Rio: It is our athletes who miss out
Laura McQuillan was a journalist at Parliament. She knows a week is a long time in politics.
It turns out, a week is a living hell in the geopolitics around the world’s biggest athletics event, the Olympic Games.
This time last week, McQuillan had just penned an email to Sunday Star-Times readers. Our Brazil correspondent had agreed to write a weekly column from Rio de Janeiro. ‘‘The Girl from Ipanema’’ we called her column, brightly.
‘‘As the only Kiwi journalist in the country, I’ve closely followed the Olympic build-up as it’s been pulled together amid Brazil’s political crisis, deep recession, and security turmoil,’’ she wrote. ’’I’m looking forward to sharing both the stories of the Games, and those of Brazil’s Marvellous City and its people with readers back home.’’
When McQuillan moved to Rio with her partner Jason, they saw this coming month as the culmination of a grand adventure.
It was not to be. After he was kidnapped by military police, driven to an ATM and forced to withdraw R$2000, the couple were sucked into a vortex of intimidation in a nation that feared bad headlines just before the Olympics.
As she writes today (p4), military police repeatedly turned up at their door. Worried for their safety, the Star-Times’ parent company Fairfax NZ helped them flee to make a new life in Canada.
Fairfax had already withdrawn its other journalists from covering the Games on the ground in Rio, concerned at constraints on their freedom to report. Negotiations with the host broadcaster broke down after Sky TV tried to impose such conditions as (at first) a ban on any criticism of its hosts and commentators, and (ultimately) a ban on any use of news and sports video whatsoever for 30 minutes.
Never mind the slap in the face for any Kiwi athlete whose triumph couldn’t be seen by family back home except as Sky TV allowed it.
What if there were to be a terror attack, as at Munich and Atlanta? Should the media be constrained from full and immediate reporting?
Don’t believe anyone who tells you New Zealanders are getting better coverage of the Olympics than ever before, better than anywhere else in the world. Ask them on what evidence they base this. It’s simply false. The truth is, the Olympic Committee has sold Sky TV a stranglehold on public access to the Games, and Sky’s lawyers have exploited their position ruthlessly.
For New Zealand, the Rio Olympics are becoming a vexed proposition. The Zika virus. Raw sewage floating in the water. The bitter taste of Russian athletes competing under the shadow of state-sponsored drug-cheating. Just yesterday, a discarded cigarette sparked a blaze and the evacuation of about 100 Australian athletes. Workers had turned off the smoke alarms and sprinklers.
The big losers, in all this, are the athletes who have trained their whole lives towards this moment. Sport is cruel, like that. There is sometimes just one chance to wear that black singlet like Lovelock, like Snell, like Kendall, like Adams.
Laura McQuillan is a good journalist. If she wants to, she will have more chances to attend the Olympic Games.
Not so for many athletes.