When Enes Kanter Freedom appeared on a basketball court in his Boston Celtics jersey and a pair of trainers emblazoned with the slogan “Free Uyghur”, the reaction from Beijing was swift. “Literally at the half-time, they cancelled every Celtics game on television [in China] for the rest of the year,” the basketball player tells the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ) and the Guardian. That game, in October 2021, marked a turning point in his career. “That’s when the NBA got really angry at me,” says Freedom. Freedom, who has long…
Tag: US sports
Lionel Messi’s Inter Miami call off China tour
Lionel Messi won’t be playing in China this month after all. Inter Miami announced Wednesday that its planned trip to China for a pair of exhibition matches has been called off. The team announced the trip last month, with a pair of games originally scheduled for 5 November and 8 November. It would have been at least the eighth time that Messi – the World Cup champion for Argentina and now an eight-time Ballon d’Or winner, after receiving the annual award yet again earlier this week – played in China,…
Sport is indifferent to the Uyghur genocide: the Warriors investor said the quiet part out loud
The US state department has described the Uyghur human rights issue as a genocide and the largest-scale detention of an ethno-religious community since the second world war. And yet to hear one leading professional sports owner tell it, “nobody cares”. Chamath Palihapitiya, a billionaire investor in the NBA’s Golden State Warriors, used the most recent episode of his All-In podcast to weigh in, dismissing the Uyghur crisis as “a very hard, ugly truth” that’s “below my line”. When his co-host David Sacks countered that the Uyghurs were a great, if…