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2 August 2012updated 12 Oct 2023 10:57am

Alan White’s Olympics Diary: Beautiful Bradley, and the IOC’s billion-pound edifice of immorality

Jacques Rogge's committee does nothing but look out for its own interests.

By Alan White

I’m so sorry. I wanted to wax lyrical about the beauty of Bradley. Of course I did. But duty calls. So.

On Tuesday, the women’s badminton took an unexpected turn when the Danes pulled off a shock win over a strong Chinese pair and took the top of Group D. The Chinese were due to meet the winners of Group A. Another Chinese pair was playing South Korea for that position.

Neither of them wanted to meet the first Chinese pair, so, to mounting boos and intervention from the referees, they tried to out-underperform each other, deliberately hitting the shuttlecock into the net and so on. The same thing happened in the next match, between South Korea and Indonesia.

Now, as I said yesterday, this isn’t particularly redolent of the Olympic spirit. The eight players were referred to the Badminton World Federation, found to be in breach of the code, and were thrown out of the Olympics.

It all seems pretty cut and dry. They were bad sports, so they were kicked out. Except it isn’t, at all. This morning Matthew Syed, the former table tennis competitor for Team GB, has admitted his team once deliberately lost a game in much the same manner. Gail Emms, whom you’ll remember as a 2004 silver medallist in badminton for Great Britain, has also backed the players.

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Far more disturbingly, Emms has told the Guardian: “Yesterday, after the Danish players beat the Chinese in the morning session, the team managers went to the organisers and said: “We’re a bit worried about these evening matches.” Nothing was done. Straight away they should have got all the players and coaches together and said: ‘If there is any single sign of someone trying not to win you will all be disqualified.’”

Emms and Syed both blame the officials. And you can see their point: you enter the Olympics to win. Regardless of whether you agree with the players’ actions, the officials shouldn’t put them in a position where that aim is at odds with the sport’s code. And make no mistake, as German singles player Mark Zweiber has pointed out, this had been coming for some time.

But this all leads me to a far bigger issue. Those officials. There is not a hope in hell of them being pulled up for failing to spot this potential row. Instead the head of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), Jacques Rogge, talks only of further action – presumably formally expelling the athletes from the Games.

You could be forgiven for thinking the IOC couldn’t give a monkey’s about the athletes without whom there would be no games. You might think it is simply a train of pampered bureaucrats that floats from one city to the next, detached from anything other than the rarefied scenes it sees in Park Lane, let alone the competitors it purports to represent.

You might wonder how far an organisation with revenues of £3.9bn in the last four years would prioritise the needs of the athletes over other concerns when its two main sources of funding are television rights and sponsorship. Perhaps you’d raise an eyebrow at its banning athletes mentioning their sponsors on social networks, unless they’re the same ones that pay the IOC.

Maybe you think that money doesn’t line the pockets of Rogge’s cronies, and finds its way to the athletes. Perhaps the words of track runner Nick Simmonds, talking to the Guardian this week, will strike a chord: “”The [IOC’s] sponsors have done absolutely nothing to help me be the athlete I am today … For years my sponsors … have helped me train and compete and now they are made to feel unwelcome. This is not right.””

Maybe you’ll wonder, then, where that money does go, given that the IOC pays no tax. Perhaps you’ll think that, given it has a total monopoly over a global event worth billions, there’s an outside chance of corruption. In which case you might not be shocked to hear a member of the IOC’s executive board only resigned this March, citing a “lack of ethics and principles”. Two months later, the IOC began an investigation (and how rigorous it’s sure to be) into claims that officials were selling tickets to the 2012 Olympics on the black market.

And when you hear that, while their country burns, Greek Olympic officials have paid £150,000 to hire the Carlton Club in Central London to house sponsors, politicians and officials, you might start to think that this is a neat correlative; that this whole “Olympic Family” – the IOC and its shady web of federations and governing bodies – is little more than a shambling, immoral edifice that should be torn asunder, that it has never done anything more than look out for itself right back to the day it felt Berlin would be a suitable venue in 1936. How happy are you about those empty seats we continue to see in stadia right now?

Like I said, I wish I’d talked about Bradley. He was good, wasn’t he?

Odds and Ends

UK gold medal winners when young: Bradley Wiggins pays tribute to his PE teacher, and here’s Heather Stanning’s eery school yearbook, for those who missed it.

Stunning pic of Gabby Douglas at the gymnastics. Speaking of which, a fabulous GIF retelling of how the USA beat Russia. I particularly like MyKayla Maroney’s vault – mesmerising.

Spare a thought for the Olympians embracing Ramadan.

As many a wag pointed out, yesterday an enthusiastic BJ was stopped by an unfortunate zip incident. Here’s a load of photoshops – they’re good, but this here video edit is a thing of genius.

How’s the Olympics been for disabled spectators? Pretty good, apparently.

Can’t believe I forgot to mention yesterday’s interview with Bert le Clos. Give this man a medal of his own.

My assertion yesterday with reference to the Tom Daley Twitter troll case that it’s better to “walk on by” was poorly-worded: I was trying to emphasise my belief that no good can come of a mob retaliation towards an online abuser. There’s nothing wrong with intervening, but as anywhere else, it’s better done through the appropriate channels: Twitter being the obvious place to start.

 

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