Arrests over Rio attack fear
Games’ governing body is betraying all honest sportspeople by dragging its heels
POLICE in Brazil have arrested 10 people feared to have been planning an attack on the Rio Olympics.
The group were detained after pledging allegiance to Islamic State on social media. A further two people are still being hunted.
Justice minister Alexandre de Moraes said police acted because the group had been discussing the use of weapons to potentially launch an attack during the Games, which begin on August 5.
The arrests were made in the southern states of Sao Paulo and Parana. However, Mr Moraes said there was no specific target for an attack.
Meanwhile, Russia has lost its appeal against a ban on its track and field athletes from competing at the Olympics.
The Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) rejected the appeal by 68 Russian athletes seeking to overturn the ban imposed by the IAAF following allegations of state-sponsored doping and cover-ups.
RUSSIA’S state-sponsored doping programme demonstrably broke the Olympic rules and is a gross betrayal of the movement’s most basic and over-arching principle of fairness.
Yet the International Olympic Committee’s failure thus far to exclude the whole Russian team from Rio de Janeiro is also a betrayal – of their responsibility to honest sportsmen and women.
The IOC meets in emergency session on Sunday to discuss this ultimate sanction. It “wants to explore the legal options”. It should have been doing this for months and devised a plan for the instant the Court of Arbitration for Sport might rule in favour of the International Association of Athletic Federations.
CAS did so yesterday, dismissing an appeal by 68 Russian athletes that will prevent any track and field competitor from appearing under the Russian flag in Rio.
IOC credibility, already eviscerated by inaction, is in freefall. To begin restoring the brand, it has little option but to suspend all Russian sport from the Games. The fallout – public perception that all sport is tainted – will inevitably impact on TV and sponsorship at every level, reducing participation and negating sport’s worthy and beneficial messages.
If doom-laden Rio prognostications should materialise, the combined effect could bring sporting meltdown.
IOC fence-sitting is unedifying. The movement should have been sufficiently certain of its legal position to suspend the whole Russian team, and delay in doing so questions its commitment to clean sport. Not for the first time. There is a distinct impression that the IOC would prefer individual international federations to follow athletics and ban Russia from the Games, leaving them aloof from the controversy.
This would simply be lack of leadership – a wrong message rather than the unequivocal one demanded: cheating will not be tolerated.
The presence of officers of the FSB (formerly KGB) in the Sochi lab during the Winter Olympics and proven tampering and falsification of test results, cannot have been done without ministerial complicity, possibly even of President Putin. He would laugh at IOC weakness in addressing this.
The double Olympic pole vault champion Yelena Isinbayeva (a friend of Putin) was among the 68 whose appeal was dismissed by CAS. “Thank you all for this funeral for athletics,” she told the Tass news agency.
She has never failed a test, and insists the innocent are being condemned with the guilty. Yet how do athletes prove innocence if their tests have been conducted in a provenly corrupt Russian laboratory?
One recalls 167 negative tests conducted, mainly in the USA, on Marion Jones, the multiple Olympic champion, eventually exposed as a serial cheat. That now begs the question whether a corrupt system protected Jones.
Clean Russian athletes should address complaints to their own national body and government, the signatories to the World AntiDoping Agency code which has so spectacularly been breached.
Those disposed to brand such athletes victims should be wary. Strict liability doping rules hold everyone responsible for anything found in their body. Former East German competitors were unwittingly fed banned drugs believing they were vitamins.
The former DDR ran a statesponsored doping regime the better to promote its ideology. Suspicion was widespread, but proof elusive. Yet IOC president Juan Antonio Samaranch accorded the movement’s highest honour to Manfred Ewald, the DDR sports minister and head of their Olympic committee. Ewald’s colleague, Dr Manfred Hoeppner, was co-orchestrator of the programme. Also IOC doping adviser, he knew exactly what banned substances were being tested for, and how.
IOC failure to act then despite sweeping rumour illustrates naivete and culpability. Likewise their failure to impose appropriate sanction when American dope cheat Crystal Cox helped the US to Olympic relay gold. This caused Scotland’s Lee McConnell to lose the only medal missing from her trophy cabinet.
I covered the 1980 Moscow Olympics when Britain and the USA attempted to orchestrate a boycott because of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. I recall a disturbing conversation with a Soviet journalist in which we discussed the communist and capitalist systems.
I described my home, a modest suburban bungalow where I lived with my wife and children. He asked how many others lived there, and on learning it was just my family, he observed in awed tones: “Your own private dacha!”
Cue brief explanation of building societies, loans, and 25-year mortgages. His disbelief was palpable. On learning we had a car, he questioned me about “all the cars”. Another explanation, about banks and five-year loans.
Scepticism overflowed: “No,” he exploded. “They give you the cars – to keep you happy!”
“They,” was the UK Government. He had covered Wimbledon several times in the era of Olga Morozova and Alex Metreveli, and had seen the profusion of cars at the tournament and on Britain’s streets. I suggested free cars on such scale defied economic logic. Soviet propaganda had him convinced, however, despite having seen for himself. And I wondered what chance was there for the mass of Soviet society who could not travel.
Yesterday, Isinbayeva called the CAS verdict “a blatant political order”. Interviews in Moscow earlier this week contained the same slavish 1980-style credence in the government line: doping is “all a Western conspiracy”.
The IOC also have a history of denying logic. Though the existence of male hormone (testosterone – and not then illegal) had been known to have helped fuel Soviet medals since 1952, it was not until 1968 that the IOC began Olympic testing. It caught only one athlete, a shooter who’d used alcohol.
When drug tests were conducted on some 8000 samples at the Moscow Olympics, not one adverse finding was reported. Tests were conducted in a Soviet laboratory.
Subsequent technology determined 16 gold medallists and 20 per cent of 1980 competitors had cheated. Fast forward to the Sochi lab behind the latest outrage.
Despite WADA’s forensic investigation and damning conclusions, the IOC still sits on its hands. In doing so, they betray the competitors whom they are supposed to protect.
The fact that Britain was absent from the roll-call of Olympic committees calling for Russia’s suspension suggests further disturbing ambivalence. It reflects poorly on the UK, the great majority of whose athletes have made their view clear: Russia must not go to Rio.
IOC credibility is in free-fall. To begin restoring the brand, it has little option but to suspend all Russian sport from the Games