IN the later years of the Roman Republic, the centre of public spectacle was the gladiator.

In the words of historians, gladiator games, which pitched warriors against wild animals, convicted criminals, or slaves, provided the organisers with great opportunities for self-promotion while providing cheap and exhilarating entertainment to the public.

Gladiator contests were common as a means of building support for election campaigns and for pleasing clients. The trainers and organisers of the games were entrepreneurs, and the contests, many of which were fought until death, were big business that concerned many livelihoods.

To the modern purveyors of sport, the blood and gore of these contests can appear barbaric: the idea of entertainment involving the possibility of death for the participants is a grotesque facet of the past that modernity has transcended.

Similar hordes descend on stadiums for fervid contests of cricket and soccer and many more; there are cheering crowds and beating hearts and lost hopes. There is, however, no death. No one dies on the field, and the crowds, unlike the hordes of yore, memorialised so artfully by Hollywood, do not thirst for blood.

Modern sport is a civilised endeavour, we all imagine; no one is going to die, no one is enslaved, and, beyond the heartfelt vagaries of wins and losses, no one suffers.

But these assumptions of civilised, less lethal sports are incorrect. Last week, as hundreds of workers toiled at the Arena Corinthians in Sao Paulo in preparation for the FIFA World Cup 2014, a giant crane collapsed on top of them. Two were killed, and many were injured.

In the days after the accident, it was revealed that a safety engineer on the site had told his supervisor that the accident was likely to happen and that the intense speed at which the project was being pushed forward was to blame. He was ignored.

One or two dead workers would not stand in the way of the construction deadline. The stadium had to be finished in time for inspections, even if it took hundreds of workers toiling 12-hour shifts without a vacation.

The people who would spend money to attend the games would not see the blood of the fallen workers; they would only see a great contest, experience some exhilarating entertainment.

Similar calculations, it seems, have been made in Qatar which is the site for the 2022 FIFA World Cup. According to an Amnesty International report released last month, Qatar’s bid for the event included the construction of new stadiums to be built at a cost of $4 billion.

Migrant labourers are contracted for all the construction projects, and the Amnesty report found gross and widespread abuse perpetrated on them. Employers often took away their travel documents upon arrival, making it impossible for workers to leave. Many workers found that the terms of their sponsorship by employers were changed from what they had agreed to prior to their arrival. Workers were housed in filthy dormitories, crammed into single rooms with little ventilation and very poor sanitation facilities.

Furthermore, the labourers toiling day and night to build hotels and splendid luxury accommodations had little or no access to healthcare facilities. If they fell sick while working on the sites, their pay was withheld.

Hostage to their bosses they were forced to labour sometimes in temperatures rising up to 45 degrees Celsius.

The Winter Olympics scheduled to be held in the city of Sochi in Russia in February 2014 presents its own tales of the world’s deprived being exploited to enable entertainments for the wealthy.

According to Human Rights Watch, widespread abuse was in evidence on construction sites in the city, which included being forced to work on unsafe equipment.

Also reported were widespread evictions and detentions and harassment of civil society and human rights activists who were raising their voice against the hazards faced by workers and residents of the area. More widespread effects of the Olympics-related construction will include no safe drinking water for a village for several years.

The 10 large corporations that are sponsoring the Olympics, including Coca-Cola, Dow Chemicals, Panasonic, McDonalds, Procter and Gamble, Samsung and Visa, have not yet called out Russian authorities and construction companies on the human rights abuses reported during the preparations of the games they are sponsoring.

One aspect of sport is the competition that is visible, the mediated rules through which wins and losses are demarcated and understood. In this sense, modern sport is supposed to be a simulation of actual combat, without the blood. It is thus imagined as graduating from the jousts of gladiators, who had not yet placed filters between actual combat and the sporting variety. Everyone can have a good time, without the guilt of exploiting the weak, the slave, the criminal, or the poorly prepared warrior.

The dirty details of the construction of mega sporting structures, the preparations for spectacles that accomplish much the same purpose as the gladiatorial galas of old, show that our visions of progress are largely illusions.

If death was evident and the targeting of the weak an undisguised fact then today these are simply cloaked. The slaves are shoved away, invisible; the ones who died or were maimed in preparation for the grand event will not appear on stage or in the arena.

The vast crowds, drunk on drama, will not remember; the bright lights and the loud music will drown out the barest whispers of a guilty conscience.

Onlookers, participants, players, and coaches are all conspirators in the lie, peddling the mega sporting event as a spectacle of fairness and equality, a grand commitment to human dignity.

The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.

rafia.zakaria@gmail.com