Irony has died for me a thousand times. That’s not a thousand little cuts. That’s a thousand spinning kicks. One of the best deaths was in 2010 when the International Center for Sport Security was created to ensure greater transparency in the bidding process for major sporting events.
The nonprofit organization has a color-coded website with push messages. Our history. Our impact. Why is our work important? Led by President Mohammed Hanzab, a former lieutenant colonel in the Qatar Armed Forces, it is based in Doha and funded by Qatar. Well what do I know.
So concern seeped back this week in the governing body’s race for moral high ground over fighting Ukraine. In that stampede, luckily, International Boxing (IBA) just couldn’t get a kick out of it, as it decided to continue its opaque relationship with Gazprom.
In their wisdom, the IBA and its Russian ‘philanthropist and benefactor’ president, Umar Kremlyov, have refused to share their Gazprom contract with the International Olympic Committee (IOC) as they have signed a non-disclosure agreement.
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What that means is that the IBA is not in a position to reveal how much money it is receiving from the Russian gas giant. Respect; faithful to its sordid, corruptible and incompetent past.
Otherwise, the governing body’s rebellion for decency is as astonishing as the arrival of foreign workers in the Gulf to build football stadiums through a kafeel (sponsor) and in a Kafala system that treated them like medieval serfs.
When you are used to a life where the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must, sports governing bodies recharge their batteries of integrity with the Ukrainian penny doing the right thing is not a natural appearance.
Ethical invertebrates to stand up straight and pedal overnight, that’s not in Darwin’s book.
Pantomime
All it takes, it seems, is a convincing pantomime villain who commits crimes so theatrically heinous that even FIFA, following its smug opening statement to ‘monitor the situation’ as real missiles rained down on real cities, felt empowered to avoid Vlad.
Okay, so there’s a little bit of what happens in real time. What about Yemen, where a UN report estimated 337,000 dead at the end of last year? What about golf’s newest honey pot at the House of Saud, the IOC and China’s Uighur re-education camps, Fifa and Qatar’s slave labor?
What is surprising is that the governing bodies had a collective backbone to find for Ukraine. An interesting aspect of his late devotion to the righteous is how it will endure if kyiv is taken and the country falls into a never-ending bloody insurgency supported by a free-flowing supply of weapons from the west.
So whose side will the IOC find itself on for Paris 2024? Think of Berlin 1936, where the Germany team had a Jewish athlete, fencer Helene Mayer, to show the Nazis’ Catholic appetite for diversity. That worked.
Think of Tokyo last summer, where the state-sponsored Russian PED cheating machine was allowed to compete like the Russian Olympic Committee. No name, no flag, no anthem, no shame, but a siege mentality.
There was a tweet a few years ago from Marina Hyde of The Guardian asking if there was fiercer competition in sport than the fight to be the most worthless governing body. She received a response noting that there were some outstanding candidates.
Vessel
A joke with a grain of truth was former IOC President Jacques Rogge who said: ‘Influencing human rights is the job of political organizations and human rights organisations. It is not the IOC’s job to engage in monitoring, lobbying or influencing.”
That turned out to be gross. It was silly when she said it, the frustration is how little sporting bodies allow the institutional values they profess to have to be involved in real social engagement or remain consistent political instruments. Instead, they are venal, a blur of conceit and contradiction.
In a study last year called A Critique of Sports Governing Bodies’ Conceptual Inconsistency in Humans Rights Work by Hans Erik Naess, it was reported that FIFA has 240 national members, the IAAF has 214 and the IOC has 196 members. Together, they represent more than a billion people.
In conclusion, the study said that government bodies are in a position to do a number of things, one of them to avoid the paradox of human rights “whereby the proclaimed universality of human rights is belied by the fact that those rights only make sense if one is included within a particular political community”.
The guilt of the sports body lies in the fact that the recent massive readjustment of the moral compass for Ukraine has highlighted what unity can achieve, but also a bankrupt and greedy history that it has ignored and is ignoring as bad and worse events. what are happening
For sporting bodies to keep the ugly past for what it is, the past, and then hope that the current ethics outburst will be part of the future is too fragile a thought for which to hold out any hope. History tells us that it is not likely.
But in their generosity and ability to capture the spirit of the current age in Kyiv, sports bodies have also exposed themselves negatively to the more difficult positions they have refused to take. Sporty bodily integrity is all the rage this month and the irony is dying.
Source: www.irishtimes.com