Foreign athletes are regularly granted citizenship by nations seeking Olympic victories. Ayelet Shachar is conflicted about the practice:
Olympic citizenship without a doubt enhances the freedom of mobility for those with exceptional talent, yet there are serious moral quandaries. Citizenship, an institution steeped in notions of equality, identity, loyalty, perhaps even sacrifice, is being turned into a recruitment tool used to bolster a nation’s standing relative to its competitors. Concerns then arise with respect to the country Olympic athletes have left behind, other athletes in the country they are coming into, and the erosion of fair play among competing nations.
She wants international sports bodies to "tighten up the eligibility rules in order to minimize the use and abuse of citizenship as a recruitment tool in the worldwide hunt for triumph." Peter Spiro, on the other hand, advocates fully eliminating nationality rules:
Think domestic professional sports, in which players are bought and sold as a matter of course. We don’t care if our baseball players have prior emotional attachments to the cities for which they play. Why should Olympic competition be any different?
(Photo: Triple jumper Yamile Aldama, who is representing Great Britain, is seen during training on July 25, 2012. She has faced hectoring for having represented Sudan in the 2004 Olympics and Cuba in the 2000 Olympics. By Stu Forster/Getty Images)
The Dish 
