We Americans cheat with best of them
There is a famous bribery scandal in international sports that went something like this when deciding on a host city: Middlemen acted as brokers when representing specific countries, understanding their own regions had no chance of winning the bid but that they held balance votes in a tight competition between leading contenders.
These people were showered with gifts, with direct payments and land purchase agreements and tuition assistance and free medical care and prostitutes and campaign/charitable donations and paid vacations and even tickets to the Super Bowl.
And in the end, Salt Lake City was awarded the 2002 Winter Olympics.
A little under six hours north of Las Vegas, a level of historic corruption took place in the name of sport.
Yeah. It happens here as much as anywhere else.
It’s one message that seems lost in the recent FIFA scandal, that the nefarious acts meant to secure global events such as the World Cup or Olympics are not limited to any specific region. We cheat with the best of them. Sepp Blatter resigned as president of FIFA on Tuesday and had yet to finish his speech when calls flooded the Internet for soccer’s governing body to reconsider World Cup berths awarded to Russia in 2018 and Qatar in 2022, both of which are being investigated by Swiss prosecutors as part of 14 individuals being indicted by the U.S. Department of Justice and FBI on allegations of corruption and bribery.
If the argument is to deny Qatar its bid for what is a documented human rights catastrophe, for hundreds of thousands of mostly South Asian migrant workers being forced to surrender their passports and live in unsanitary conditions while a projected 4,000 of them lose their lives building infrastructure for the World Cup, then FIFA should unquestionably reconsider its 2022 plans.
It has taken up to 13 months for some workers to receive daily wages of less than $10. Qatar, an oil-rich sovereign country that is expected to spend $200 billion on soccer’s grandest event, is officially a slave state.
But if the reasoning for nations to be stripped of bids centers on allegations that Qatar paid millions of dollars for votes and that Russian president Vladimir Putin used a middleman to entice loyalty when submitting ballots with a Picasso painting and several of the finest works from his country’s top museums, we should think twice about casting stones in our red, white and blue glasshouse. It’s just not good politics. Think first of international relations. Putin is a mastermind politician, but he’s also just disturbed enough to believe his reaction if losing the World Cup would border on maniacal. He’d probably blow off steam by invading someone. The guy is a few rubles short of reality.
Qatar hosts two American air bases and one Army base. It also purchased $11
American Blazer figures prominently in FIFA scandal
billion in U.S. weaponry last year. There is also the issue of crude oil.
You don’t want this stuff getting to the point in which presidents and prime ministers and sheiks are involved. It’s still just soccer. Think more about hypocrisy. Chuck Blazer is listed as Coconspirator #1 in the 47-count indictment that included nine FIFA officials. He has pleaded guilty to racketeering conspiracy, wire fraud conspiracy, money laundering conspiracy and income tax evasion. He also coordinated bribes for votes on World Cups, allegedly including the 1994 event awarded to the United States.
He is the most crooked of crooks in this entire FIFA mess, and he’s an American.
There is a saying that besides the obvious financial influence of CocaCola, there were too many bodies buried to uncover all the unscrupulous dealings that went into the United States landing the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. Corruption has hardly escaped our shores when it comes to this stuff.
In a perfect world, none of this happens. None of the wrongdoing. Small nations without a middle class to rise up and empower their governments wouldn’t feel the need to bribe their way to World Cup or Olympic bids. Powerful ones like ours wouldn’t do so out of greed.
But it’s true that there is no honor among thieves, and this is hardly a perfect world. Bribery is bribery, whether you are paying people off with money or paintings to secure a World Cup or you are the NFL demanding potential Super Bowl cities agree to 153 pages of requests for free items to have a chance at hosting the big game.
This isn’t to suggest what the United States did in handing down those indictments last week is wrong. But before we decide to police the world, it might be smart to understand our own skeletons when it comes to sports and corruption.
And we better be sure we know where all the bodies are buried from that 1994 World Cup, because there is every chance Sepp Blatter does.
Not to mention a certain American crook named Chuck Blazer. Las Vegas Review-Journal sports columnist Ed Graney can be reached at egraney@reviewjournal.com or 702383-4618. He can be a heard on “Seat and Ed” on KRLV 1340 from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday. Follow him on Twitter: @edgraney.