Is international sport now a hostage to corruption?

“The Olympic Games must not be an end in itself, they must be a means of creating a vast programme of physical education and sportscompetitions for young people.” -Avery Brundage

There is, these days, a hollow ring to the high-sounding pronouncement by the one-time high-profile American sports administrator, Avery Brundage. Though not a man without blemish (Brundage used his own flawed analysis of Nazi Germany to support the US participation in the 1936 Munich Olympics) contemporary circumstances provide his pronouncement with an unmistakable ring of poignancy. The spirit of the Olympic Games, now surely stands gravely imperilled by the coincidence between the imminence of the August 2016 Rio Olympics and the emergence of the latest in a slew of cheating and corruption-related scandals in international sport.

At the cheating end of the corruption in athletics scale the most recent sensational World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) report on drugs in athletics, goes beyond what we have grown accustomed to, mere collusion between athletes who must win at all costs and their coaches. This time, the revelations point fingers directly at countries, at doping on what one might call an industrial scale, and at the Russian Federation on the one hand and the uppermost echelons of the IAAF on the other.   There are claims of a systematic, state-sponsored doping regime in Russian athletics and the IAAF’s now disgraced former President Lamine Diack has been fingered in what is believed to be cover-ups in exchange for bribes and kickbacks. Truth be told, however difficult it may be to accept the reality that sport is no longer sport, the facts are what they are. The loss of innocence in international sport has long been a fact of life.

What the facts tell us is that winning along with the perks that derive therefrom, is everything; and since the true spirit of competition in sport is underpinned by the assumption of fair encounter and fairplay, much that has traditionally drawn us to sport and informed the embracing of our sporting heroes has collapsed under the sheer weight of cheating. The reality is that what you see is not what you necessarily get.

Drug-enhanced performances are only a part of the equation that characterizes the disfiguring of international sport. In a world where a continually growing sports economy accounts for as much as 2% of global GDP organized crime is believed to launder in excess of US$ 140 billion annually through sport betting. Additionally, recent research suggests that around 80% of global sport betting is illegal. It would take a great deal to roll back a tidal wave of that magnitude.

Particularly instructive is the recently released joint report from The University Panthéon-Sorbonne in France and the International Center for Sport Security (ICSS), the results of two years of research into sport corruption that gives figures on the scale and scope of the sport-betting market, including match-fixing. The Report, titled ‘Protecting the Integrity of Sport Competition: The Last Bet for Modern Sport,’ addresses in detail the manipulation of sport competition and betting that threatens all countries and regions, with football and cricket (and tennis as we have recently learnt) the sports most under siege these days, though no sport is safe from gambling-related corruption.

As an aside, the region’s own favoured sport, cricket, once euphemistically dubbed a ‘gentleman’s game,’ has long ‘gone south’ in a maze of match-fixing and crooked gambling that has ended careers and even sent players to prison. Nowhere in sport, it seems, is there, these days, respite from corruption.

Rio 2016 awaits. A key question that arises is whether we are not entitled to be cynical about the promise made by Russian Olympic Committee that it will satisfy the demands of WADA and is “ready to take the lead in reforming the Russian Athletics Federation and to bring the Federation in line with the demands of the IAAF (International Associa-tion of Athletics Federations) and anti-doping legislation.” In other words, can Russia, in the time left before August, fix its doping problems; and if it can’t, will Rio 2016 not turn out to be a fateful wrong turn for the Olympic Games that might inevitably create a paradigm shift in our understanding of the spirit of competition that will probably never be repaired?