International Olympic Committee: 'Elitist, domineering and crassly commercial at its core'

[Newsjock]

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/05/opinion/no-medal-for-the-international-olympic-committee.html?_r=1&ref=opinion
By Jules Boykoff and Alan Tomlinson

While Europe roils in economic turmoil, London is preparing for a lavish jamboree of international good will: in a few weeks, the city will host the 2012 Summer Olympics.

But behind the spectacle of athletic prowess and global harmony, brass-knuckle politics and brute economics reign. At this nexus sits the International Olympic Committee, which promotes the games and decides where they will be held. Though the I.O.C. has been periodically tarnished by scandal — usually involving the bribing and illegitimate wooing of delegates — those embarrassments divert us from a deeper problem: the organization is elitist, domineering and crassly commercial at its core.

The I.O.C., which champions itself as a democratic “catalyst for collaboration between all parties of the Olympic family,” is nonetheless run by a privileged sliver of the global 1 percent. This has always been the case: when Baron Pierre de Coubertin revived the Olympics in the 1890s, he assembled a hodgepodge of princes, barons, counts and lords to coordinate the games. Eventually the I.O.C. opened its hallowed halls to wealthy business leaders and former Olympians. Not until 1981 were women allowed in.

... Then there are the excessive demands that the I.O.C. makes on host cities. For instance, the host cities have had to change their laws to comply with the Olympic Charter, which states that “no kind of demonstration or political, religious or racial propaganda is permitted in any Olympic sites, venues or other areas.” When Vancouver, British Columbia, hosted the Winter Games in 2010, the city passed a bylaw that outlawed signs and banners that did not “celebrate” the Olympics. Placards that criticized the Olympics were forbidden, and the law even empowered Canadian authorities to remove such signs from private property.

Jules Boykoff, an associate professor of political science at Pacific University, is writing a book on dissent and the Olympics. Alan Tomlinson is a professor of leisure studies at the University of Brighton.