International Sports Ambassadors: Mapping the Ecology of Sports Diplomacy Actors in Cases of Russia and Iceland

Despite a growing appreciation for the heterogeneity of actors involved and dimensions of practices that are understood collectively as ‘sports diplomacy,’ majority of academic and policy analyses in the field still adopt nations as their units of analysis and interpret elite-level sporting events and international sports governance bodies and national governments as, respectively, key channels and practitioners of this craft. These approaches paint a limited picture of what we refer to as an ‘ecology of sports diplomacy.’ Focusing on cases from Iceland and Russia, this chapter sketches out a typology of sports diplomacy actors and identifies various dimensions, motivations, audiences and possible outcomes of their activities. We group sports diplomats into two broad types: actual athletes and sport-adjacent actors. Utilising diverse examples of both elite- and grassroots-level actors situated in or associated with the national settings of Iceland and Russia – from Alexander Ovechkin to the Icelandic horse – the chapter proceeds to explain the significance of interactions within the ecology of sports diplomacy. It also accounts for various factors that shape and inform individual actors’ activities in order to achieve a more nuanced view of sports diplomacy and its impacts.