Paris: A ‘new era’ of corruptionfree Games?

PARIS: Ahead of the Paris Olympics in July and August, French prosecutors are working on four inquiries into possible wrongdoing, but are the investigations a sign of problems or of genuine efforts to tackle graft?

Andy Spalding, an academic and author who studies corruption in sporting “mega-events” such as the Olympics or the football World Cup, believes French authorities are showing they are serious about delivering a clean Games.

Three preliminary investigations are into possible favoritism in the awarding of around 20 contracts worth tens of millions of euros, while a fourth — revealed on February 6 by Agence France-Presse (AFP) — is scrutinizing the pay of chief organizer Tony Estanguet.

In an interview with AFP, Spalding, a professor at the US-based University of Richmond School of Law, explained the troubled history of Olympic corruption and why he believes the Paris Games might spell the start of a “new era” of cleaner international sport.

Question: When did corruption in the Olympics first come to wide public attention? “The Salt Lake City Winter Olympics in 2002 was the first time in which there was hard evidence of corruption that went public. Pre-2002, we know there’s corruption. But we can’t prove it, and the world is largely resigned to corruption.

Then in the late 1990s, there’s something sometimes called the “corruption eruption” — a period of time in which all of a sudden the world starts paying a lot of attention to corruption issues.

There are new international conventions; there’s an explosion of scholarship. There are scandals and resignations, new enforcement initiatives.

What we saw in the ensuing Games was not just incidents of corruption, but systemic corruption. Russia with the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics was probably the most egregious example of this, where billions of dollars are estimated to have been embezzled in the course of the event.”