Below is a summary by Dr Matthew L. McDowell (University of Edinburgh) of the ‘Sport, “Islands”, People, and Politics’ conferences, organised in Kirkwall on June 28, 2025 with the support of the Society.
The XX International Island Games are being held in Orkney from Saturday, 12 July through Saturday, 19 July. The competition started in 1985 as part of the Isle of Man’s Year of Sport, and it has been held in Atlantic Rim ‘islands’ (broadly defined) every two years since (with the exception of the COVID-cancelled 2021 Games). Orkney 2025 is the second time the competition will be hosted in Scotland – the last time was 20 years ago, in Shetland – and it is arguably a unique sporting and social gathering that tells us a great deal about how communities, territories, and polities on the edge have survived and sometimes thrived. But what is the relationships of these places with sport – historical and otherwise?
I sought to organise a conference to discuss this. Of course, there is a difficulty in organising a conference that examines Island Games polities. Membership of the International Island Games Association (IIGA) includes Shetland, Orkney, the Western Isles, the Isle of Wight, and Ynys Môn/Anglesey: is it fair to make experts in these places travel to Edinburgh, or Leicester, or even London? (This is before we get to Gozo, Bermuda, the Falkland Islands…) Travel within the Island Games is usually funded by athletes themselves, who typically engage in an elaborate series of fundraisers to be able to do so: is it fair to make to make academics travel similar distances, especially since our systems of getting internal and external funding are less plentiful than they used to be? One year, we might hold an online conference to examine these places; certainly, the logistics are much easier. But this time, I thought it was important to have a small, in-person meeting. Let’s all find our own way to Orkney, I thought, and let’s understand how Orcadians (and other islanders) have to negotiate their relationship with ‘mainlands’.
The conference, entitled ‘Sport, “islands”, people and politics’, was held on Saturday, 28 June, at the St Magnus Centre in Kirkwall. Generous funding for the venue and plenaries’ travel and accommodation was given by two organisations. The Scottish Society for Northern Studies (SSNS), to my knowledge, has never had a conference on sport before. I have been a member since 2021 (when I gave an address at its online conference): the SNSS and its members explore the history of Scotland (and other places) as it relates to the idea of ‘the north’, in particular interrelationships with ‘Nordic-ness’ and ‘Celtic-ness’. Meanwhile, I am assuming that this the furthest-north event (though I could be wrong) that the British Society of Sports History (BSSH) has ever funded. The BSSH is the pre-eminent scholarly organisation for historians of sport, with an increasing remit to work with heritage. Sport scholars are more attentive than most to the idea Scotland and England are not the same thing; here, we sought to figure out how islands were different from each other, but additionally what they had in common.
Our three plenary speakers certainly worked towards this end. The only Orkney-based academic at our conference, Professor Donna Heddle (University of the Highlands and Islands, Institute for Northern Studies) gave a brilliant opening address which placed the Island Games in a context most SSNS members would be very familiar with: a long view of Scandinavian ideas of ‘leikr’, or play, and how modern sport in islands with Nordic histories such as Orkney, Shetland, and the Isle of Man inherit much older concepts discussed in the likes of the Orkneyinga Saga. Dr Paul Wheeler (retired, University of Chichester), a native of the Isle of Wight, and current BSSH Treasurer (and a well-known figure at sport history conferences), went down a very different road when discussing the Isle of Wight’s relationship with golf – not just a tale of how the island moulded its economy to cater to tourism, but about the place’s and people’s (and golfers’) relationships with the wider world. Dr Matthew Benwell (University of Newcastle), research performed with now-MP (and fellow geography academic) Dr Alasdair Pinkerton concluded on a more contemporary note, discussing the 2019 Island Games in Gibraltar, which coincided with the British territory’s detainment of Grace 1, an oil tanker allegedly working in service of Iran. But Gibraltar, not an island but effectively “islanded” during Spain’s Francoist regime (whereby the dictatorship sealed Gibraltar’s only crossing frontier), for its 2019 iteration essentially grappled with the limitations (and metaphorical symbolism!) of the land, including rock that refused to be easily dynamited to make way for sporting facilities.
Connections with these addresses arrived in the other papers. Stuart Gibbs (Manchester Metropolitan Uni PhD student, and another staunch BSSH regular and current media/website manager) highlighted some episodes of women’s football in the Isle of Man, Orkney and Shetland. Women’s football in the Isle of Man existed largely in proximity to the holiday destination’s status as a place of entertainment, whilst women’s football in Orkney and Shetland was a fixture around gala days and agricultural shows. (Gibbs additionally discussed the discontinued iteration of the women’s Kirkwall Ba’.) My own paper examined the sole non-British Island Games territory discussed on the day. Åland is an autonomous region of Finland whose residents are Swedish speakers: controversies initially arose about the ability of Åland’s state gambling authority, PAF, to fund Island Games participation, but the tournament has proven a means of allowing the province to gain access to political power in regional sport. One of my main duties on the day, however, was reading Kara Hanlon’s paper. Hanlon, an MSc Sport Policy, Management, and international Development graduate from the University of Edinburgh, wrote the most contemporary paper of the day: an examination of Orkney Island Council’s pre-Island Games legacy planning. It was a reminder that, for all that the Island Games presents a unique sporting experience, it too is tied to macro- and micro-politics.
As a result of the conference, we are hoping to put together a special issue of Sport in History. Ultimately, however, the real success will come when we finally begin to understand sport in these islands as less of a novelty, and more as part of the island way of life.
- Dr Matthew L McDowell (University of Edinburgh)
Former BSSH Chair