The International Association of Red Sports and Gymnastics Associations, commonly known as Red Sport International (RSI) or Sportintern was a Comintern-supported organization, created on 23 July 1921, to promote communist-based sports and gymnastics.
RSI was largely created upon the initiative of Nikolai Podvoisky, and was not officially recognized by the Comintern until its Fifth World Congress in the fall of 1924.[1] By that time, the Sportintern had become primarily an instrument of the Young Communist International, the youth wing of Comintern.[1]
The Moscow-based organization was to sway worker sports organizations around the world away from the socialist Lucerne Sport International and convert them into revolutionary organizations to united the "physical vanguard of the proletariat".[2]
When RSI was founded, the only branch was in the USSR, however, the communist sports federation of Czechoslovakia became an official member in October 1922, followed by the worker sports federation of France (in 1923) and Norway (in 1924).[1][2] Other sections were created in Uruguay, Argentina, Canada, Sweden, Spain, the United States, Greece, Iceland, Germany, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Netherlands, Austria, Sudetenland, and Alsace-Lorraine.[1]
In opposition to what they viewed as the "bourgeois" International Olympic Committee, RSI promoted its alternative the Spartakiad, first held in August 1928 in Moscow.
Although by the end of the 1920s, the RSI included branches in three continents, it was disbanded by the Comintern April 1937. [1]