QATAR'S WORLD CUP CRUELTY.

• Author: Russell, Jason
• Position: WORLD

QATAR'S BID TO boost its global standing by hosting the 2022 FIFA World Cup is hardly unprecedented. Adolf Hitler hoped the 1936 Olympics would demonstrate the merits of his terrible ideals (Jesse Owens had other plans), while modern authoritarians in China and Russia use sports to bolster their nationalist credos. Even democratic leaders vie to host prestigious sporting events in the usually vain hope of boosting economic growth and raising tourism baselines long after the final whistle.

"Sportswashing" of this kind often serves to distract people from bad government behavior in other arenas. But in Qatar's case, it was the government's eagerness to host the World Cup that fostered deadly abuses.

Since FIFA awarded Qatar the hosting rights in December 2010, more than 6,500 migrant workers are known to have died in Qatar, according to a February 2021 Guardian report. That combined number came from the governments of Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. The true total may be much higher, since large numbers of Kenyans and Filipinos also are working in Qatar.

Most of these workers died while building the vast infrastructure the country needed to host the roughly 1.5 million foreign fans who are expected to attend the World Cup in November and December. In 2015, when the migrant worker death toll was at least 1,200, the BBC reported that workers were building "subways, hotels, and even an entire city...not to mention an airport, numerous roads, a new sewerage system in central Doha and 20 skyscrapers."

Qatar's insufficient infrastructure raised major concerns when it won the right to host over countries that already had adequate transportation and sports facilities, includingAustralia, Japan, South Korea, and the United States. In 2018, the United States won the right to host the 2026 World Cup in a joint bid with Canada and Mexico.

According to that 2021 Guardian report, the World Cup's organizing committee said 37 people have died while working on the eight World Cup stadiums. According to data compiled by The Washington Post in 2015, the known death toll during stadium construction was six for the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, 10 for the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, and two for the 2010 World Cup in South Africa. Sixty people reportedly died while working on facilities for the 2014 Winter Olympics in Russia.

Qatar's organizing committee claims 34 of those 37 deaths were not work-related. But...