IOC

16 bars of gold

16 bars of gold

It was only a little more than a year ago, standing center stage on a wet and windy night at historic Maracanā Stadium, that Carlos Nuzman, president of the Rio organizing committee, declared at the closing ceremony of the 2016 Summer Games, “I am the happiest man alive.”

He added, “Let’s celebrate together this great victory, this triumph of sport, of youth.” Knowing what we know now: that is what is called chutzpah. Nuzman, authorities said Thursday, had 16 gold bars in a safe in Switzerland.

The real story of Rio, and perhaps the Tokyo 2020 Games as well, is now going to be written, and the International Olympic Committee — which bought itself time with the award of Paris for 2024 and Los Angeles for 2028 — is already looking out to the 2026 Winter Games, but the essential disconnect that is Nuzman and the IOC response to his arrest is at the core of why the institution is enduring such profound turbulence.

 

Anita DeFrantz's Olympic life

Anita DeFrantz's Olympic life

Anita DeFrantz grew up near Indianapolis. If your perception of Indiana is all “Hoosiers” basketball and corn fields swaying in the midwestern summer sun, know, too, that Indiana was once a Ku Klux Klan mainstay. And that when she was just 3 — this was in the 1950s — Anita’s parents took her and her brother out for a drive just outside Greeenwood, Indiana, where, after walking through the snow, her father read them this sign:

“Don’t be here after dark — nigger.”

This story opens “My Olympic Life,” Anita DeFrantz’s forthcoming memoir, written with Josh Young, and what she says about that experience when she was just a little girl explains almost everything.

In which my mother has (good) advice for the IOC

In which my mother has (good) advice for the IOC

Maybe you have a Jewish mother. Maybe not. I do. I’m the oldest son, of four boys. Let’s be honest. Being a sportswriter? Is this a doctor, or a practicing lawyer, or something else brag-worthy? OK. Does my mother truly, honestly care about sports? Do you have to ask? 

Like me, my mother went to Northwestern. Could she tell you who the Wildcats are playing this weekend? Not if her life depended on it. 

So you might understand further how little sports intrudes into my mother’s life, especially these past few days: last week, my mother, her husband of nearly 20 years (my dad passed away many years ago) and the fugly dog had to be evacuated from their home in south Florida because of Hurricane Irma. (Update: some minor damage to the patio outside, more or less everything OK.) 

Hurricane be damned, a matter of import apparently had been weighing on my mother’s mind. “I want to tell you something,” she said in that tone that when your mother uses you go, uh-oh. Obliging son that I am, I replied, “Yes?”

It has been a long time since, you know, I lived under my mother’s roof. Even so, she likes to keep up, at least in a general sense, with my whereabouts. She knew I was bound for Peru, and the International Olympic Committee session at which Paris would be awarded 2024 and LA 2028.

“These Olympic people,” my mother said, “have a big problem on their hands.”

DONE: Paris 2024, LA 2028

DONE: Paris 2024, LA 2028

LIMA, Peru — The teams from Paris and Los Angeles had not yet even taken to the floor to make their formal presentations Wednesday to the members of the International Olympic Committee when, with president Thomas Bach outlining the run of show, he explained how Paris would be getting the 33rd Summer Games in 2024 and Los Angeles the 34th in 2028. 

Everyone clapped.

Not yet, Bach said. Not yet.

Even so, ladies and gentlemen, that is pretty much how the 2024 and 2028 Games were awarded. 

And now: the latest, greatest IOC corruption scandal

And now: the latest, greatest IOC corruption scandal

The International Olympic Committee is meeting in Peru at what should be a moment of triumph, the awarding of the 2024 and 2028 Summer Olympic Games to Paris and Los Angeles.

Instead, the news cycle is dominated by headlines trumpeting seemingly more of the same: corruption in the Olympic scene.

Is it really so difficult to understand why taxpayers are so fed up?

A good day for the Olympics: Mr. Bach goes to the White House

A good day for the Olympics: Mr. Bach goes to the White House

You can like Donald Trump. You can not like Donald Trump. To be clear: I did not vote for the gentleman. Whatever. When the president of the United States of America meets with the president of the International Olympic Committee at the White House, that is a good day for the Olympic movement.

Let us all understand the gravity of what happened Thursday. Put emotion aside. Think strategically. What is in the best interest of the Olympic movement, and of the IOC? Answer: having good relations with the governments of the world. Russia is a great country and a great Olympic power. China is a great country and a great Olympic power. But, people, let’s be real.

Once again, the Olympic disconnect

Once again, the Olympic disconnect

Do you want to know why nine cities have dropped out of the running for the 2022, 2024 and 2026 races for the Olympic Games?

Why only Los Angeles and Paris are left for 2024 and the International Olympic Committee is all but certain this summer to award both the 2024 and 2028 Games to those two, order yet to be determined?

Because the 2016 Rio Games are just the latest super-expensive Olympics and because the IOC, in attempting to explain billions in spending tied to an Olympic Games, issues a statement that’s filled with inconsistencies and double-speak.

Not fake news: is IOC looking at real crisis?

34333248636_b710e92532_z.jpg

The Paris 2024 media team, in anticipation in the coming days of both the French presidential election and the International Olympic Committee’s evaluation visit, undertook a media blitz of sorts, with bid leader Tony Estanguet quoted Monday in leading U.S. newspapers.

Talk about fake news.

There’s a (huge, and perhaps two-pronged) scandal perhaps waiting to erupt in the Olympic world, the latest twist possibly involving one of its most influential power brokers.

Olympic stories hardly take up newsprint in off years. Yet this is what’s being fed to readers as what matters?

Estanguet, to the LA Times:

“ … We want to reduce the involvement of the political world. They are there to support. But we decide where to put the Olympic village. We decide the global concept that has been there since the beginning.”

Estanguet, to USA Today, even bolder:

“We want to reduce the involvement of the political world. They are there to support. They are there to be tough. But we decide where to put the Olympic village. The sport movement will be responsible for delivering the Games.”

It’s easy enough here to knock the newspapers. Due diligence, please.

Beyond which, it’s the job of journalists to hold people in positions of authority accountable.

In that spirit, Mr. Estanguet’s remarks are good for a laugh.

It’s all well and good to say the “sport movement will be responsible for delivering the Games.”

Except for the basic fact that in France the sport movement is the government.

Even the bid itself is, you know, a government project.

If Mr. Estanguet is trying to draw a distinction — oh, look, the badminton team and his beloved canoers will be responsible for delivering the Olympic village — that would just be silly.

Indeed, as even the bid book points out, if Paris were to prevail there would be a delivery authority. It would be called SOLIDEO.

From the second of three books in the Paris 2024 candidature file:

“The delivery of the venues and other infrastructure projects needed to stage the Games will be the responsibility of an Olympic and Paralympic Delivery Authority (SOLIDEO). The SOLIDEO will also plan for the legacy of infrastructure investments. It will take the form of a public entity, reflecting the role of public authorities in funding and underwriting Games capital investments.”

Wow — a public entity. Not “the sport movement.”

All these things, and what’s really amiss in these stories is that while they may scratch a seeming mainstream media itch — oh, look, LA and Paris are involved in a bid race, and there’s that news hook in the May 7 French presidential race and the IOC visit in mid-May to both cities — these stories do little to no journalistic service whatsoever.

Because the news that matters in Olympic bidding circles is not whether Marine le Pen wins in France. The days of the head of state carrying an International Olympic Committee election — Putin in Guatemala in 2007, Tony Blair in Singapore in 2005 — are seemingly long gone.

The issue on the table now is not who is head of state of country X or Y. Instead:

It’s whether the IOC wants to keep going back to government-run bids that inevitably 1) produce cost overruns and 2) bad press for seven years, which then 3) further erodes taxpayer and official trust in the IOC and the broader movement, 4) which leads to the spectacle of cities dropping out repeatedly, 5) just like they have done over the past few years for the 2022 and 2024 bid cycles, 6) just like Stockholm did last week for 2026.

But, again, even that’s not the most pressing news.

For sure the bid process is broken and needs to be fixed. At issue is whether the IOC is going to do it — indeed, address all its business — in a calm fashion or amid crisis.

The signs increasingly point to crisis.

Over the weekend, stories flashed around the world suggesting that the influential IOC member Sheikh Ahmad al-Fahad al-Sabah of Kuwait is co-conspirator No. 2 in the criminal case of United States v. Richard Lai. The matter is in the Brooklyn federal courts.

The sheikh says he is innocent of any wrongdoing.

The Lai case directly relates to FIFA. Co-conspirator No. 1, as described in the court document, would appear to be Mohammed Bin Hammam, a Qatari billionaire who ran for the FIFA presidency in 2011.

The document describes co-conspirator No. 2 as a “high-ranking official of FIFA.” Since the document has become public, Sheikh Ahmad has resigned his FIFA posts.

According to the court document, co-conspirator No. 2 was also a high-ranking official of the Olympic Council of Asia. The sheikh heads OCA.

The sheikh is also president of the Assn. of the National Olympic Committees. Through that role, he oversees the distribution of hundreds of millions of dollars in what are called Olympic Solidarity funds — that is, monies that go from IOC headquarters to developing nations.

The sheikh travels within a closely held circle of trust. The court document describes co-conspirator No. 3 as a “high-ranking official of the OCA” as well as an official of the Kuwaiti soccer association.

Co-conspirator No. 4 was an OCA employee and No. 3’s assistant, the court document says.

The court document describes the transfers of a lot of money. Intriguingly, paragraph 31 describes wire transfers from accounts in Kuwait controlled by co-conspirator No. 3 or his assistants at the OCA.

A few things are clear:

— Prosecutors now hold the cards in dealing with Mr. Lai.

— The court file is mysteriously thin for a case that has come to resolution with a guilty plea. Mr. Lai has yet to be sentenced. He clearly has a significant incentive to tell what he knows.

— The obvious question: what does he know, and in particular about co-conspirators No. 2 and 3?

In Olympic circles, the sheikh is believed to have played a key role in helping to orchestrate the triple play that marked the 2013 IOC assembly in Buenos Aires — the elections of Thomas Bach as president and Tokyo as 2020 site plus the return of wrestling to the Olympic program.

In the American courts, the FIFA matter has for months now been that — a FIFA matter. Now it threatens to slide into the Olympic space, and in a powerful way.

The FIFA inquiries, it is important to note, were launched during the Obama years. The Brooklyn office used to be headed by Loretta Lynch. Ms. Lynch went on to be the attorney general. It’s fascinating that this matter has not drawn the significant attention of the Trump people in their first 100 days, and worth asking if it will now — or anytime soon, because if it the status remains quo prosecutors in Brooklyn will likely just keep keeping on.

At any rate:

Already in recent weeks, the IOC member Frankie Fredericks has been connected to the inquiry being led by the authorities in France tied to Lamine Diack, the former head of the international head of the international track and field federation.

Diack and Bach were also allies of longstanding.

Diack was known to have remarked before the assembly in Buenos Aires that the triple play was going to happen just as it did — Bach, Tokyo, wrestling.

It is believed in Olympic circles that the French authorities know more, and about more IOC members. Unclear is whether whatever they know will become public in the weeks ahead.

Uncertain, too, is what is known at the Chateau de Vidy, the IOC’s lakeside headquarters in Lausanne, Switzerland, about the scope and nature of the inquiries in France and Brooklyn and how, if at all, the two mesh. The Fredericks matter suggests that the Americans and French are sharing, at the least, wire transfer records.

To be obvious:

The Salt Lake City scandal of the late 1990s came about because IOC members could literally get their hands on what we in the journalism business called “inducements” — that is, anything and everything from college scholarships for their kids to parts for cars to cash and much, much more.

The investigations in France and Brooklyn threaten the IOC, and far more insidiously. As the Lai case underscores, a forensic accountant and a wire transfer record make for black-and-white reading.

In this context, yet again, it is worth recalling what the then-president of the organization, Marius Vizer, said at the 2015 SportAccord conference in Sochi:

"History demonstrated that all the empires who reached the highest peaks of development never reformed on time and they are all headed for destruction. The IOC system today is expired, outdated, wrong, unfair and not at all transparent."

The first person to lead the charge against Vizer then was — Diack.

It is worth emphasizing that co-conspirators No. 2, 3 and 4 in the Lai matter have not been charged with anything, and that in the American system the vigorous presumption of innocence prevails.

It is also worth emphasizing that optics matter, particularly in the Olympic space, which is why the likes of Stockholm are out for 2026, because the IOC has over the past several years considerably forfeited the trust of taxpayers and officials.

Here is where the reasonable person asks the reasonable question:

Why would that be?

NHL: Agenda 2020, drop dead

GettyImages-470020503.jpg

Agenda 2020, International Olympic Committee Thomas Bach's would-be reform proposal, holds 40 points. The IOC members passed all 40, unanimously, in December 2014. Some two and a half years later, with the exception of the launch of the Olympic Channel, Agenda 2020 has proven a lot of aspirational talk and not much else. The NHL's decision to walk away from the 2018 Winter Games offers potent new evidence of the obvious irrelevance with which it views Agenda 2020 and, by extension, the larger Olympic enterprise. There can be no other conclusion. If Agenda 2020 held the power to effect meaningful change, what would the NHL choose when weighing this essential question: is hockey a brand or a sport?

Aspirational talk is swell. But the real world demands far more. And the NHL's move underscores the largely empty gesture that Agenda 2020 is well on its way to becoming.

Most of the focus on Agenda 2020 package has been on the points dealing with the bid-city process. That's understandable. That process needs a wholesale makeover. The 2022 Winter Games race ended with just two cities and now the same for 2024, Paris and Los Angeles.

It's simply not clear whether any of those Agenda 2020 bid-city proposals can ever be meaningful.

Or, for that matter, the rest of the Agenda 2020 package.

Last week, the NHL announced that decision not to take part in the 2018 Winter Olympics in PyeongChang, South Korea. Assuming no change, that ends a run of five consecutive Winter Games with NHL players.

Now, to Agenda 2020, and Recommendation 8. Here it is, word for word:

"Forge relationships with professional leagues

"Invest in and forge relationships with professional leagues and structures via the respective international federations with the aim of:

"• Ensuring participation by the best athletes

"• Recognizing the different nature and constraints of each of the professional leagues

"• Adopting the most appropriate collaboration model on an ad-hoc basis in cooperation with each relevant international federation."

How would the reasonable person say that's working out?

 

Real and significant threats to the IOC

GettyImages-91581416.jpg

If Frankie Fredericks remains in position as chairperson of the International Olympic Committee’s 2024 evaluation commission past, say, Tuesday, then everybody has a big problem.

At the same time, the real question is whether the IOC itself has big problems.

Very big problems.

Way beyond Frankie Fredericks.

Like whether both the winning Rio 2016 and Tokyo 2020 bids were fixed.

This represents one of two very real and significant threats not only to the IOC’s traditional way of operation but to the presidency of Thomas Bach, elected in 2013.

The other, little-understood, especially by the IOC itself, is this:

Community organizers, particularly in Europe, have discovered the power of social media to amplify grievance and conflict. Who's to blame? The establishment, not limited to but including the state. In this context, there's a ready target: a government-underwritten and -sponsored Olympic bid.

The IOC is in a jam.

These next few months could be among the most significant in its modern history.

Bach, in a German-language interview last Thursday, appropriately noted that the social media-to-referendum connection is “the target of anti-establishment movements that we have in many European countries,” later identifying, again correctly, that the IOC is “also part of this establishment.” Too, he said, “You can not go through,” meaning make a convincing counter-argument, “with facts.”

A starting place is easy.

At the same time, it’s hard, because it means shaking up that establishment.

The era of Games as government-run infrastructure development model has run its course.

Simply and bluntly put, that needs to change — starting with the 2024 campaign, pitting Paris, more of the same (government-run, history all but guaranteeing gargantuan cost overruns) against the change option, Los Angeles (privately run, just like 1984, which ended with $232.5 million surplus).

From the Paris bid books, and ask this elemental question as you remember that the dorms at UCLA exist right now and are more than suitable while the French authorities propose a 126-acre, 3,500-unit to-be-built athletes' village described, variously, as a "significant catalyst" and an "outstanding urban regeneration project": is this what the Olympics are supposed to be about?

"The construction of private housing for ownership or lease will be funded by private developers and any social housing units will be funded by public entities, under the traditional arrangements of urban development projects in France. Transport and other public infrastructure, such as roads, riverbanks, open areas and public facilities will be funded by the state, the region and local authorities, in accordance with the usual split of responsibilities."

Change is never easy. But it is the IOC’s essential option.

Unless the IOC goes to LA, it can’t make a convincing counter-argument, because it literally cannot come up with the winning facts Bach is seeking.

Example:

Bach, in that very same German Q&A, noted that the IOC gave Rio 2016 organizers $1.5 billion.

Again, absolutely true.

But so what?

For the past 20 years, there have been two separate but intricately related budgets in any Olympics. The first is the organizing committee’s operating budget. That’s where the IOC money goes. For Rio, that made up roughly half the Rio 2016 committee’s revenue.

The second is capital investment. That's why the public authorities are so eager to bring a Games home.

In winning the bid in 2009, the Rio people pegged total costs at $14.4 billion.

So nobody was exactly playing hiding the ball.

The total post-Games Rio 2016 tab is not in but given delays, cost over-runs and the economic crisis that devastated Brazil over the past couple years: probably $20 billion. Maybe more.

Look, $1.5 billion is a lot of money. But everything is context. If the IOC president wants to go through with facts, let's compare apples with apples. To use $1.5 billion when the real discussion is probably $20 billion is disingenuous, at best.

This is the sort of stuff that tends to fuel grievance and conflict with the establishment, you know?

All the while, the newspapers are filled with pictures of decrepit swimming pools and busted-up stadiums in Rio, of horrifying budget woes in Tokyo (bid: $7.8 billion, current estimate $25-30 billion) and stories, like Friday’s in Le Monde, suggesting more to come on a scale perhaps unseen since the scandal in the 1990s over Salt Lake City’s winning bid for the 2002 Winter Games.

Salt Lake City won the Games in 1995 after wooing IOC members and their relatives with more than $1 million in cash, gifts and other inducements.

The Salt Lake crisis led to the expulsion or resignation of 10 members and a 50-point reform plan.

Will more details now under wraps in France become public? When? Unclear all around.

For emphasis, even as his name started popping up Friday around the world in media accounts, Frankie Fredericks is assuredly entitled to the presumption of innocence.

Fredericks is arguably the most famous person to hail from the west African nation of Namibia. He has four Olympic silvers in the 100 and 200 meter sprints. He has both a bachelor’s degree in computer science and an MBA from Brigham Young University.

Now 49, he has always been one of the amiable and approachable guys on the international track and field and Olympic scene. He served as a member of the IOC athletes’ commission from 2004-12 and as that panel’s chair from 2008-12; for those last four years, he was on the IOC’s policy-making executive board, too.

He was made a “regular” IOC member in 2012.

Back to 2009, and the IOC session in Copenhagen. That’s where Rio won the 2016 Games. The others in the race: Madrid, Tokyo and Chicago.

Fredericks served at that IOC assembly as what’s called a “scrutineer.” There typically are three. The scrutineers count the electronic votes before passing the results to the IOC president — then Belgium’s Jacques Rogge.

Friday’s account in Le Monde would seem to establish a timeline for the exchange of money. Connecting the dots: what, if anything, got proven? Not clear.

The newspaper report will now trigger an ethics commission inquiry into what IOC spokesman Mark Adams on Friday called “serious allegations.”

The ethics inquiry is perhaps the least of Frankie Fredericks’ concerns. If he has retained reputable legal counsel, this advice would surely have been forthcoming: don’t set foot in France.

A basic rundown:

Ahead of the Copenhagen vote, a company called Matlock Capital Group paid $1.5 million to Pamodzi Consulting, a company founded by Papa Massata Diack, and transferred another $500,000 to Papa Diack’s Russian bank account.

Papa Diack’s father, Lamine, served from 1999-2015 as president of track’s international governing body, the IAAF. He was IOC member from 1999 to 2013.

The son was a former IAAF marketing consultant.

French prosecutors are investigating Diack, father and son, on corruption charges in a separate scandal — the alleged cover-up of Russian doping cases.

In January 2016, citing the Russian matter, the IAAF banned Papa Diack for life.

Le Monde said Matlock is a holding company linked to a Brazilian businessman, Arthur Cesar de Menezes Soares Filho.

Soares reportedly is close to Sergio Cabral, the former governor of the state of Rio.

Cabral stepped down in 2014. He was arrested last November, after the Rio Games, and is now awaiting charges he diverted millions in bribes for the renovation of Maracanā Stadium before soccer’s 2014 World Cup and two other

The IOC picked Rio on October 2, 2009.

That very same day, Le Monde says, Papa Diack transferred $299,300 to Yemi Limited, an offshore company linked to Fredericks.

In an email exchange with the newspaper, Fredericks said, “The payment has nothing to do with the Olympic games,” explaining he had a marketing contract with Pamodzi from 2007-11.

The IAAF has long had a far-reaching marketing agreement with a Japanese company called Dentsu.

It’s unclear whether or not the Dentsu program is or ought to be at issue.

Also uncertain: if the Dentsu program is relevant or material, why or how Fredericks would undertake independent or even related marketing schemes in Africa, as he suggests in the emails published by Le Monde, much less a program worth $300,000, why such a four-year program would be worth $75,000 per year or, critically, why the payment for such a deal would arrive, perhaps coincidentally, on the very same day the IOC picked Rio.

What is clear:

Chicago got kicked out of the 2016 voting on the first round. The president of the United States had been on scene and he was humiliated.

Fredericks was one of the guys counting votes — in position to know, even before Rogge did, what was what. This is fact, not the suggestion of anything amiss. The scrutineers know before the IOC president does.

The Americans were so stung by Chicago’s exit, which followed New York’s loss for 2012, that they sat out the 2020 election — won by Tokyo.

Now come Los Angeles and Paris for the 2024 Olympics.

Who, at least until Friday’s Le Monde report, is sitting as the chair of the IOC committee evaluating the candidates’ so-called “technical” readiness— that is, inspecting factors as sports facilities, roads, airports, hotels and more?

The guy who at the very least knew before almost anyone else that Chicago was out in the very first round is now due to be passing judgment on Los Angeles?

Even if he spent college and grad school in Utah, and is super-familiar with the way things work over here in these United States, how can the IOC allow that?

Isn’t that just a big-time optics problem?

If Frankie Fredericks doesn’t do the right and honorable thing, let’s say by Tuesday latest, you’d have to think it’s going to be done for him.

Meanwhile, stay tuned.

This is, all things considered, preliminary skirmishing. The IOC may yet be looking at very big problems.

Very big.