Word.ws English Dictionary

sportswashing

sportswashing noun: the use of sporting events to improve an organization or polity's reputation, especially to distract from human rights abuses. Also the present participle and gerund of sportswash.

Noun

sportswashing

  1. The use of sporting events to improve an organization or polity's reputation, especially to distract from human rights abuses.
    • From the 2016 European Formula 1 Grand Prix, matches at football's 2020 European Championship, and now the European Games, Azerbaijan is practicing sportswashing – using major sporting events as a way of diverting attention from human rights violations.2015, Caroline Christie, “Human Rights Abuses and the European Games in Azerbaijan”, in Vice
    • By taking this line are we as sports fans not also complicit in this sportswashing?2018, César Jiménez-Martínez, Michael Skey, “How repressive states and governments use 'sportswashing' to remove stains on their reputation”, in The Conversation

Also used as

sportswashing is also the present participle and gerund of sportswash.

Examples of sportswashing in a sentence

  • There is this assumption that sportswashing works, especially with football fans.2023 July 12, Adrian Chiles, “Is anyone convinced by Saudi sportswashing? Only the crooks who sell fake football strips”, in The Guardian...
  • “[We ought to] look exactly at the harms generated by the tournament rather than the general question of sportswashing.”2024 September 22, Eromo Egbejule, “Football-mad Morocco dreams of a World Cup final in its own ark”, in The Observer, Guardian Media...

Origin of sportswashing

From sports + -wash + -ing.

From sportswash + -ing.

Questions about sportswashing

What does sportswashing mean?
Sportswashing means the use of sporting events to improve an organization or polity's reputation, especially to distract from human rights abuses.
How do you use sportswashing in a sentence?
There is this assumption that sportswashing works, especially with football fans.
What part of speech is sportswashing?
Sportswashing is a noun.

Words near sportswashing in the dictionary

  1. sportster
  2. sportsters
  3. sportswash
  4. sportswashed
  5. sportswashes
  6. sportswashing
  7. sportswatching
  8. sportswear
  9. sportswise
  10. sportswoman
  11. sportswomanlike

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: sportswashing (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “sportswashing.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/sportswashing. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.