The problem of nationalism in the international sports movement is one of the most actual topics of modern sports science. This article attempts to analyze the main approaches to the concept of “sporting nationalism”, to consider the relationship between sports and the construction of national identity. Special attention is paid to the analysis of various examples of sporting nationalism in the early Olympic movement. Unlike its predecessors, who believe that the active processes of the dehumanization of sport, its involvement in the orbit of political battles and nationalist contradictions began in the period between the First and Second World Wars, the authors of this article assume that the origins of the phenomenon of sporting nationalism in the Olympic movement should be detected at the end of the 19th century - beginning of the 20th centuries.