IOC’s push for sport colonisation???
“The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has warned the Russian president of amateur boxing that it still has “significant concerns” over the governance, integrity of judges and financial sustainability of the organisation he leads in a striking intervention that comes just days before he faces re-election.
“The letter, sent to the International Boxing Association (Iba) president, Umar Kremlev, who has in the past thanked Vladimir Putin for his backing, also questions the sport’s readiness for the Paris 2024 qualification cycle – and reminds Kremlev that boxing is not currently in the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles because of its problems”.
The abovementioned quotation comes from an article written by Sean Single and carried in The Guardian dated 11 May 2022.
Single’s article addresses an important discussion that has been taking place in international sport for a considerable period of time.
One of the most interesting features of the discussion is the fact that the IOC appears to be the one leading the fight. From the vantage point of the author of this Column, the IOC does not appear to have the moral authority to play the tole that it seems so anxious to play and it is even more amazing that the entire international sports fraternity has taken to a sort of deafening silence that defies logic and good sense.
The IOC itself may find itself in a situation that we in the Caribbean refer to as ‘the pot calling the kettle black’. We may also say to the IOC, ‘Physician! Heal thyself!’ and ‘remove the moat in your own eye before trying to take the speck out of your brother’s.’
There appears a lack of consistency in respect of the ethical standards to which the IOC now seems to want to hold international sports organisations. Historical analysis of the IOC itself as an international sports body may well leave many thinking that it certainly needs to ‘peep in its own bowl’, engage in critical self-analysis, before making some the decisions and pronouncements it is now so eager to make on others.
This author questions whether the conduct of the IOC today is not more consistent with what we have come to understand as the experience of colonisation. Dominated as it is by white Europeans and the wealthy, the IOC may well be incapable of seeing beyond its own nose.
Corruption in sports
The history of sport may well have a significantly large sub-title, ‘an insight into a very special type of corruption’.
A perusal of sport’s history reveals a very sordid and contradictory reality.
Ghada Waly, Executive Director, UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), in the Foreword of The Global Report on Corruption in Sport – Evolutions in Sport Related to Corruption, published in 2021, wrote, “Corruption strips sport of its positive transformative power. There is widespread recognition of the negative economic and societal consequences of corruption in sport, and in particular its impact on youth.”
The Introduction to the Report begins as follows, “Corruption in sport is not a new phenomenon. Fraudulent activities in the running of sports institutions and competitions have been documented from the times of the Ancient Olympic Games to the modern day, including in relation to e-sports tournaments”.
The foregoing is also very well known, and perhaps too many of us have been deliberately turning a blind eye to the realities that we see on an almost daily basis.
Perhaps too, sport administrators in former colonies have been socialised, like so many of our politicians who end up in government, into striving to become like the colonisers and have come to see corruption as integral to the broader development process.
The wealthy’s control of commercial enterprises, politicians and governments, have allowed them to have their hands in every pie. Their control of sport is part of the broader culture that they have spawned across the globe while leading the general populace everywhere to accept their deliberate marketing of values that essentially are palliatives.
Research into the sports of antiquity, including what was considered the Olympics back then, seems to suggest that there were corrupt practices, including issues of payments to athletes and doping in sport, if not direct manipulation of the system. The attempt at suggesting that these are modern innovations does not appear to be consistent with history. That some insist on pervading the myth of these being innovations in our lifetime may well be a ruse to detract from an understanding of how the wealthy have been able to sustain their control of societies everywhere.
We have been exposed to the hugely popular corruption of the 1919 baseball championships in the USA, unfortunately labelled, ‘World Series’, involving the legendary Black Sox team.
The Salt Lake City Scandal associated with that US city’s Winter Olympics Bid and which unearthed engagement of some IOC members has been blown over. Many have not paid sufficient attention to the strategy used by the then IOC President and his team to involve several internationally recognised personalities in the ‘reform’ process that essentially gives the appearance that all has been settled.
There has been the despicable FIFA scandal that should have forced sports authorities across the globe to insist upon an historic research-based investigation to corruption in the sport at all levels. This has not happened. Too many are hiding behind the actions of the courts, claiming to be waiting on legal decision making.
Many have been wanting an investigation into the award of the Football World Cup Finals to Qatar and Russia, respectively.
More recently the corruption in the Indian Premier League of cricket has been the focus of attention.
The list of corruption in sport seems endless. It also appears that who acts to effect change have also come under intense scrutiny as ‘motives’ are often brought into question.
IOC – the Sports Interpol or Pariah?
The attention that has been paid to corruption of one sort or another in international boxing. Clearly, this has been around for some time. Accusations of corruption are not new.
The point being made in this Column is that the IOC’s treatment of the sport of boxing seems to leave many pondering the double standards of the organisation.
To many, the IOC is not in a position to address boxing as a sport in the way in which it is doing.
No international sport currently on the Olympic Games sports programme, that is worth its salt, should have maintained its silence and participated in the Tokyo Olympics in 2021, given the IOC’s treatment of boxing.
The IOC’s decision to make the heavy demands on boxing should have led to the sport being cancelled if it was felt that the institution was corrupt.
In what seems to this day to be most hypocritical, the IOC continued to keep the sport on the programme without there being an international federation in place, managing the sport’s engagement in the Games of 2021.
How could the IOC dare to be so bold-faced to try to convince the sporting world that it was so concerned about the boxing athletes that they created their own framework within which the sport functioned for the Games?
Now, the same IOC dares to make its own decisions about boxing’s involvement in the Olympics of 2024 and 2028 seems also to be in jeopardy.
This Columnist remains insistent that the IOC is completely inconsistent and should be made to allow itself and its operations over the decades to be placed under the researchers’ microscope, and the findings published.
In the world today, many countries are arguing for reparation from the colonisers. It would be very interesting to see whether the findings of a decidedly investigative analysis of the IOC would yield behaviour that could possibly lead to a similar type of response.
The response of the people of Boston to that State’s bid for the Olympics of 2024, should tell us all an amazing story of how the bidding process works and the engagement or lack thereof of the masses of the population in the process.
Not enough attention has been paid to the level of corruption in the Olympic Games bidding process over the decades.
Not enough attention has been paid to the decision, suddenly, to determine that the Games of 2024 and 2028 should have been awarded simultaneously after the submission of bids were made, only for 2024. The eventual decision to award both at the same time appears to have been made, more by the IOC’s understanding of the immense financial benefits to be derived from awarding another edition of the Olympics to the USA, given that country’s experiences in the several bidding processes it entered since hosting the Centennial edition in 1996.
The international sports community, including much of the international media, all stood idly by, looking on in silence.
Not enough attention has been paid to the dynamics of how an IOC President has been selected over the years and how votes are garnered, and individuals elected.
Not enough attention has been paid to the fact that as it now stands, the IOC has essentially taken unto itself the power to determine when it deems it pertinent to take action on one international federation after another. The organisation appears to ignore the implications.
Epilogue
In the modern era, it has become clear that sport has very quickly become the new frontier of colonialist aggression, leading to conquest and persistent exploitation albeit under the cover of a near-narcissistic, benevolent dictatorship.
The real problem is that while boxing has numerous problems there may well be reason to believe that there are others on the Olympic Programme with either the same or even worse governance issues and this may extend to the IOC itself.
Boxing is no sacred organisation, but neither is the IOC.
There is reason to ask whether the IO’Cs public pronouncements on boxing and its governing body may be of greater significance than many are willing to understand.
To whom is the IOC pandering?
After Boxing, who will be next?
Will football ever reach on the IOC’s governance agenda?
Will the IOC ever reach on the organisation’s own agenda?
Will the IOC ever reach a stage in its governance where it will insist that the NOCs of the world will be allowed to democratically engage in the elections of the organisation’s Executive?
Will the IOC establish parameters for its own elections that allows sufficient public scrutiny regarding adherence to its own governance regulations?
Will the IOC ever reach the stage where it recognises its continental bosies and insist that their governance procedures allow each NOC to have one vote and not be prejudiced by virtue of having held the Games?
Money runs things. That seems to be the norm.
One is left pondering whether the IOC’s continued pursuit of money, through the performances of athletes on the Olympic stage, ever allow the athletes to benefit directly from the windfall profits and be free to more directly influence the organisation’s future.
One is also left pondering whether the leadership of the IOC today, much like through its history, ever be willing to allow for a genuinely democratic institution to unfold or will it forever be like global history where the monies, white European and North American business interest will forever dictate what the IOC remains.
Olympic Agenda 2020 and Olympic Agenda 2020 plus Five, have not yet changed anything in the culture of the IOC.
