Cricket dominates South Asian sports diplomacy, particularly the India-Pakistan rivalry, which mirrors broader geopolitical tensions. The Asia Cup in September 2025 witnessed an intense India-Pakistan cricketing season in the wake of India Pakistan bilateral boycott over a terrorist attack in April evoking India’s precision strikes against terror infrastructure in Pakistan, through Operation Sindoor. India's dominant win over Pakistan on September 14  led to emboldened debates on security.  Indian cricket team declined to shake hands with Pakistani players starting the “no-handshake” row. After the match, the Indian captain dedicated the win to victims of the Pahalgam terror attack and made reference to “Operation Sindoor”. Pakistan Cricket Board demanded match referee Andy Pycroft to be replaced, prompting ICC penalties.

George Orwell referred to modern global sport as war minus the shooting. Sports at times enacts larger political conflicts. In such backdrops, athletes play the role of proxy warriors whose successes or failures reverberate far beyond the matches. Circumstances might make sporting events symbolic battlegrounds, with wins and losses carrying political baggage of a broader geopolitical context. 

Exceptions aside, nations continue to use sports as a strategic soft power tool of “back-channel" diplomacy to foster mutual understanding and advancing foreign policy goals.  Sports diplomacy serves as one of the most popular, effective and widely documented means of people-to-people connection in the world. 

Records indicate the practice that earned its coinage as ‘sports diplomacy’ in the 20th century was prevalent even Before Common Era( BCE). The ancient Olympic Games, with the first recorded instance in 776 BCE started the conventional practice of maintaining a temporary truce period that mandated a complete cessation of hostilities and prohibited the carrying of arms during the event.

The cold war period marked an important period in the history of the recent past when sports diplomacy was used in major power dynamics, the most prominent example being 1971’s Ping-Pong Diplomacy.

The National Museum of American Diplomacy in its documented report states, "In April 1971, nine players from the U.S. Table Tennis team took a historic trip to China, becoming the first delegation of Americans to visit the country in decades. Following the 1949 Chinese revolution, there had been no diplomatic ties, limited trade, and few contacts between the United States and China. Their trip was the start of what became known as “ping-pong diplomacy” and helped lay the groundwork for establishing official diplomatic relations between the United States and China. Ping-pong diplomacy also led to improved people-to-people understanding and cultural exchange".

It paved the way for high-level diplomatic contact, culminating in President Nixon's visit to China in 1972. The visit and subsequent exchanges led to the eventual restoration of formal diplomatic relations between the United States and China in 1979. 

At the peak of the cold war, "Ice Hockey” emanated as a proxy tool of political tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union. In 1980,  the US went on to win the gold medal in a ice hockey match defeating Soviet Union, solidifying the victory  as ‘Miracle in Ice’,  one of the most iconic moments in US sports history. This was preceded by the 1969 Czechoslovakia vs. USSR World Championship games. In March 1969, the Czechoslovak national ice hockey team beat the Soviet Union twice at the World Ice Hockey Championships, avenging the invasion of their country by Soviet-led troops seven months earlier.

South Africa's 1995 Rugby World Cup win against New Zealand  at Johannesburg's Ellis Park Stadium, depicted in the movie Invictus, stands as a hugely symbolic moment in South African history. It marked South Africa’s first major sporting event since the end of apartheid regime in 1991. President Nelson Mandela orchestrated the winning moment as a show of unity, national reconciliation and global reintegration, using the slogan “One Team, One Country.”

In modern day Asia, sports diplomacy has evolved into a powerful tool for regional integration as well as projection of national identity. Apart from Cricket tournaments, Sports Mega Events (SMEs) like the Asian Games, Southeast Asian (SEA) Games are important sporting event platforms in Asia used by countries for political signalling, global outreach, and mandating tentative reconciliation efforts.

Some of the historical milestones in Asian Sports Diplomacy was witnessed in: a) The 1988 Seoul Summer Olympics played a significant role in South Korea's transition from military rule to democracy, significantly boosting its ties with the West and Japan by demonstrating its commitment to openness and modernization on the global stage,  b)  The 2002 FIFA World Cup,the first World Cup ever held in Asia,jointly hosted by South Korea and Japan,  introduced a new narrative of a more inclusive Korean nationalism to foster strong economic growth. It further, underlined a tone of  reconciliation between the joint hosts beyond  historical animosities that dates back to  WWII, c) The 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics was instrumental in profiling an international status of China  by projecting it as a unified, powerful, and modern nation to attract foreign investment, and to signify the country's opening up and economic development, d)  The 2023 Hangzhou Asian Games- China used the event to mend fences with Northeast Asian neighbors (Japan, South Korea) amid US-China rivalry, emphasizing regional unity.

Sports as a socializing agency has the potential to blur lines between state-led diplomacy (e.g., government funding) and non-state actors (e.g., athletes as goodwill ambassadors). Beyond taking ahead diplomatic objectives, sports also promote human centric values like gender equality and non-violence. While sports diplomacy yields soft power gains it risks politicization leading to demonstrative caste studies of nationalism fueled rivalries. However, they are great forums to take ahead narratives and dialogues of unity too.