Drone racing to drone strikes: have war and sport become indistinguishable? | Sport
AAmong the most surprising continuities of 2026 is the visual kinship between the Winter Olympics and the United States’ illegal and unprovoked war in Iran. Drones with high-speed cameras were a highlight of television coverage of the recent Games in Milan Cortina, putting viewers close to the action as Olympic athletes raced down and around the slopes during the skiing and sliding events. Aside from the incessant howling of drones, the introduction of cameras on board quadcopters seemed like a real step forward in winter sports coverage, bringing a (literal) new perspective to events that had, over the past few decades, become quite static as a viewing experience.
No sooner had the Olympics ended than aerial video was back on our screens – only the images, in this case, were of a much darker variety. Instead of the ridiculous hip flexibility of slalom skiers and the high-speed turns of monobobbers, our feeds have been flooded for the past month with satellite and drone images of the U.S. military blasting planes, ships, vehicles, munitions ships, and Iranian citizens to smithereens. The aerial perspective that brought to our screens the strength, speed, elasticity and joy of Olympic competition now conveys the daily horrors of war in two-minute clips that are easy to snack on on our phones. In the era of the duck milkshake, it is almost expected that everything positive in our culture will eventually turn sour – and technology, of course, is ethically agnostic, a tool that can be used for both good and evil purposes. But even in a culture as depraved and hypocritical as ours, the seamless transition from drone-delivered images of Olympic excellence to drone-delivered images of war crimes has been truly shocking.
There has been much discussion in recent weeks about the “memeification” of war, expressed most clearly in the Trump administration’s appropriation of Hollywood imagery and video games in its videos about U.S. military activities in Iran. Less noted is the extent to which war, at least in the United States, is increasingly communicated to the public and – most worryingly – waged through the visual and behavioral prism of sports fans.
The drone’s status as a pivotal technology linking sport and warfare should perhaps come as no great surprise. Professional drone racing emerged with the advent of the niche sports boom about a decade ago. The Drone Racing League, the largest and most popular competition in this extremely loud and fast new sport, involved goggle-wearing pilots guiding lightweight drones with first-person views at speeds of up to 90 mph around neon-lit temporary obstacle courses built in the stadiums of existing professional sports franchises. Many drone racing courses extended into the grandstands of the stadiums themselves, which meant that the presence of live spectators was always secondary to the action: this was a sport designed to be consumed primarily on screen, through highlight reels punctuated by accelerated electronic beats. The military has played a role in drone racing almost since the league’s inception in 2015. The U.S. Air Force has long sponsored the Drone Racing League, using the competition as a scouting ground to recruit new pilots, while the league has spawned spinoff companies like Performance Drone Works, now a leading supplier of unmanned aerial systems to the U.S. military.
The league continued for a few years after PDW spun off into a separate military contractor, before its acquisition in 2024 by metaverse startup Infinite Reality. Since then, the Drone Racing League, like Infinite Reality itself, seems to have gone dark; the league hasn’t held events or posted social media posts in nearly a year, and its website is down. Perhaps this is due to its design: the drone has survived its origins as a sports competition vehicle and is now a pure instrument of war. (Though much larger than the first-person-view drones used for racing, surveillance, and image capture, Iran’s Shahed drones and U.S. Lucas drones are the defining weapons of the current war.) But the marriage of military and sporting spirit that gave rise to drone racing survives in other dimensions of this conflict.
In a sports culture that wants to get rid of live spectators (or at least make participation in live sport so expensive that it becomes the privilege of the wealthy few) and arbitrate all sports consumption through a screen, there is a dark evolutionary logic in replacing professional drone races and Olympic skiers cutting down gates with drone footage of the US military obliterating targets in the Middle East. These clips sanitize the conflict, stripping it of its very real material and human costs: all the terror and destruction of war as experienced by those in the strike zone is stripped away in a series of extremely eventful shots. This is war as sport: action without living witnesses, without scruples or consequences, pure kinesis stripped of the messy affairs of context.
The Trump administration has made no substantive attempt to justify the war to the American people or to seek authorization from Congress to attack Iran. Rather, the goal seems to be to legitimize war as entertainment. The White House wants the public to “consume” this war the same way we might experience March Madness or Major League Baseball: passively, as a series of brief distractions to idly scroll through on our phones. Indeed, it comes close to how the president himself absorbs information about the conflict. According to a recent report, Donald Trump’s daily briefings on war progress from military officials primarily take the form of two-minute video montages of “stuff exploding.” Every day, a team of social media managers scours raw footage from drones and missiles to “slice up” the conflict with the same eye of excitement the NBA might use to put together a bunch of Wemby dunks. War marketing is as insensitive as war itself. If drone racing helped the US military state imagine the future of war, the war in Iran helps us imagine the future of sport – as deterritorialized, user-friendly entertainment, consumable anywhere, on any device, in which the fate of those on the ground is incidental to the interests of those in power.
Not only does this war reflect the cultural supremacy of sports-derived clip culture, but it also illustrates the extent to which Trump’s trash talk has degraded the language of global diplomacy. As thousands die in Iran, Lebanon, the Gulf and beyond, the commander in chief’s tweets about the war have been even more crude and moronic than usual: “Open the fucking straits, you crazy bastards,” Trump posted on Sunday. American foreign policy is now run by the most obnoxious member of your sports chat group. While the world is on the brink of a military and economic catastrophe, the president is glued to his phone, letting fly all the finesse of Philip Seymour Hoffman in Along Came Polly. Even Trump’s arbitrary deadlines and ultimatums to Iranian leaders are timed like major sporting events, to coincide with prime time on the US East Coast.
The need to view everything in this war through the lens of sports is not limited to the president. Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, recently asserted that the United States sees “the finish line” in Iran. Sportsman intimidation and machismo shine through in every inflated statement by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth about the “dominance,” “lethality” and “unwavering resolve” of the U.S. military. Untroubled by the pangs of conscience, the political class is free to experience the war as a game, demanding “more bombs” that will send Iran “back to the Stone Age,” in the same voice and with the same risk-free, tribal intensity with which it cheers on its favorite college football team. In some sense, the administration’s constant touting of American advances and victories in the face of tougher and more competent Iranian resistance than expected also represents a crude borrowing from the language of modern sports, with its dogma of illusory self-confidence and its insistence on ignoring competitive setbacks to “trust the process.” Even those outside the Situation Room are doing their part to deepen the ties between sports and the Trumpian state. Kash Patel, a man whose political background is so indistinguishable from that of a merch-hungry fandom that he had a pair of custom FBI-branded Nikes made for him, hosted an event last month to get UFC fighters to help train FBI agents. (Patel, readers may recall, has a history of running for political office in a draw against Liverpool.) Then there’s all the questionable activity throughout the war in the investment and prediction markets: the sports betting disease has so deeply infected the Magaverse that it’s not hard to imagine that the conduct of this war is timed to maximize opportunities for speculation among members of Trump’s inner circle.
Are war and sport becoming indistinguishable? It may be an exaggeration, but it seems increasingly clear that sports culture is at the heart of the chaos unfolding in the Middle East. The Spanish writer José Ortega y Gasset once argued that the modern state grew out of sport—that the desire of young athletes to hunt, wage war, and feast forced the early organization of society into a political form with rituals, laws, and well-established institutions. Eventually, in Ortega y Gasset’s idiosyncratic history of civilization, mature men came to dominate public affairs and the vigor of the young and athletic was replaced by the serenity of the middle-aged and sensible.
To this story, modern America today adds a disconcerting coda: under the leadership of the seemingly mature men who run it, today’s United States is falling back into a state of primitive sporting consciousness. The difference, of course, is that the leaders of this resurrected state demonstrate none of the energy or bravery that comes with actually participating in athletic competitions. American leaders behave not like players in the arena but like spectators: they consume the war like fans, comment on it like fans, conduct it like fans, and their thirst for escalation shows all the irresponsibility of the worst form of secondary incitement. The term of the sporting state is not the graduation beyond sport but a return to sport, not to maturity, wisdom, tolerance or grace, but to the decay of executive will into impulsive and shameless fanaticism.
