Looking forward to this Panorama, whenever it gets broadcast. No real surprises that votes can effectively be bought – the whole regime stinks in my opinion.
This being an Olympic year, Andrew Jennings normally has another book out on this subject. It doesn’t seem to be the case this time around sadly.
It’s always seemed to me that while becoming a dictator of a country is quite hard work, and will result in possible alienation from other countries, exclusion from the UN, possible invasion by America if you happen to have oil in “them there hills”, and quite possibly arms dealers queuing up at the airport to sell you stuff. Overall though, being a dictatorship is generally seen as a bad thing by right thinking countries. Apart from anything else, you have to have eyes in the back of your head in case some discontented general in your army decides he’d make a far better leader.
But sport is a different case. There you can make your own rules, bend then to your heart’s content, get treated like royalty and generally do as you wish. You quite probably bribe representatives, that you picked, from third world nations to vote for you. You start your own marketing companies to sell off the TV rights to your events, getting a nice slice of the action along the way. You start introducing new competitions to increase revenues, without too much care about whether sports fans want or need another competition.
Yes comrades, sport is the last bastion of the great dictatorships!
[UPDATE]
There was someone from the London 2012 Olympic bid on Radio Five this evening being interviewed at the Crystal Palace athletics meeting this evening who was having a bit of a moan about this forthcoming documentary. Both he and the interviewer admitted that they hadn’t seen the documentary (I suspect that it’s not yet finished), but the stance he was taking was that this is likely to reduce the likelihood of London winning the bid. But as far as I can make out from what I’ve read and heard about this programme, the scandal is that agents are there to accept bribes for votes from IOC members. The fact that this sting was set up in London is neither here nor there. It could equally have been Paris or one of the other bid cities. The idea that we’ll have “all forgotten” about it come next summer when the decision is made is completely the wrong attitude. If the IOC has members who are willing to accept bribes then they need to be drummed out of the organisation.
The corollary of this is that the BBC, as a major news organistation in Britain, should not investigate possible scandals amongst Olympic members in the run-up to a bid. This is exactly the right time to be doing it. If people are accepting cash for votes to get London chosen, then they’re equally as likely to be willing to accept that cash for choosing other cities. The process should be completely fair and open, and any IOC members who are acting illegally should be discovered now and not later. Don’t forget that after the Salt Lake City scandal, the chosen venue wasn’t changed as a result. If Paris were to win the vote next summer, and subsequently it emerges that in a tight vote, several members had chosen Paris in return for cash then would they really change the host city? No. It’d be too late. As soon as the winning city is chosen, work begins, including major construction. There’d be major law suits launched and the entire thing would spiral out of control.
What would happen is that some people would end up in court, and be thrown out of the IOC. There’d be recriminations. But Paris would still get the games.
So let’s continue to investigate corruption in sport. It’s a multi-billion business, and there’s far less serious news coverage than there should be. I’d guess that the reason is that there are interests to be protected.
Panorama is on Wednesday 4 August at 9.00pm on BBC1 (and probably stored on the web subsequently). I’ll be watching.