Olympics Highs and Lows ( part 3 )

RePosted
Friday, August 8, 2008; 12:00 AM

"The opening ceremonies of the Olympic Games are always a marvelous sight -- full of pagentry, music, stirring words and strong, young athletes. Yesterday's ceremonies at Lake Placid were no exception. But if the mood of this Olympiad seems different from that at other Games in other places, it is probably because this may be the last of these great spectacles....

"The Games, according to the men who run them, are free of this Great Vice [politics]. But conspicuous by their absence from yesterday's parade of athletes were the Chinese from Taiwan. The flag behind which their older brothers and sisters had marched in similar parades since 1952 and behind which they insisted they march this year is no longer acceptable to the self-perpetuating body that controls such things. Were the 27 athletes thus denied their chance at an Olympic medal because they were putting a phony principle above performance? Or were they the victims of international politics?

"This group of Chinese is not the first to fail to reach the Olympic starting line for reasons that have nothing to do with sports. The Olympic Games are drenched in politics -- from the selection of the site through the judging of individual events to the closing ceremony....

"Any group that deceives itself so consistently about the events that swirl around it, as the IOC has done since at least the Berlin Games in 1936, has a limited life expectancy."

-- "Fading Olympics," Feb. 14, 1980

1984: Cold War Games

In the run-up to the 1984 Summer Games in Los Angeles, the Post editorial board speculated that Moscow would not sit out in protest, but would make a "show of annoyance" instead. (The Post was wrong. The Soviets ended up leading a boycott of 14 Eastern Bloc countries and allies.) But the board also had an interesting proposal for reducing the disruptive influence of Cold War politics:

"Readers with a good memory will recall our saying at Olympics time four years ago that it was absurd to think that sports could be taken out of politics, or politics out of sports. We continue to feel the best course is to remove the Olympic Games from inherently political locations, such as the Soviet Union or the United States, and to rotate them permanently among the few non-political places eager and able to receive them -- the Switzerlands of the world. That would also spare the monstrous expense and dislocation of one-time game-hosting.

Until that sensible policy is adopted, Russians, Americans and everyone else will have to live with the sort of grievances the Russians are lofting now."

-- "Moscow's Olympic Complaints," April 12, 1984

1999: Bribery and Scandal

In late 1998, it came to light that IOC members had accepted extensive bribes -- trips, scholarships for their children, even cosmetic surgery -- from the Salt Lake Olympic Bid Committee in exchange for awarding the 2002 Winter Olympic Games to the Utah capital. The Post editorial board wrote in disgust:

"The Olympics are big business. They earn $1 billion a year from NBC and other networks, another $200 million from corporate sponsors such as Visa and Xerox. But nostalgia for lost purity in amateur athletics is beside the point. The real problem is that as the Olympics evolved into big business, [IOC President Juan Antonio] Samaranch and his colleagues didn't put in place the institutional or regulatory checks and balances that any multinational corporation needs. And there is no excuse for their failure; it's not as if people didn't have a pretty good idea of what was going on.

The significance of the various continuing investigations into the Olympics scandal goes beyond sports. Just last month, an international treaty went into effect binding the industrialized nations of the world to an anti-bribery code. This was a major achievement -- a recognition that corruption is a huge handicap to many economies, a tax on the poor and the honest, a blight that can be combated and not just accepted as part of nature. But for every serious attempt to root out corruption, there's always someone ready to call a bribe a "humanitarian" gesture, a reflection of "culture" or simply a "willingness to please." We've heard all those excuses, and more, in connection with Salt Lake City. They, more than anything else, should be on trial now."

-- "A Willingness to Please," Jan. 26, 1999

-- Terrence Henry

Source : http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/07/AR2008080702180_3.html?wpisrc=newsletter&sid=ST2008080703094&pos=