politics.

Who, saying metaphorically, roots for Belarus? What is the connection between the support to national sport and demographic characteristics and political preferences? The answers to these questions are partly available via the results of March survey.

Thus, almost a half of respondents root for the national team (Table 1).

At the same time success of native sportsmen triggers positive emotions even in those people who don’t consider themselves as sports fans (Table 2).

Table 1 means that geography of “rooting” serves to some extent as a projection of mental political world map of Belarusians: the first place is taken by their own country, then comes Russia, then the EU, and then… well, basically that’s all. A lot of countries in the world have successful teams, for example, China. But success is not enough to root for sportsmen from one or another country, what’s important is a kind of proximity. Proximity is present in the relation to own country and two main geopolitical “magnets” – Europe and Russia.

Table 3 shows the relation between “rooting” for Belarusian sportsmen and “rooting” for teams from other countries.

Variant of answer	Don’t root for the Belarusian team	Root for the Belarusian team
Root for the Russian team	10.2	31.9
Root for a team from one of countries of the EU	10.2	7.4
Root for the US team	2.7	0.4
Root for some other team	4.4	0.9
Don’t root	38.1	0
Don’t follow sports events	36.8	0.4

As you can see, there is no significant category of sport fans not rooting for Belarusian sportsmen. Number of respondents who don’t root for the Belarusian team, but root for somebody else is comparatively low. In this latter group there are more fans of teams from the EU, the USA and other countries than in the group of fans of the Belarusian team, but these differences are insignificant. The overwhelming majority of those who don’t root for the Belarusian team don’t root for anybody else. Conspicuous is the fact that among the fans of the Belarusian team almost each third roots for Russia as well. A calculation shows that they constitute 73% of all respondents who root for the Russian team.

Table 4 describes the relation of sports “rooting” to socio-demographic characteristics, political preferences and attitude to the president.

Characteristics	Don’t root	Don’t root for the Belarusian team	Root for the Belarusian team
Sex:
Male	15.7	46.7	53.3
Female	24.3	59.2	40.8
Age:
18-29	19.3	51.3	48.7
30-59	19.8	50.5	49.5
60 +	24.1	62.6	37.4
Education:
Primary	30.	90.3	9.7
Incomplete secondary	22.9	59.5	40.5
Secondary	18.2	52.1	47.9
Vocational	21.6	50.2	49.8
Higher	18.2	45.9	54.1
Internet usage:
Every day	15.9	46.1	53.9
Trust to the president:
Trust	17.1	52.4	47.6
Don’t trust	24.5	56.0	44.0
Geopolitical choice:
For integration with Russia	18.6	51.9	48.1
For joining the EU	20.6	52.8	47.2

In Table 4 only the differences on grounds of sex are expected. Women are less inclined to “rooting”, though there not so few fans among them as well. The relation to other characteristics is quite unexpected. People with higher education and those who use Internet every day, let us say, the high-browed ones, are not less, but more inclined to root for the Belarusian team. However what’s more surprising in the results of Table 4, it is not the positions where there are differences, but those, where there is no difference at all. “Euro-Belarusians” and “Belo-Russians”, supporters and opponents of A. Lukashenko are political antagonists. However these differences do not influence their attitude to sport and “rooting” for the Belarusian team: the shares are almost equal.

So sport is a uniting, not a dividing factor.

In this connection it is not surprising that the idea of boycott on the World Hockey Championship in Belarus is not very popular (Table 5).

In fine it should be said that the idea to use sport as a political protest is not very good. Relation to sport has very little connection to political preferences.