IOC could have grown a spine in 2001
Committee has shown future dictators that cheating leads to a mere slap on the wrist
It’s not difficult to pinpoint the exact moment when the International Olympic Committee took the disastrous wrong turn that led directly to the current mess in Pyeongchang.
The Pyeongchang games were irrevocably tainted before they began, tainted by the very visible presence of Team Russia. The same Russian team that was guilty of massive, state-sponsored doping at Sochi four years ago: the biggest single doping scandal in Olympic history.
All this began almost 17 years ago, at an IOC session in Moscow during a steamy week in July of 2001. The Russian capital was in the throes of a brutal heat wave that summer, with temperatures hovering around 38 or 39 degrees and Russian air conditioning simply not up to the task.
First, the IOC delegates bypassed Toronto to award the 2008 Summer Games to Beijing, ignoring the fact that China is a totalitarian state with an abysmal record on human rights. Then they chose the affable nonentity Jacques Rogge to succeed Juan Antonio Samaranch as president of the IOC over the blunt-spoken, enormously competent Richard Pound of Montreal.
Given two six-year terms as president, Pound might have cleaned up the Olympic movement and done away with doping and bribery for once and for all. He wasn’t given the chance and now we see the result: the farcical presence of the team called “Olympic Athletes from Russia” in Pyeongchang.
Abetted by the inexplicable blundering of the Court of Arbitration for Sport, the IOC has enabled future dictators to force their athletes to turn themselves into walking lab experiments, knowing that the consequences will be no more than a slap on the wrist. Different uniforms, same team, same boss: Vladimir Putin. Put lipstick on a pig, it’s still a pig.
Pound, an Olympic freestyle swimmer at the Rome Olympics in 1960 and a full-time tax lawyer who accomplishes more in a morning than most people do in a year, should have won the IOC presidency in 2001. But in the wake of the bidding and bribery scandal surrounding the Salt Lake City Olympics in 2002, Pound was handed the unenviable task of “cleansing the Augean stables,” as he put it. He wielded a big broom and IOC members did not appreciate it.
When the final ballot came, Rogge won 59 votes, Korea’s Kim Un-Yong (who had been linked to offers of financial incentives to voting members) 23 and Pound only 22.
It was a bitter defeat for Pound: Not so much because of the victory for Rogge, who had the backing of the massive European bloc, but because Pound had finished behind the Korean despite the vote-buying scandal.
Rogge would remain as IOC president for 12 years, during which his most notable accomplishment was to ditch the organization’s imperial style in favour of a more egalitarian presence. But Rogge the diplomat was not the one to tackle the twin problems of bribery and doping head-on.
Next to his successor Thomas Bach, however, Rogge was a model of courage and determination. With full knowledge of the extent of Russian doping at Sochi, Bach folded before the Rio Games, and he did it again before Pyeongchang — then tried to make up for it with a few pointless words in his speech at the opening ceremony.
At the IOC session before the opening ceremony in Pyeongchang, only the blunt, plain-spoken Pound has stood up to Bach and the jelly-spined IOC.
“I believe that in the collective mind of a significant portion of the world, and among the athletes of the world, the IOC has not only failed to protect athletes, but has made it possible for cheating athletes to prevail against the clean athletes,” Pound said.
“We talk more than we walk. The athletes and the public at large … no longer have confidence that their interests are being protected. Our commitment to both is in serious doubt.”
Worse, as Pound pointed out, the IOC hung the whistleblowers who exposed the Russian misdeeds out to dry. This in Putin’s Russia, where those who displease the dictator can end up dead.
All in all, a disgraceful performance. Had Pound been elected president, you have to believe that all this might have been prevented. We’ll never know. All we know is that Pound would have gone after corruption and doping with a wide broom and
The athletes and the public at large … no longer have confidence that their interests are being protected.
that he alone would have had the courage to stand up to Putin.
This is not about the handful of Russian athletes who may actually be clean.
I have enormous sympathy for the Russian people and Russian athletes — but the best way to protect them in the future would have been an outright ban.
A slap on the wrist is not the way to get the attention of the man who rigs American elections and turns his friends into billionaires with impunity: Forcing the Russians to stay home might finally have gotten his attention.
But because the IOC got it so terribly wrong in Moscow in the summer of 2001, the entire Olympic movement has been left to the mercy of the cheaters — and men like Vladimir Putin have no mercy.