Just what is the point of the gutless IOC and FIFA?
ACCORDING to legend, the demon Belphegor, summoned by a sacrificial offering of excrement, allows lazy men to profit by clever inventions. Tradition links him with the deadly sin of Sloth, and he is occasionally represented as a monk falling asleep on the job.
The IOC should consider dropping their discredited Olympic rings and putting a picture of him on their flag for the Rio Games, since it is now clear that the body which are supposed to be the worldwide guardian of Olympic values have decided that they actually can’t be bothered.
Russia have been cleared to send competitors to Rio de Janeiro next week, despite a dumpster-load of evidence that they deliberately sought to dope, cheat and corrupt the Olympics as a matter of state policy.
In allowing this, the IOC are not merely slumbering through a crisis. They have taken a sleeping tablet, popped on an eyemask and turned up the whale music, allowing devils to dance around their bed while pretending that they see nothing.
The business of sports government — like all government — is in some perversion of basic sporting ethics was then cleverly and systematically covered up.
In other words, this was not a case of rampant individual wrongdoing. It was not just a lot of Russians who cheated. It was Russia itself. And Russia ought now to bear the consequences.
Except it will not. The IOC have shrugged off their own responsibility, asking individual sporting governing bodies to decide which Russians should be allowed to compete and giving them less than two weeks to make their calls.
That would be laughable if it wasn’t actually real.
Worse, what was spineless has been made truly cackhanded by the other IOC ruling, stating that Russians who have served doping bans in the past will be excluded from the Games, a sanction not applied to busted athletes of other nations.
So now there is no justice in either direction. Everyone is aggrieved and the Rio Games approach with no resolution but only confusion, resentment and a PR cloud of pure