ATHLETICS
Martin Gillingham
Let me tell you a true story. There’s this national leader who approaches the president of a global sports body and pleads him to stage his world championships in his country. “But you haven’t got a stadium big enough,” replies the sports boss.
“I know,” says the politician, “but if you give me the championships then I shall build it.”
The sports boss ponders for a while and then grants the politician his wish. Five years later, however, the politician, who is preoccupied with his recent declaration of war, tells his sports minister to admit the stadium will never be built. In a feeble effort to soften the blow, the sports minister is also charged with the task of persuading the sports boss to switch the event to another city within the country where a stadium already exists.
The problem is that the politician knows the stadium is way up in the inhospitable north of the country and nowhere near big enough. So, to grease the deal’s smooth completion, he equips the sports minister with a treasure chest of bribes.
Sounds like a classic African tale, doesn’t it? Not quite. The politician is Prime Minister Tony Blair and the tale is of Great Britain’s embarrassing failure to meet its commitment to the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) to host the 2005 world championships in London.
As twice Olympic 1500m champion Sebastian Coe put it: “Here’s a country that at the same time as it was constructing a coalition against international terrorism admitted it could not construct a domestic coalition to build an athletics stadium.”
Here was the smarmy British leader whose global image is of a budding president of the world while at home he’s breaking promises and offering illegal inducements.
The bribes involve Richard Caborn’s ham-fisted attempt to persuade Lamine Diack, president of the IAAF, to switch the championships to Sheffield. What Caborn was offering were shopping trips to Harrods for the wives of top athletics officials as well as hand-outs to young African athletes.
Caborn says: “We offered to let the IAAF stage their congress in London and then offered trips around the capital. Then, in light of what the prime minister said about helping Africa in his speech at the Labour Party Conference, we told them we would like to develop a full bursary and said we could bring African and Third World athletes to the UK for training as far as I am concerned what we did was in good faith.”
The International Olympic Committee is so amused by this tale that new boss Jacques Rogge has advised Britain not to bid for the Olympic games again for quite a while.
l Ekkart Arbeit (60), the mastermind behind East German success throughout the 1980s, has ruled himself out of contention in the race to be Athletics South Africa’s (ASA) first national coach.
Arbeit was in South Africa recently, at the invitation of ASA, to host a coaching symposium. ASA chief executive Banene Sindani says he discussed the job with Arbeit but admits the German does not want to be considered for a permanent role. “He sees himself more as a consultant.”