Oh sport, you're fat

It turns out that not only Polish, Zenit and Croatian fans know how to turn a sports festival into a disgrace. National Olympic committees also cope well with this task.

In today's edition of The Sunday Times - a large report on the results of a journalistic investigation, during which reporters, posing as ticket speculators from the Middle East, received offers for the illegal sale of tickets from 27 agents representing the Olympic committees of 54 countries. This means that 54 national Olympic committees were ready to sell to the left the quota of tickets for the 2012 Olympics in London, which they received from the organizers for sale to fans, coaches and sports officials in their countries. Of course, with a significant overpayment. The Chinese, for example, asked for 6,000 pounds for the best seats in stadiums. The Serbs offered to push 1,500 Olympic tickets to the left at once for 80,000 pounds in cash. And the chairman of the Greek NOC boasted that he had extracted additional tickets from the game organizers, which he was happily ready to push to the left. The British say that the Greek is lying, and his NOC did not receive any tickets above the quota. All materials obtained by journalists were handed over to the crooks from the IOC, who promise that they will conduct the most thorough investigation and punish the perpetrators. In the UK, speculating on Olympic tickets is a criminal offence.

And the scandal began, as usual, in the post-Soviet space. In April, when the head of the National Olympic Committee of Ukraine Volodymyr Gerashchenko arrived in London for a meeting of the Olympic organizing committee, a BBC journalist who introduced himself as a ticket speculator gained confidence in him. Gerashchenko volunteered to sell the reporter one hundred tickets from the Ukrainian quota, and asked to pay in cash. Unfortunately for the professional Little Russian Olympian, all negotiations with the journalist were recorded. After the recordings were shown on the BBC , Gerashchenko was removed from the leadership of the NOC. This was at the end of May. Three weeks later, it turns out that Gerashchenko’s actions were nothing unusual for the head of the NOC. It’s just that he was the first to volunteer and the first to get burned. And when they started digging, it turned out that Gerashchenko did not do anything special. And even the scale of his offense looks comical against the background of his Serb brothers. And, probably, Ukraine should reconsider the decision to remove him: after all, he stuck around there for 15 years at the head of the NOC, like a crab in the galleys. It’s not his fault that in London, unlike all previous Beijing and Athens, they don’t like corruption.

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