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  3. Where Latin American history is so much the story of disappointment—the burden of unfulfilled promise having weighed heavily on

Where Latin American history is so much the story of disappointment—the burden of unfulfilled promise having weighed heavily on

admin2022-12-10  1
问题     Where Latin American history is so much the story of disappointment—the burden of unfulfilled promise having weighed heavily on the region—football in many ways remains her greatest achievement. When, in 2007, Brazil was named host nation for the 2014 Fifa World Cup, the country’s then president stated that "football is more than a sport for us, it’s a national passion".
    He was, however, mistaken. Football in Latin America is much more than a passion: It is the architect of national identity. Whereas Europe fashioned her identity early, it was not until the 20th century that Latin American republics were able to consolidate the myths that would shape nationhood. For many, this bordered on an obsession.
    As early as the 1910s, identity was being constructed by international football. When faced with a stained past and uncertain future, it was through the game that the continent defined itself in relation to the rest of the world. Latin Americans still see football as their birthright, even though it was born of the British sporting clubs that were established in the region in the 19th century. Football in Latin America is where sentimentality and violence jockey for position. In short, the continent’s soul is reflected in her football.
    In the early Thirties, the celebrated travel writer and adventurer, Rosita Forbes, spent a year in South America, where she encountered "half a dozen coups d’état, military and civilian". For South Americans, this was nothing new. These republics, for the most part proto-democratic, had spent much of the previous century fighting wars within their borders and without.
    Bolivia, for example, had been humiliated in the War of the Pacific, the peace settlement of which left her without access to the coast. Not only was she poor: she was landlocked. (This was something that football fans from neighbouring countries would not let her forget.)
    The onset of the 20th century was unlikely to eradicate the bloodletting that had become part of the psyche of so many of these nascent (新生的) republics. Argentina had been a prime offender. This was not lost on V. S. Naipaul, who noted, "the idea of blood and revolution, in unending sequence: just one more fresh start, the finding out and killing of just one more enemy".
    For Forbes these traits were manifest in football. "It has been suggested by cynics, " she wrote, "that football is almost as great a danger to the peace of South America as the politics of soldiers, students and artisans. Both sports are flavoured with a fanaticism only equalled by the Inquisition." Moreover, she noted that the diplomatic spat (争吵) between Argentina and Uruguay in 1932 could be "traced to the bitterness on one side and the impolitic rejoicing on the other which followed the defeat of the larger republic in the stadium of Montevideo".
    This bitterness had history. For a country that, in the mind of the Argentinian, was dismissed as a mere province, it was irritating that Uruguay had won gold in football at the 1924 Paris Olympics, a feat they repeated four years later in Amsterdam. Hosting and winning the inaugural World Cup in 1930 confirmed the country’s supremacy in the region. And yet triumph in Europe was not solely about the game; it had greater significance for the diminutive republic.
Winning the World Cup means________for Uruguay.
选项 A、bitterness
B、irritation
C、jealousy
D、ascendancy
答案D
解析
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