Greed and corruption too often drove athletic achievement off the sports pages
Gavin Evans
Sport’s first year of the third millennium (or the last of the second) will be remembered as hugely significant in so many ways here good, there bad, but mostly merely ugly.
Let’s start with the good, because it was indeed far better than expected. Outgoing International Olympic Committee (IOC) boss Juan Antonio Samaranch has a habit of declaring every Games the “best ever” even revolting ones like Atlanta 1996 but this time everyone agreed. Sydney put on a show of efficiency, beauty and goodwill that captured what remains of the “Olympic spirit”, and displayed to the world how this could successfully be packaged for the new century.
At times it drew heavily on sentiment enabling tiny Equatorial Guinea to put itself on the Western map through the gallant failure of a pair of swimmers who could barely swim, but there was also substance to the goodwill. For instance, it revealed a generosity of spirit from the people of Sydney displayed so vividly by the thousands of unpaid volunteers who delighted in just helping out in stark contrast to the crass greed of Atlanta four years earlier.
But Sydney’s success occurred despite and not because of the IOC’s state of dubious grace. It is true that the Samaranch regime had been forced into a belated makeover as a result of a succession of bribery scandals (which exposed the practice of Olympic bidding cities offering kickbacks to IOC members in exchange for votes). But it remains a self-appointed body with no provision for democratic accountability, and includes several members whose own backgrounds make Samaranch’s unrepentant past as a Spanish fascist official look almost savoury.
In 2000 the committee’s nature was most aptly displayed by the way it handled the drug issue. The IOC and its affiliates have long made great play about rooting out the use of performance-enhancing drugs, while actually doing as little about it as they could get away with. For years there have been allegations of positive steroid tests by leading athletes being quietly ignored or misplaced.
These days steroids are relatively easy to detect but two drugs replaced them as the elixirs of elite performance ereythropoietin (EPO), an oxygen-boosting chemical compound that enables endurance specialists to thrive, and artificial human growth hormone (HGH), which boosts the strength, bone density, muscle growth and energy levels of athletes in power-based sports. Neither is detectable in conventional urine analysis, but under pressure from some member countries the IOC agreed to consider blood tests.
A French-based team successfully came up with a test for EPO, which was introduced in time for Sydney. The direct result on performances in Sydney was dramatic. There were no world records in distance running, for example, and the times run by several leading European athletes were significantly slower than expected.
A British-led team came up with a successful test for HGH, and at the beginning of 2000 the IOC agreed to fund the final push to make the test legally watertight. And then, suddenly, with no adequate explanation, it withdrew the funding. There was much muttering within drug-testing circles about IOC fears that highly bankable stars would get caught in the HGH net. They did not want a repeat of the Ben Johnson debacle of 1988; nor could they afford a spate of slow times in blue riband power events.
Carl Lewis perhaps one of the few clean sprinters in recent history refused to attend the track component of the Olympics in protest. Others merely held their noses while the sprinters, lifters and throwers delivered and their sponsors went home happy.
But the IOC was not the only sporting body fighting ugly in 2000. The outcome of the bidding process for the world’s other great international sporting spectacle, football’s World Cup, left a similarly sour taste.
The logic for an African World Cup in 2006 was compelling: France staged the event in 1998 the 10th European turn, compared to nil for Africa. The selection came down to a shoot-out between the favourite, South Africa, and Germany. A tie was widely expected with Sepp Blatter, head of world ruling body Fifa, then placing his casting vote in South Africa’s favour to ensure a happy ending. Instead, Germany won by a single vote.
Nothing remarkable there, until the reasons for its victory became apparent. Oceania’s delegate Charles Dempsey, a former enthusiast for sporting ties with apartheid teams, was instructed by his home body to vote for South Africa. Instead he abstained, citing “extreme pressure” (primarily from German interests, it emerged). Equally disturbing was the fact that several Asian and third world “friends” of South Africa voted for Germany, leaving clouds of suspicion about what precisely they had been offered.
Whether you take Blatter’s understated verdict “I was a little bit sad that the executive committee had not the courage to innovate” or the overstated reaction of South African President Thabo Mbeki “This is a tragic day for Africa” it is hard to avoid the feeling that once again money got in the way of justice.
Soccer, however, enjoyed a relatively healthy 2000, highlighted by the upset successes of the two Olympic competitions Norway’s women beating the United States and Cameroon’s under-23 men beating Spain. The game continued to extend it financial tentacles, to cross the gender barrier and expand its international player base. The only other team sport that can come close to claiming “world” status is basketball.
Cricket too once boasted of global expansion, but not even its most hearty enthusiasts would make that claim today and its performance in 2000 was disastrous. There have long been allegations of players throwing one-day matches in return for bribes from Asian betting syndicates, with small ripples of revelation in Australia and Pakistan.
South Africa was thought to be immune from such behaviour, its team headed by a born-again Christian Afrikaner, Hansie Cronje. But Cronje was the first to fall. Since then several other English, Indian, Sri Lankan, West Indian, Pakistani and Australian stars have been implicated in the funds-for-favours scandal through allegations from book- makers, detailed in a comprehensive report by India’s Central Bureau of Investigation.
No one is shocked by scandal in boxing, but the 2000 version revealed a more profound truth about the nature of a sport that has gone further than any other in the process of what could generously be called “commercialising” its self-control.
The International Boxing Federation (IBF) was established 15 years ago as US-based counterweight to the Mexican-led World Boxing Council and the Colombian-led World Boxing Association both said to be corrupt and undemocratic. This year, how-ever, IBF president Bobby Lee went on trial on a string of corruption charges, principally involving the receipt of bribes from the world’s leading promoters, in exchange for world rankings. After a five-month trial Lee was convicted of racketeering-related charges, tax fraud and money laundering, but acquitted of receiving bribes because the jury accepted his version that the IBF was a business rather than a world body and that the “bribes” were therefore legitimate financial transactions for desired services (world ratings).
A partial antidote to this tendency came with the passing of the Muhammad Ali Act, which will curtail these “market forces” in the US by introducing a measure of federal authority into US boxing, much to the chagrin of the promoters.
This kind of trade-off forms the subtext to the story of most major spectator sports this year they exist within a paradox. On the one hand, publicly based pastimes, reliant on mass support and celebrated within the parameters of the nation-state; on the other, privately owned products, cutting through national boundaries and resisting control by anyone other than their shareholders.
The tension comes to the fore when these dimensions run up against each other a national football side calls up an imported club star, an elite sprinter fails to make his national squad, an international control body wants to test for a previously undetectable drug in essence when the public gets in the way of the private. In this sense, the combination of generosity, national pride and collective goodwill on display at the Sydney Olympics was an anomaly. In 2001 we can be sure it will be back to business as usual.