A new constitution has been adopted by a sport that has been riddled with doping and corruption in an attempt to retain the place it has held on the Games’ schedule since 1896In all the excitement it was easy to miss the press release put out by the International Olympic Committee on 6 August announcing a tweak to rule 59 1.2b of the Olympic charter. But in one little corner of the Games hundreds of athletes and officials were hanging on the change. The rule now states that the IOC’s executive board has the power to “suspend any sport, discipline or event” if the federation running it acts “in a manner likely to tarnish the Olympic movement”. Which, for those...
Beach volleyball in Rio was a riotous joy but how will it play when a city is essentially forced against its will to host the global event?You don’t get a great deal of down time as a jobbing hack at the Olympics but my schedule at the Rio Games meant the laptop lid was sometimes snapped shut by around 7pm. Ablutions at the team hotel were followed by a couple of beers in the company of any colleagues who might also have found themselves at a loose end. Thirst slaked, it was feeding time: a coronary of assorted succulent meats washed down by plonk at one of the myriad beachfront all-you-can-eat steakhouses.Exhausted, stuffed, pleasantly sozzled and with the sanctuary of...
China’s treatment of Uighurs has been deemed by Canada as genocide. Are we about to legitimise the regime responsible?History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes. I am staring at two bundles of newspaper clippings – one present day, one past – and feeling a deepening chill. The first pile details China’s treatment of the Uighur Muslim population in Xinjiang, where more than a million people have been “re-educated” in camps, as well as the calls for the 2022 Winter Olympics to be stripped from Beijing. The second is from the Manchester Guardian in 1935, recording the abuse of Jews in Germany and demanding a boycott of the Berlin Games. The echoes are eerie. The looming question, then as now,...
Cas leniency is like Great Train Robbers getting community service, but a lesson in realpolitik may concentrate mindsHere is a question you may not expect to find in a sports column. When a journalist is assassinated, do financial markets care? The answer, according to new research in the journal Applied Economics, is a resounding yes. And there is more in the detail. If the murdered journalist was an editor or worked in television, stock prices of companies with headquarters in that country declined on average by 2.18%. However, if they were tortured beforehand, they fell by 3%. And if they were killed by military officials, prices went down even further by 4.62%.This awful set of statistics tells us that the...
Fifty-two years after Tommie Smith and John Carlos used the Olympic podium to protest against racial injustice, a new documentary examines the legacy of the gestureChaos on the streets. Poison seeping into minds. Athletes speaking out against racial injustice being vilified as villains by those in power. Right now 2020 looks a lot like 1968, recast and rebooted.Certainly when LeBron James and other NBA stars went on strike last week, they were standing on the shoulders of giants of that era. And two in particular: Tommie Smith and John Carlos, whose podium protests at the 1968 Olympics are the subject of a timely and vital new film, The Stand: How One Gesture Shook The World. Related: Most Australian athletes believe...