Friday, February 15, 2002
IOC straying from Olympic creed
By KEN FIDLIN -- Toronto Sun
"Olympism is a philosophy of life, exalting and combining in a balanced whole the qualities of body, will and mind. Blending sport with culture and education, Olympism seeks to create a way of life based on the joy found in the effort, the educational value of good example and respect for universal fundamental ethical principles."
With lines like that, Pierre de Coubertin should have been a stand-up comic.
Using that idealistic blueprint to guide him, de Coubertin launched a movement he naively hoped would change the world.
That philosophy is at the core of the International Olympic Committee's mission statement, essentially unchanged since it was penned by the altruistic Frenchman 108 years ago. Seen through the long lens of history, it's hard to recognize the 19th century dream amid the 21st century reality.
Almost from the very beginning it has been apparent that humankind is simply too frail to live up to de Coubertin's lofty aims. And the noblemen de Coubertin enlisted to light the Olympic torch have proven no better at it than the poor slobs they pretend to lead.
Indeed, some of the most outrageous infringements of the Olympic creed have been committed by the keepers of the flame itself.
The pairs judging controversy that threatens to overwhelm the entire figure skating competition at the Salt Lake City Olympics is simply the most recent in a long line of violations that have threatened to shake the Games to their foundation.
The assaults on Olympus have come from every conceivable angle. Politics, religion, gender, economics, arrogance, greed and larceny ÷ not to mention the drive to win at all costs ÷ have all conspired to whittle away at the Olympic ideal.
The ink was barely dry on the Olympic charter when Spyridon Loues, a Greek shepherd, won the first marathon when the modern Games were revived in Athens in 1896.
Immediately upon accepting his medal and a crown of olive branches, Loues became the first to cash in on his Olympic medal when he accepted free shaves and haircuts for life from a patriotic barber as well as free meals, any time he asked, at an Athens restaurant. He may have been the first to disobey his oath, but not the last.
Neither did it take long for nations to comprehend that the Olympic Games provided an enormous platform for ideological propaganda.
There exists no more blatant example than the 1936 Games in Berlin as Hitler put his beliefs of a German "master race" to the test. In this pro-Aryan, anti-Semitic setting, American Jesse Owens, a black man, stepped up to the starting line and made the most powerful statement in Olympic history by winning four gold medals, infuriating the Fuhrer.
In 1952, the Olympic cold war began in earnest, an ideological struggle that would eventually lead athletes into the drug culture that infests the sports event today.
Nationalism has been both a draw and a curse for the Olympics. Without the flags and patriotic fervour, it's hard to imagine the massive appeal that the Games have. On the other hand, nationalism has been the source of most of the Games' problems. This perversion of the Olympic movement's stated aims could have been avoided had the people in charge recognized how they were being manipulated. Instead, the Olympic bosses seemed to revel in it.
At the 1952 Oslo Games, the communist bloc of nations Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Yugoslavia and, for the first time, the Soviet Union, took their quest for world political dominance onto the athletic stage.
This struggle between east and west, the USA versus the Soviet Union, would run for nearly four decades, transcending sport, mocking the Olympic mission in the process all the while lining the coffers of the IOC.
That is where the IOC has lost its way: Unbridled commercialism has obscured the mission statement.
Instead of maintaining the moral high ground, the IOC and its members have been disgraceful in their pursuit of the almighty buck. By 1960, television coverage was blanketing the event, reaping financial benefits for the IOC and luring corporate advertisers into the mix.
Cities began to recognize the value of hosting the Olympics and the sophisticated process of courting the voting members of the IOC began in earnest.
Lining their pockets
Over the years, certain IOC members ÷ not all ÷ became utterly shameless in lining their own pockets, accepting cash, free trips, valuable gifts, jobs and even sexual favours in exchange for the promise of their votes.
This eventually resulted in the revelations over the past few years that Salt Lake City, Nagano in 1998, Sydney in 2000, Atlanta in 1996 and many other unsuccessful bidders were accessories to the despicable behavior of unscrupulous IOC members.
This has led to expulsions of a handful of IOC members and the general discrediting of the reign of Juan Antonio Samaranch, the head of the IOC for more than 20 years.
"It was all for show," said Tom Welch, the disgraced head of the Salt Lake bid committee. "If what those expelled members did was wrong and everyone else on the IOC was to be judged by the same standards, then probably 80% should have been kicked out."
Drug death
"There were 12 cities lobbying the same 100 people," said Welch's colleague, Dave Johnson, who was indicted for his role in the scandal. The charges were dropped.
"We found that within the window of just one year, a total of $100 million was spent on those people. Salt Lake was not alone in what it did."
The first known drug death occurred at the 1960 Games in Rome when Danish cyclist Knud Jensen keeled over during a race. No specific drug was identified but rather than a warning, Jensen's death was a precursor of what was to come.
Twenty-eight years later, Ben Johnson would become the poster boy for the drug sleuths when he was disgraced and stripped of his medal after winning the highest-profile event ÷ the 100 metres ÷ at the Seoul Games. He became a scapegoat for a problem that existed long before he rose to prominence and remains to this day.
By the early '70s, drug cheats ÷ steroids, mostly ÷ had proliferated to the point that urine testing became mandatory, but nobody was prepared for the massive East German conspiracy that began in 1974 and manifested itself in the 1976 Games at Montreal.
East German doping
In an attempt to turn their country into a sporting super power and, by extension proof of socialist supremacy, East German sports officials turned hundreds of teenage athletes, many of them women, into walking pharmaceutical laboratories. East Germany had never previously won a gold medal in women's swimming, yet took home gold in 11 of 13 events at Montreal.
So sophisticated was the East German program that they could regulate the administration of steroids to guarantee the athletes would test clean in competition.
When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, confidential documents detailing the diabolical scheme became public, resulting in the trial and conviction of sports official Manfred Ewald, the drug plan's orchestrator. He served 22 months in prison as a result of endangering the health of as many as 142 athletes who are now suffering health problems.
The East Germans aside, the IOC has had great difficulty in staying up with drug cheats for the past 30 years. Just as testing and detection have become more sophisticated, so have the methods and chemicals used by the cheaters.
Beyond the actual science, national sports bodies all over the world have been reluctant to deal with drug use on their home soil. Many would insult our intelligence by having us believe that Ben Johnson was a lone wolf. Anecdotal evidence says Johnson's greatest sin was in getting caught.
The establishment of the World Anti-Doping Agency, with Canadian Dick Pound as its head, is a positive development that may make a difference in the future. But the IOC's will to uncover such scandals, never strong in the past, is going to be tested.
With billions of dollars in TV and sponsorship money now riding on the Games, many IOC insiders are reluctant to rock the boat and ferret out high-profile cheaters, lest the gravy train dry up.
Similarly, judging scandals like the one bubbling away in Salt Lake, are not the kind of publicity the closed society of the IOC cares for. But the Olympics, in a way, are victims of their own success.
The bigger the Games become, the more the public cares and the more the public cares, the more they want the competition to at least have the appearance of integrity.
Judging suspect
Sports that base results upon subjective judging have always been suspect.
There was no greater miscarriage of justice than the boxing competition at the 1988 Games in Seoul when Korean officials happily conspired with Soviet bloc nations to corrupt the results in favour of communist fighters at the expense of the Americans. One after another, American boxers were robbed of medals by dishonest refereeing.
The most blatant theft was perpetrated against Roy Jones Jr., who would go on to be one of the great super middleweights in professional boxing history. In Seoul, he was a light middleweight and in his gold medal bout against Korean Park Si Hun, Jones landed 86 scoring blows to just 32 by the Korean. It was a mismatch. But when the decision was announced, Si Hun had won, 3-2, in a decision that makes the Russian win over the Canadian figure skating pair of Sale and Pelletier the other night in Salt Lake, seem like petty theft by comparison.
So, what is the IOC to do? That is, if it chooses to do anything. See, that has always been the IOC's way: Deny, deny, deny.
Samaranch is gone, however, and a wave of reform has been sweeping the IOC. Perhaps, just perhaps, the lords are a bit more willing to take control of their property.
Changes
On the matter of figure skating, it's clear that some fundamental changes must happen in the area of judging. Whatever the International Skating Union decides, it should be irrelevant to the IOC. If the ISU wants to soil its own championships, there is nothing to be done.
But once the skaters step on to an ice surface governed by the IOC, it's a different story.
Judges should no longer be allowed to attend practices or fraternize with coaches and skaters. They should be trained in all disciplines and even paid a salary, if necessary.
Accountability
Judging panels should never be chosen until just minutes before the competition begins, to avoid vote-fixing. The IOC might even take things further by seeding the top five or six skaters and barring judges from those countries from sitting on the panel.
Judges should be made to be accountable, even to the point of being required to answer to the media after every major championship.
But be assured of this ÷ as soon as this controversy dies down, another Olympic scandal will be there to take its place. It will offend and outrage us and remind us that, yes, Pierre de Coubertin did have a sense of humour.
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