Olympian gods on sinful earth

Gazeta.Ru Nine days before the opening of the Olympics in Athens, the Olympic movement is plunged into its biggest crisis since the resumption of the games in 1896.

In the last 20 years of the twentieth century, the Olympics began to be sold - they turned from competitions of pure spirit and will into commercial projects. Now it has finally become clear that the main sporting competition of humanity is not only being sold, but also being bought. Like a regular product.

BBC journalists, under the guise of some business agents who want to promote the holding of the 2012 Olympics in London (besides him, Paris, New York and Moscow are competing for these Games), contacted some members of the International Olympic Committee. Having offered these officials bribes (relatively small, according to some sources, up to $11 million), the false agents asked to ensure a positive vote in choosing the 2012 Olympic capital. As a result, the officials to whom the money was transferred said that they were ready to provide 54 votes for IOC members. The entire process of negotiations and bribery of officials was filmed with a hidden camera and formed the outline of the film “Buying the Olympics,” which is scheduled to premiere today. The main character of the film is IOC member from Bulgaria Ivan Slavkov .

The first corruption scandal broke out four years ago. Then a number of IOC members were accused of receiving bribes from structures that lobbied for the holding of the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, America. As a result, ten IOC members were forced to voluntarily resign under the pressure of accusations. Although the then head of the International Olympic Committee, Juan Antonio Samaranch , managed to remain in office and left only after completing his next term.

Meanwhile, it was Baron Samaranch who changed the logic of the modern Olympics, laid down almost 110 years ago by another baron - the Frenchman Pierre de Coubertin .

Coubertin's logic was simple: once every four years, as in ancient Athens, the strongest athletes get together to find out who is the best. At this time - again in strict accordance with the traditions of the ancient Olympics - all wars cease. The organizing country receives purely moral dividends in the form of the trust of the world community and a grandiose sporting spectacle to boot. There were flaws in this logic - for example, in 1936 the Games were entrusted to Hitler's Germany, which caused natural protests in many countries around the world. But still, for most of the twentieth century, the Olympics developed as a non-profit project.

However, Baron Samaranch, who led the Olympic movement at the 1980 games in Moscow - the first where athletes from some countries, including the United States, did not come for political reasons, decided to turn the factory of sports dreams into an ordinary commercial factory selling this most grandiose sports spectacle. The IOC began the practice of concluding large sponsorship contracts with transnational corporations and selling broadcast rights, which began to cost billions of dollars.

As a result, the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles became the first in the history of modern Olympism to bring profit to the organizers.

And since then, making a profit has become perhaps the main criterion for the success of competitions - certainly more important than, say, the number of world records.

Big money really came into the Olympic movement. But it seems that the keepers of the spirit of Olympism themselves could not withstand the temptation of the values of the material world. If during the last corruption scandal there was no real evidence of bribery of IOC members - the scandal was fanned by newspapers with references to certain intermediaries, now the BBC, a respected company that values its reputation most of all, managed to film the entire process on camera. This is hardly a falsification - in this case, the main British broadcasting corporation faces the worst reputation scandal in its history. The ring trade is too close to the truth.

It’s just that in the last two decades the Olympics have become both a tempting enterprise and a way to attract large-scale investments in the country’s economy, and even a method of political rehabilitation.

For example, in order to obtain the rights to host the 1988 Summer Olympics, South Korea actually changed its military dictatorship to a presidential republic. And the Chinese authorities interpret Beijing's participation in the 2008 Summer Olympics as recognition by the world community of the absence of human rights problems in the country. But the economic dividends from the Olympics still outweigh any political benefits.

~Now the International Olympic Committee has a difficult choice: to make its business as transparent as possible, perhaps even openly transforming itself from a public organization into a commercial structure operating under international financial reporting standards, or to change the procedure for selecting applicants for the Games, making it open to journalists. Because trade in rings - in conditions where the IOC includes more countries than the UN - is global world trade. And if such trade does not follow the rules, large firms simply will not want to deal with “dirty business.” Then devaluation of the Olympic Games product cannot be avoided.