During the interwar period, the Balkan states were plagued by mutual mistrust, which hindered any possibility of deeper cooperation among them. Despite ongoing political issues, efforts were made to improve relations, and football emerged as a means to bridge the divides. In the late 1920s, football players became national symbols, with their successes and failures reflecting on their countries' reputations, but also on relations with other nations. Eventually, the growing popularity of football in the Balkans led to the organization of the Balkan Cup, a football competition between Yugoslavia, Romania, Bulgaria, and Greece, which was also intended as a political tool to bring this region's countries closer together. In total, there were six Balkan Cups, and each one had its distinguished political background. What should have been used as a tool for closer relations had become an area where current political issues had been manifested in sports. As a result, football suffered, and politics overshadowed the potential for sport to foster unity in the region. The Balkan Cup was canceled due to the shifting political landscape in Europe and the diverse sports and political aspirations of the Balkan nations. This paper explores precisely the role of the Balkan Cup as a political instrument aimed at fostering cooperation among Balkan states between 1929 and 1936.

The main goal of this paper is to consider the necessity of founding ethical committees in professional sports. In the first part of the paper the authors consider the emergence of the first ethical committee in medicine, and the emergence of bioethics as a social movement and academic discipline. In the second part of the paper, the authors examine few examples of ethical committees in contemporary professional sport and the need to set up ethical committees within sports associations to consider numerous ethical problems: doping, match fixing, referee errors, racism, injuries, sex/gender and body issues, sexual abuse in sports etc. These topics are also an inevitable field studied within bioethics, so the following question arises: 'Is the official establishment of ethical committees in professional sports as an aspect of 'bioethicalization' of sport a real need that is imposed due to the growing ethical problems that are present in modern sports?'

The aim of the paper is to re-examine the concept of marathon as a sports recreational activity that presupposes a healthy lifestyle. Through the theoretical concept of escapism on the example of the Belgrade Marathon, the autobiographical book of a recreational marathon runner and autobiographical records of recreational runners, recreational participation in marathons is studied as a form of escapism from the problems of everyday life that ends up as a certain form of fanaticism. Fanaticism expressed in the imperative of success imposed through the obligation to finish the race changes the approach to a recreational activity whose goal is, among other things, to improve and nurture health. In the social context of neo-liberalism, this (self-)imposed imperative often leads in the direction of disrupting health for its own fulfillment.