The 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro begin in earnest this week. Friday’s opening ceremony, always a bombastic exercise in propaganda regardless of host country, will no doubt captivate the mind with its pageantry. Despite the tales of systemic political corruption, human rights violations and broken promises, not to mention tales of Olympic facilities that may or may not be “Olympic-caliber,” it appears the Olympics will happen. Rio won’t be a disaster after all.
{mosads}While the lead-up to the Rio games may be the most disorderly we’ve seen, the fact is, pre-Games disorder is a common narrative. It has become customary to work ourselves into a frenzied lather over the host city’s not being ready, and yet the games always seem to go off without a hitch.
Without a hitch, that is, if we continue to ignore those pesky allegations of corruption and human rights violations.
Last December, the U.S. Justice Department rounded up over a dozen high-ranking FIFA officials in a series of historic indictments for corruption and racketeering. The U.S. could no longer turn a blind eye to soccer’s stunningly corrupt governing body and U.S. action in that particular case was swift and unequivocal.
Which begs the question: When will the United States address the equally corrupt International Olympic Committee (IOC)?
In 1998, several members of the IOC were accused of taking bribes from the Salt Lake Organizing Committee during the bidding process for the 2002 Winter Games, which of course ended up taking place in Salt Lake City. Two members of the roughly 100-member IOC were directly linked to the Salt Lake bribery scandal and currently serve in senior positions. Investigations into the Salt Lake scandal also found that IOC members took bribes during bidding for the 2000 Summer Olympics.
A report ordered in 2006 by Nagano, Japan’s governor revealed that his city, during the 1998 Winter Olympics, provided millions of dollars for an “illegitimate and excessive level of hospitality” to IOC members. One figure from that report noted that $4.4 million was earmarked for “entertainment alone.”
Like FIFA, the bidding process to host the Olympics is rife with unreasonable demands and bribes, none of which go to further the games or the masses. The bidding process has become so mendacious that the only ones left seriously bidding to host the games are the world’s authoritarian dictatorships.
Both China, host of the 2008 Summer Games, and Russia, home of the 2014 Winter Games, have been accused of serious, and in some cases grotesque, human-rights violations in order to make those games happen. All of the democratic countries which originally bid to host the Winter Games in 2022 have removed their names from consideration, leaving the IOC with a choice between China and Kazakhstan, two incredibly despotic regimes.
The IOC gets away with its demands and abuses because it invariably has, in its host country, a willing partner. Authoritarian hosts agree to the IOC’s terms because they have the ability to run the games, and put on a spectacular show, with ruthless efficiency. In the case of Rio, the corruption within its own government creates its own paradoxical efficiency: Those with the money make the rules.
If it is not the IOC’s own crooked malfeasance, it is its sanctioning of it. The IOC, by proxy, is just as responsible for the human violations that have been reported in China, Russia or Rio, as those offending countries. The IOC, as a body, can no longer talk out of both sides of its mouth. It can’t tell us from one side that the goal of the Olympics is to “place sport at the service of the harmonious development of humankind, with a view to promoting a peaceful society concerned with the preservation of human dignity,” while from the other side placing those sports in countries that brutally tread on human dignity.
“Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence,” Leonardo da Vinci one said. It is time for the U.S. government to make a case against the International Olympic Committee. The time is now. The abuses and their impact must be stopped.
Spatola is a West Point graduate and former captain in the U.S. Army. He currently serves as a college basketball analyst for ESPN and is a host on SiriusXM radio.
The views expressed by contributors are their own and not the views of The Hill.