I’ve covered nine Olympic Games and from the first time I showed up in Los Angeles in 1984, I’ve had this feeling that the International Olympic Committee is an Evil Empire. Just like the Star Wars’ Evil Empire. These days Jacques Rogge is Darth Vader. It used to be Juan Antonio Samaranch.
This weekend, it became significantly clear that the IOC is about as silly as any group of entitled European gentry could possibly be. To paraphrase Monty Python, “These prissy old clowns are our upper class twits of the year.”
Oh, where to start???….
1) NBC reported on Saturday night that five Russian skiers who tested positive for banned substances prior to the Games would not be disciplined until after the Games (if they are ever disciplined at all).
Former WADA chief, Dick Pound is probably vomiting all over the new suit he wore at that panel discussion in Vancouver last week, the one where he called athletes who use banned substances, “sociopathic cheats.” Guess his former colleagues don’t agree.
Like everything else at the IOC, there are rules for some athletes and different rules or others. And, evidently for a small group of Russian skiers, doping is not an issue.
2) The IOC’s final report on the fatal accident that killed Georgian luger Nodar Komaritashvili claimed that there was nothing wrong with the course and that Komaritashvili died as a result of “athlete error.”
Which would be fine, one supposes, if the IOC and the World Luge Federation didn’t immediately change the course, a course on which the world’s best, Armin Zoeggeler, crashed during training.
OK, so let’s get this straight, the IOC and the tall foreheads of World Luge, have blamed the athlete for his own death and yet they immediately moved the men’s start line to the women’s start line, moved the women’s start line to the juniors’ start line, changed the levels and angles at the bottom of the course, built a giant wall where Komaritashvili left the course and slowed down the competitors from the mid-140-kilometres per hour to the mid 120-kilometres per hour.
Sorry, that’s hypocrisy at best or one big, fat, ugly lie at worst.
3) Olympic women’s hockey is a joke.
That’s not to say that women’s hockey is a joke. On the contrary, women’s hockey, as it’s played in Canada and the United States, is a wonderful game dominated more by speed and skill than by size and brute force.
However, after Canada blasted Slovakia 18-0 in Vancouver on Saturday night, it quickly became clear that as an Olympic competition women’s hockey is nothing more than a dual-meet between Canada and the U.S.
Since Olympic women’s hockey entered the Games in 1998, the gulf between the dominance of Canada and the United States and the rest of the world has become wider. While Canadian and U.S. women’s hockey gets better, the rest of the world gets considerably worse.
Of course, the idiots who run the IOC, decided to drop women’s softball from the Olympics because, well, it was very popular and too many countries were good at it? Those same IOC bozos decided that women’s ski jump was, ahh, what? Too dangerous?
There is almost nothing the IOC does that makes any sense. Having a women’s hockey competition and yet not allowing women’s ski jump or softball is a classic example of the buffoonery that runs rampant with the upper class twits of the IOC.