OLYMPIC VERDICT – AT 6:59 P.M. ET:  In a superb column in the Washington Post, Sally Jenkins says what a lot of us have been thinking – there need to be big changes in the international Olympic "movement."

I love the Olympics, always have.  My wife and I are big figure skating fans.  But the International Olympic Committee has always been a farce, and a farce that doesn't do its job:

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."

There's the problem, as Jenkins points out.  Trivial issues are treated with great gravity.  Major issues, like the death of the Georgian luger at the start of the Vancouver games, are wished away.

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.

There will be no serious investigation.  The IOC has always been a political, not an athletic organization.  Its record of collaboration with Nazi Germany before World War II is notorious.  That record of casualness about fascism continued after the war.  Strangely, until recently, IOC presidents always seemed to have some relationship to fascist regimes.

But they don't even try. They abdicate, and that abdication has been a huge moral failure. It's a cold hard fact that the Olympics have become vehicles for evil, partly thanks to their scale. In 2007 and 2008, Human Rights Watch documented scores of human rights abuses directly linked to the Beijing Games. From forced evictions to the arrest of dissidents, the Olympics led to "an overall deterioration of human rights in China." The Olympics are leaving huge debts -- of all sorts -- in their wake. In some cases, they left men and women broken and in jail. For the moment, this is the IOC's real legacy.

Finally...

It shouldn't be to much for the IOC to demand that host countries sign contracts guaranteeing they won't perpetrate naked evils in the name of the Olympics, the charter of which insists on "human dignity."

If the Olympics aren't ruined yet, it's only because they are indestructible. Each quadrennial, the athletes deliver competitive masterpieces, spectacles so dazzling that we forget the problems that went into making them. In the end, that's what the Olympics are really about...But the danger is that under this IOC, they are turning into the ultimate political cover.

COMMENT:  Well said.  The athletes are the show, but some of the producers should be retired.

February 28, 2010