Our athletes are the real losers in the Rio scandal
IT TOOK a unique combination of contempt and arrogance for Pat Hickey to declare that he is looking forward to resuming his position as president of the Irish Olympic Council. Hickey swept aside a distinguished judge’s scathing report on his governance of the IOC just as blithely as he ignored and dismissed politicians for decades.
He defeated Irish governments and politicians in every confrontation since his election in 1988 – but even an old warhorse like Hickey cannot expect to win this battle.
Yet he is expected to continue facing down the Government, repeatedly saying he will be proven innocent of the charges brought against him in Brazil – and he has every right to clear his name.
Hickey decided not to cooperate with Judge Carroll Moran’s inquiry into the ticketing scandal in Rio or to appear before the Oireachtas sports committee hearing on the report’s findings.
Everyone hopes he will eventually explain the circumstances of how the police in Rio arrested and charged him and nine others with ticket scalping, conspiracy and ambush marketing.
Judge Moran’s inquiry was flawed: it did not have the power to compel Hickey and other witnesses to give evidence. But despite its limitations, the 226-page final report gave a remarkable insight into Hickey’s one-man show at the OCI. Here is a truncated list of its findings:
A company that was to sell Irish tickets in Rio was ‘unfit for purpose’.
The OCI had a contract with and worked closely with THG, a hospitality company that had been banned from operating in Rio.
Accountancy practices at the OCI were not always robust.
But I believe the gravest of the findings is that the OCI prioritised its commercial interests over the concerns of athletes. Is that why Irish athletes did not have proper accreditation to use public transport to reach events in Rio that they were competing in?
Is that why athletes’ families had to travel to Brazil without any guarantees of access to a ticket?
HICKEY says there are inaccuracies in the Moran report, that he will be proven innocent and that he will continue the fight to clear his name. For decades he has presented himself as a lone hero battling to provide for athletes with little or no personal financial reward.
Yet the OCI had granted him an annual honorarium of €60,000. According to a spokesman for Hickey, the money was to be used as a bursary for athletes and the matter would be ‘concluded on [Hickey’s] retirement’. Now we have learned that the full amount, €360,000, was drawn down in 2015.
This week we also learned that, without the knowledge of any other members of the OCI board, Hickey signed a contract last year that will permit THG to resell tickets for Ireland until 2016. THG had been banned from selling tickets in Rio because of suspicions it had been involved in ticket touting; it is also banned from selling tickets for next year’s Winter Olympics.
The OCI has lost all of its prestige sponsors, including its principal funder, Electric Ireland, as well as Kellogg’s, New Balance, yogurtmaker Muller and Kia cars.
Sports Minister Shane Ross has resolved to stop funding the OCI until it cuts its ties with THG and implements sweeping reforms.
Ross is just the latest to confront Hickey, 72, who patronised or marginalised all the previous ministers who took him on.
Those turf wars caused enormous collateral damage to the OCI and its athletes and left Ireland with an ugly stain on its otherwise proud sporting history.
By the time the Tokyo games begin in 2020, Hickey may be just another old man recalling old memories – but his golden years will have already been running for nearly two decades. WHEN the Tories decide a prime minister has outlived their usefulness, faceless men in grey suits have a quiet word and suggest resigning, usually for ‘health reasons’. In the US, Carl Bernstein of Watergate fame is now talking openly about men in white coats having a clinical conversation with Donald Trump.
Bernstein based his diagnosis on conversations with military top brass, intelligence chiefs, business leaders and Republicans.
On Friday, he said: ‘They are questioning President Trump’s stability and fitness for office.’
Bernstein has the best-placed sources of any US working journalist on his speed dial. BRITAIN was shocked last week when the former chief of staff for Brexit minister David Davis disclosed that he had seen David Davis ‘drunk’, ‘bullying’ and that he only worked a three-day week. The adviser revealed another of Davis’s habits, one sure to repulse Simon Coveney, our healthconscious minister: he takes six spoons of sugar in his tea. DUBLINER Stewart Kenny is not your run-of-the-mill Irish multimillionaire. The Paddy Power founder (net worth €65m) recently asked why a portion of the €50m raised in betting duty was not allocated to deal with gambling addiction rather than being used to subsidise prize money for rich racehorse owners. Mr Kenny asked: ‘What next… State grants for owners of super yachts?’
A Buddhist who refused to move his businesses offshore for tax purposes, he questioned other superrich tax exiles. In a letter to the Irish Times, he asked how much Denis O’Brien would be prepared to pay if he would not even cough up 20% Capital Gains Tax.