The role of sport in preventing infectious disease Sport’s universal popularity, its power and reach as a communication platform, and its particular appeal to children and youth make it an ideal vehicle to inform, educate and mobilize populations to fight disease. While research has not yet caught up with current practice, and while evidence of sport’s impacts on health outcomes is only just emerging, sport’s capacity to attract and engage is undisputed, as is its communication power.
While sport is equally well-positioned to inform and educate people about infectious and non-infectious disease, it is currently used most often in connection with infectious disease. The discussion that follows highlights the different ways in which sport is being used to this end and some early lessons emerging from the field. Using elite sport as an educational platform Moving beyond its traditional entertainment role, sport is now recognized as having enormous potential as an informational and educational platform for health and development messages targeted to youth and adults alike.
Sport is unusually powerful in this regard. No other activity approaches the popularity sport enjoys, receives more intense media attention, or reaches more people on a global, regional or local level.
Sport’s advantages as a communication medium stem from the fact that it appeals to people on an emotional and personal level in a largely positive way (there are exceptions — sport-based racism, hooliganism and violence). 96 Sport also possesses an unsurpassed ability to reach broad sectors of populations, including marginalized groups which are difficult to reach by other means.
High-performance sport events have the ability to attract huge audiences. In 2002, more than one billion people worldwide were transfixed by a live broadcast of the final match of the FIFA World Cup between Brazil and Germany — the largest audience for a single event at that point in time. 98 Because of their global celebrity, high-performance athletes also wield enormous influence. Celebrated football player, Pélé, middle-distance runners Maria Mutola and HaileGebrselassie , tennis stars Roger Federer and Boris Becker, and many other athletes are increasingly using their popularity to advance development causes, as goodwill ambassadors or through their own aid activities. Regardless of where they live — in Brazil, Kenya, Bhutan or the Ukraine — children, in particular, identify with local and national sport heroes and strive to be like international stars such as Ronaldinho , David Beck ham and Michael Jordan, whose popularity transcends cultural and political borders.
The potential health impact of involving such athletes is perhaps best illustrated by the case of Earvin “Magic” Johnson, one of the world’s top basketball players and a hero to millions of youth worldwide. On November 7, 1991, Johnson told a news conference in Los Angeles that he had HIV and that he was withdrawing from active sport. Johnson’s announcement was a milestone in the fight against HIV and AIDS because it was the first time a sport superstar admitted openly to having HIV. The effects of Johnson’s announcement were profound.
He helped break the taboo in sport against speaking openly about HIV and AIDS. He also helped to challenge the stigma surrounding HIV and AIDS, which can feed discrimination and impede prevention efforts. 100 Perhaps most importantly, his actions changed peoples’ perceptions about HIV and its prevention. As a result of Johnson’s announcement, awareness and accurate knowledge of HIV increased, 100,102,103 as did people’s desire to obtain more information about HIV and AIDS 104,105 Calls to AIDS hotlines , 106 and the number of people getting tested for HIV also increased. 107,108,109 In addition, studies showed an increased understanding of vulnerability to HIV among adults 110 and changes in high-risk behaviors.
In a survey administered to adolescent clinic attendees aged 12–19 in four U.S. cities, 60% of respondents reported that Magic Johnson’s announcement had increased their awareness of AIDS, 65.4% reported increased self-efficacy in a sexual situation, 37.2% reported that they had changed their perceptions around AIDS risks, and 37.8% described increased resistance to peer pressure for sexual intercourse. 112 This is just one example of the potential impact of celebrity athletes who serve as health spokespeople and role models. Fortunately, many athletes today are participating in international and national programs to help communicate health messages and combat stigma.
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