IOC failing in its responsibility to the OlympicsBy Sally Jenkins
Sunday, February 28, 2010
As the Vancouver Games come to a close, International Olympic Committee President Jacques Rogge will call them a success. But it's the IOC -- so incubated in blue blazers, five-star accommodations, and shellfish buffets -- that requires real assessment. Exactly what should the purpose of the IOC be? Rogge seems hard-pressed to define his job -- what exactly are the duties of royalty?
It's been almost a decade since Rogge took over the IOC, and the hope that he would provide some integrity and leadership to the organization is gone. Instead, the primary achievements of his millennial Olympic movement are unwieldy growth, a breathtaking collaboration with regimes that commit human rights abuses, and a shucking of responsibility for Olympic-sized ills. The IOC, confronted in Vancouver with a couple of lethal issues and fresh human rights concerns at the next Winter Games in Sochi, Russia, instead reserved some of its toughest words for this late-breaking scandal: the drinking of champagne by women in public.
The IOC's treatment of the Canadian women's hockey team as scandalous for being photographed swilling from bottles of bubbly after winning a gold medal was typical of the organization's recent fecklessness. Gilbert Felli, the IOC's executive director for the Olympic Games, a man apparently devoid of humor except for the jokes he perpetrates unwittingly, said, it was "not what we want to see." He intoned, presumably between bites of scallops, "I don't think it's a good promotion of sport values," and promised, "We will investigate what happened."
It was another bold stroke in the emerging portrait of IOC leadership. The pattern is clear. We can count on the IOC to firmly tackle superficial issues. As for accountability on the meaningful ones, such as the death of Georgian luger Nodar Kumaritashvili, killed on a training run on an unsafe track at nearly 90 mph, the IOC did not have "a responsibility in judicial terms," Rogge said, ever so carefully. Asked who was ultimately responsible for the fatal crash, Rogge said: "Everyone is responsible."
No. No, we're not. You are. Kumaritashvili's death requires a serious investigation, and it should include deep internal soul-searching by the IOC about its leadership. Are the Winter Games pushing athletes too far? How did the track get 20 mph faster between its design and construction? It was designed by the International Luge Federation and built to specifications by Vancouver organizers, neither of which has incentive to investigate itself, or to admit that athletes voiced serious fears and complaints about the course for a year. Oversight is surely the role of the IOC, especially when something goes wrong.
The rest:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/27/AR2010022703315.html?hpid=topnewsYup.