Essay published in the January/February 2010 Issue
A Shameful Track Record
 
The Olympic movement plays fast and loose with basic democratic values.
By Laura Robinson
Published January 1, 2010, Literary Review of Canada
 
http://reviewcanada.ca/essays/2010/01/01/a-shameful-track-record/
 
Chris Shaw is a bit of a nebbish, a Woody Allen–esque guy who researches
Parkinson’s disease for a living. He has two ex-wives and a fuel-efficient
car, but in the winter-of-discontent narrative that has enveloped the
Vancouver Olympics, he has a different passion. In 2008, Shaw wrote Five
Ring Circus: Myths and Realities of the Olympic Games, a thoughtful book
exposing the current Olympic underbelly, from cost overruns to the
destruction of pristine Eagle Ridge to make way for a widened Sea-to-Sky
Highway, to the death of Tsimshian elder Harriet Nahanee from pneumonia,
days after she was released from two weeks in detention for camping on
Eagle Ridge and facing down bulldozers.
 
In his introduction, Shaw acknowledged that he had been opposed to and
protesting against the 2010 Winter Olympics ever since 2002. But did he
ever imagine that the Integrated Security Unit, a nearly $1 billion
combination of 7,000 Vancouver City Police and RCMP, 4,000 military and
5,000 private security personnel responsible for keeping the games “safe,”
would be tailing him to his local café on June 3, 2009, interrupting his
walk from the café to work and, in their polite plainclothes way, telling
him they did not like what he had written? Or that they would knock on the
door of his ex-wife and try to pry damaging information out of her? Did he
imagine the same thing would happen in the same week to other
anti-Olympics activists, as police went to neighbours looking for
information about the shady person next door who had the audacity to speak
out against the games? Or that a week later he would land at Heathrow
Airport, on his way to the University of Coventry for a sports conference,
and airport security would hold him in solitary with no explanation for 40
minutes? Shaw had not imagined any of this. He was under the impression
that Canadian law enforcers understood the Charter of Rights and Freedoms
and that our right to freedom of expression was sacrosanct.
 
It turns out that is not the case, and the Vancouver Organizing Committee
for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games expressed the tension
over this issue very clearly in a press release it issued on September 16,
2009, titled: “A Balance of Interests: Freedom of Expression in Public
Spaces and Athletes Competing at Their Best and Spectator Enjoyment at the
2010 Games.”
 
The press release said:
 
[VANOC] is working closely with its partners to provide a reasonable
balance of interests at the 2010 Winter Games including freedom of
expression in public spaces; the protection of Olympic marks and Games
sponsors against commercial infringement and ambush marketing; and venues
where athletes can compete at their very best before spectators who can
fully enjoy the events.
 
VANOC clearly assumes there is a contradiction between freedom of
expression and the right of athletes, spectators and sponsors to enjoy the
games, as if allowing freedom of expression will somehow take away from
the enjoyment of others instead of adding to it. “Protecting” the games
against criticism of any sort is one of the main things the modern
Olympics has always been about, giving rise to an intensely secretive and
opaque organizational culture. When the games are held in democratic
countries, these tensions come to the fore. In more totalitarian or
fascistic states, the Olympic movement gets a much more comfortable ride.
The history of this tug-of-war is a fascinating and deeply troubling one.
 
Journalists were initially banned from the 121st session of the Olympic
Congress this past October.
 
Given the all-powerful and monopolistic role it plays in international
sport, the International Olympic Committee has come under little scrutiny
in North America. This is partly because it and the international sport
federations that make up much of its ranks choose to base themselves in
Lausanne, Switzerland, where everything—especially bank accounts—is a
secret. But the International Olympic Committee’s Olympic Marketing Fact
File numbers from 2001 to 2004 show the IOC brought in a total of
US$4,189,000,000 in revenue. Broadcast rights accounted for
US$2,232,000,000 and domestic sponsorships brought in US$796,000,000, and
licensing another $87,000,000. The Olympic Partner (TOP) sponsorship
brought in US$663,000,000. Included in TOP are McDonald’s, Coca-Cola,
Visa, Samsung, GE, Atos Origin, Panasonic, Acer and Omega—the latter six
of which are in the military and/or surveillance business.
 
Switzerland allows the IOC to call itself a non-profit sports club despite
the $4 billion broadcast deals it signed for the Vancouver 2010 games and
the 2012 games in London (30 percent greater than the broadcast numbers
quoted above). This way it does not even pay the 20 percent standard
income tax that regular organizations would, and Switzerland gets a
generous bonus in sport tourism, as—coincidentally, of course—the country
hosts a disproportionately large number of international sporting events.
One World Trust, an independent British think tank, recently ranked the
IOC as the least transparent of the 30 non-profit organizations it
measured.
 
When they appear in public, members of the IOC are surrounded by security.
Journalists were initially banned from the 121st session of the Olympic
Congress this past October in Copenhagen; then the 1,400 media
representatives who had come to cover the selection of the host city for
the 2016 Olympics were cordoned off by hundreds of police officers and
security agents. Once the choice of Rio de Janeiro was announced, most of
the journalists left, but there were still a couple of hundred wanting to
cover the rest of the congress. The IOC allowed 17 to question delegates
in the lobby of the Copenhagen Marriott during lunch and breaks, dividing
the journalists into two groups, A and B, with only group A getting access
to the IOC members. No reason was given for this by Mark Adams, the IOC’s
communications director—at least no reason that made any sense to the
journalists present. Gianni Merlo, president of the International Press
Association, said, “This is unfair. We are here to talk to the IOC
members. And we don’t want to be listed as A and B journalists. It’s
complete nonsense to prevent us access to the delegates.” He was joined by
the president of the Olympic Journalists Association, Alain Lunzenfichter,
who also tried to obtain media accreditation for all journalists. At the
end of days of confusion and double-talk from the IOC, Adams said:
“Thanks, this was a most enjoyable press briefing.”
 
We will all be paying for the IOC’s security this winter. It may deter
terrorists, but most importantly it keeps journalists out. In Beijing I
wanted to ask Hein Verbruggen, chair of the Olympic Games coordination
commission and former president of the Union Cycliste Internationale (the
governing body for cycling), why there was such a discrepancy between how
many women were allowed to compete in cycling compared to men. Each
country could bring a maximum of eleven men to compete in seven events at
the velodrome while only a maximum of three women competing in three
events were allowed. When I saw that he would be giving out the medals at
the time trial, I made my move.
 
IOC member General Lassana Palenfo was sprung from an Ivory Coast prison
in 2000 by an envoy from Juan Antonio Samaranch.
 
As soon as I got close enough to ask him a question—which I did by
squirming around security guards—they closed in on me. All Verbruggen
would say to my questions was, “I don’t know.” This from the man who is
still the most powerful person in bike racing in the world. I persisted,
but security was pushing me away. “It must be historical,” Verbruggen
said, smiling as security formed a wall around him and pushed me out.
 
The UCI headquarters at the Olympic venue in Beijing was guarded by a
steel fence, cameras and more security. We now know that Verbruggen worked
out a secret deal with Beijing. After IOC president Jacques Rogge
guaranteed journalists that all internet sites would remain up and
uncensored, Verbruggen agreed to let Beijing shut down sites that were
critical of China’s human rights record seven days before the games
commenced, a move most believe Rogge also knew about.
 
By focusing a magnifying glass on some of the IOC’s members, a portrait of
the movement and its values begins to emerge more clearly. Look, for
instance, at General Lassana Palenfo, a member of the IOC Women and Sport
Commission. He is from the Ivory Coast but now lives in Paris. Why?
Because, according to two stories in the Danish newspaper Ekstra Bladet
this past October, he was sprung from an Ivory Coast prison in 2000 by an
envoy sent by then IOC president Juan Antonio Samaranch. Palenfo was told,
according to the paper’s confidential source, he would be released from
prison as long as he voted for Beijing to host the 2008 Olympics.
 
And why was the general in jail in the first place? He was second in
command after being part of a 1999 Ivory Coast coup masterminded by junta
leader Robert Guei, who later suspected him of plotting an assassination
attempt and had him thrown in jail. This was ironic given that Palenfo was
very good at throwing others in jail as head of the PC Crise—or Crisis
Patrol—which “was a kind of death squad,” journalists Sverre Quist and Bo
Elkjaer from Ekstra Bladet were told by an informant still in the military
who met secretly with them last fall.
 
General Palenfo is not unlike Major General Francis Nyangweso, also an IOC
member. By 1972, Nyangweso was a military commander under Idi Amin in
Uganda. Amin’s reign of terror is responsible for having an estimated
400,000 Ugandans killed. If things get uncomfortable for Nyangweso in
Uganda, he too will be well taken care of by the IOC, and this may have to
happen because after being president of the Ugandan Olympic Committee
since 1980, Nyangweso was ousted in February 2009. The newly elected
officials found the committee’s bank account nearly empty—something
Nyangweso had previously denied even though his tab as a jet-setting
president became very high during his reign. As well as being an IOC
member, Nyangweso also sits on the IOC Commission for Culture and Olympic
Education. Remember that when the Olympic torch comes through your town.
 
Goebbels convinced Hitler that hosting the games would put Germany in a
glowing light.
 
In fact, it is salutary to remember how the Olympic torch got its start.
Despite what Canadian journalists might write and broadcast about the
torch relay being a symbol of peace and international understanding, its
roots are steeped in one of the best propaganda exercises ever perpetrated
on this planet. In the prelude to the Berlin Olympics of 1936, Carl Diem
came up with the idea that Germany should send 3,422 Aryan runners to
start at Mount Olympus and end 3,422 kilometres later at the Berlin
stadium. Diem, the games’ organizer, later became a vicious Nazi military
commander who ordered his young soldiers to “die like Spartans” in the war
to uphold the Aryan nation.
 
In the 1988 The Olympic Flame, an official IOC publication written by
Conrado Durantez, founder of the Spanish Olympic Academy, the chapter on
the Berlin Games begins: “The 1936 Olympics went down in the annals of
sport as among the most perfect ever organized, as those which were
steeped in the greatest Olympic sense and essence and where the public
turnout was the most enthusiastic, boisterous and numerous.” There are
large photos of Nazi parades with the torch and a banner reading “Germany
Awake”—the title of a popular Nazi song. More photos show Hitler with the
IOC president at that time and massive columns of soldiers and swastikas.
The text under a group of runners doing the Heil Hitler salute reads, “The
team of runners who will execute the first phase of the journey to Athens
swear an oath, raising their right arm” but not one word of the text even
hints at the political reasons Hitler wanted the Olympics in Germany.
 
In fact, Hitler did not like the idea of the Olympics because the games
involved too many people he saw as “unfit,” but Joseph Goebbels, his
minister of propaganda, convinced him that hosting the games would put
Germany in a glowing light. The Nazis put US$8,000,000 toward the Games.
And Goebbels’s press agency issued sophisticated edicts to German
journalists:
 
Press coverage should not mention that there are two non-Aryans among the
women: Helene Mayer (fencing) and Gretel Bergmann (high jump and
all-around track and field competition). [July 16, 1936]
 
The racial point of view should not be used in any way in reporting sports
results; above all Negroes should not be insensitively reported … Negroes
are American citizens and must be treated with respect as Americans.
[August 3, 1936]
 
The northern section of the Olympic village, originally utilized by the
Wehrmacht [German army], should not be referred to as “Kasernel” (the
barracks), but will hereafter be called “North Section Olympic Village.”
[July 27, 1936]
 
When the war was over, London hosted the Olympics in 1948. The political
lines of the Cold War were soon drawn as Germany was divided into west and
east, with Manfred Ewald becoming head of East German sport. He was the
mastermind behind decades of doping that put East German athletes on the
Olympic podium, as he experimented on female athletes, injecting them with
doses of steroids so high many became caught in a nightmarish existence,
not female and not male.
 
What prominent opponents have there been to the IOC’s proclivity for
dictators? Not many.
 
And how did Ewald manage to come to the prestigious position of head of
the country’s sports organizations? His résumé included joining the Hitler
Youth in 1938, becoming a member of the Nazi party as an adult and
organizing the very street gangs he once ran in as a young brown shirt.
Ewald’s past was known to the IOC, but it did not keep Juan Antonio
Samaranch, the president of the very august and male organization from
1980 to 2001, from awarding him, in 1985, the Olympic Order, seen as the
Nobel Prize of sport.
 
In Germany after the wall fell, Giselher Spitzer of the University of
Potsdam and Gerhard Treutlein of the University of Heidelberg researched
and wrote all they could on the Ewald era in the east, and also about the
ease with which West German athletes were given performance-enhancing
drugs. Spitzer lost his professorship and both have been persecuted by an
element of the German sport system that has remade the country’s sporting
past into myth. Go to the stadium in Berlin where Hitler held the 1936
Olympics and you will see the bronze plaque that commemorates Carl Diem.
Go to the Olympic Museum in Lausanne and read the accolades to Manfred
Ewald in the archives.
 
The IOC prefers to operate publicly with no memory, and of course that
includes not acknowledging Juan Antonio Samaranch’s fascist ideology and
provenance. Samaranch was sports minister in Francisco Franco’s regime in
Spain, and during that time was president of the Spanish Olympic Committee
from 1967 to 1970. There are photos of him in his fascist’s blue shirt
alongside Franco, but none of this is ever mentioned in any official IOC
text. By 1966 he was also a member of the IOC, and replaced Ireland’s Lord
Killanin as president in 1980. Samaranch insisted on being called “his
excellency” and is now Honorary President for Life. His son is an IOC
member, too. If Samaranch Sr. showed a soft spot for fascism, he was
following in the footsteps of American Avery Brundage, who became IOC
president in 1952. Brundage conveniently took fellow American Ernest Lee
Jahnke’s place in the IOC ranks in 1936 after Jahnke was expelled for
calling for a boycott of the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Brundage referred to
Germany’s persecution of Jews as “the present Jew-Nazi altercation” and
blamed the support for a boycott on “the Jewish-Communist conspiracy.”
Brundage continued to believe that the Berlin Olympics were by far the
finest and was said to have been a life-long admirer of Hitler until he
died in 1975.
 
Besides Jahnke, one may ask, what other prominent opponents have there
been to the IOC’s proclivity for dictators? Not many. In 1994, before he
took the athletes’ oath on behalf of all athletes at the Winter Olympics
in Lillehammer, Vegard Ulvang—three-time gold medalist in Nordic
skiing—questioned the dictatorial nature of the IOC. “We Norwegians do not
think highly of fascists,” he told me later.
 
In no time Samaranch had the upstart athlete taken off the starting list
for his first event. This caused a scandal in Norway, where Ulvang is
considered a Nordic god. The Norwegian Olympic Committee and ski
federation intervened; Ulvang was put back on the startlist and he did not
apologize. In 2007, when Oslo, Trondheim and Tromsø were vying to be the
Norwegian city to host the 2018 Winter Olympics, Ulvang asked publicly
where a critical appraisal of sport had gone. He was not alone: a poll
showed that only 38 percent of Norwegians thought hosting the games was a
good idea and all three cities dropped out.
 
Canadians are supposed to put on their Made in China red mitts and are
told to “believe.”
 
Canadian Olympic gold medalist swimmer Mark Tewksbury organized many
athletes in 1999, including Ulvang, to form Olympic Advocates Together
Honourably—OATH—as a way to address corruption in the IOC. In 2000,
Tewksbury told a BBC documentary that the IOC is “an autocratic or
totalitarian system whereby things are going to happen a certain way and
processes are put in place whereby those results are arrived at.” The
group was snuffed out by a few IOC lawsuit threats.
 
Along with the B.C. Civil Liberties Association, Shaw and another activist
filed a lawsuit in October 2009 against the City of Vancouver over its
omnibus bylaw that gave police special powers to enter private homes
should they display “ambush marketing” signs or logos on their property
and to arrest the occupant and take down the signage. The BCCLA argued
that anti-Olympic signs could be considered ambush marketing under the
bylaw. After many protests the city amended the bylaw to protect the
rights to protest and to freedom of expression. The BCCLA sees this as a
major victory, but is also asking VANOC to rescind a clause in its
contract with artists that stipulates that the artist must “refrain from
making any negative or derogatory remarks respecting VANOC, the 2010
Olympic and Paralympic Games, the Olympic movement generally, Bell and/or
other sponsors associated with VANOC.” In addition, the Writers Union of
Canada has written to VANOC twice—first over the harassment of Shaw and
then, in December, over the detention and interrogation of U.S. writer Amy
Goodman at the Canadian border on her way to do a reading at the Vancouver
Public Library.
 
Meanwhile, journalists from official media sponsors such as CanWest
Global, CTV, TSN and The Globe and Mail exclaim over the torch relay and
Olympic “dreams.” Canadians are supposed to put on their Made in China red
mitts and are told to “believe.”
 
In what?
 
Laura Robinson is a former member of the national cycling team, former
Canadian rowing champion, and Ontario Nordic ski champion. The Vancouver
Olympics will be her fifth to cover as a journalist. She coaches the
Anishinaabe Nordic Racers at Cape Croker First Nation Elementary School in
Ontario.
 

Laura Robinson, Literary Review of Canada