THEMA: FIT FOR THE FUTURE?

In an editorial this week, The Australian began its shredding of the governance class of Olympic and Football governance with this damnation:

"Given her past as former Zimbabwean despot Robert Mugabe’s “golden girl” and seven years as a cabinet minister under his ruthless successor, Emmerson Mnangagwa, a fearful former state security chief known as “the Crocodile”, it is no surprise that new International Olympic Committee boss Kirsty Coventry thinks it’s time to reconsider Russia’s exclusion from international sport because of Ukraine."

The newspaper was far from being the only major publication in the world to take that or a very similar view of the state of Olympic sport as the Winter Olympic Games get underway in Milan-Cortina, in the presence of Gianni Infantino, the sure-fire inaugural winner of the Nobel Prize for Sycophancy were the guardians of Alfred's legacy ever to feel the urge to balance honour with a nod to dishonour.

They probably won't: the list of candidates in sport alone would take centuries to clear.

Let's be both optimistic and yet determined to rely on facts not feelings, truth not fantasy about the world sport much operate in, and the world in.which its business generates the money that holds the IOC' governance structure together.

Headlines and articles galore this week have suggested that Coventry is ready to give Vlad the impaler of democracy the benefit of the doubt. In other words, welcome back Russia, its flag, political oversight of sport and the curse of Sochi 2014.

I'm not so sure that's what was meant, though I do have colleagues much closer to the Olympic whisperers of Milan who were left with a sinking feeling when they heard what Coventry (mantra and vision set a "Fit For The Future") did say and what she did not say.

Here is what the 2004/2008 Olympic swim champion actually said in her speech to the 145th IOC Session to fellow IOC members, as Milano-Cortina geared up to light the flame today.

"(We must) focus on our core. We are a sports organization. We understand politics, and we know we don't operate in a vacuum, but our game is sport ... a place where every athlete can compete freely, without being held back by the politics or divisions of their governments. In a world that is increasingly divided, this principle matters more than ever. It is what allows the Olympic Games to remain a place of inspiration, where the athletes of the world can come together and showcase the best of our humanity ... We cannot be all things to all people. The Olympic Games, and the values they represent, are our greatest asset."

All of which can also be read as a precursor to Russian athletes being allowed to enter LA 2028 as neutral athletes, just as much as it might be seen as the vodka poured before a toast that would go down like an Olympic Molotov cocktail.

Here's what Ukrainians think about it, even if it is a case of neutral athletes being allowed back into the Games - and if their view doesn't count, then shame on all who think so, for neutrality in such circumstances cannot in any way be said to have promoted peace.

As The Australian puts it:

In giving hope to Russia for Los Angeles in 2028 and Brisbane in 2032, Ms Coventry aligned herself with another top sports administrator, Donald Trump’s close friend FIFA president Gianni Infantino. Ahead of the FIFA World Cup in the US, Canada and Mexico in June, Mr Infantino argued “Russia should (be allowed to) return to competitive international football”.

Their views as sports administrators are understandable. But they are misguided in trying to make a case for Vladimir Putin’s Russia to be allowed to return when the Kremlin’s army is committing appalling human rights abuses in Ukraine. Last weekend’s bombardment of most of Ukraine’s power-generating infrastructure was aimed to cause further agony to Ukraine’s people struggling to survive -20C winter temperatures. Data from the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington shows 1.2 million casualties in Ukraine since Putin launched his unprovoked, illegal invasion, including a total of 325,000 Russians dead. 

Absolutely. Case closed? Certainly not. That's just one of a catalogue of reasons to resist a Russian return.

Here are three other reasons that link the Olympic Movement directly to criminality and harm, including:

• the events that linked De Coubertin to the Nazis who nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize after all the propaganda and promotion he'd helped them with for the swastika-soaked Berlin 1936 Olympics
• the apparent use of a Russian teenage winter Olympian as both a victim of Jeffrey Epstein and anyone else involved in the criminal activity that put Ghislaine Maxwell behind bars as Epstein's romantic partner, close confidante, employee, and, ultimately, convicted co-conspirator in his sexual abuse of minors, but, at least so far, has left all the blokes who quaffed alongside them free to go about denying any involvement in or knowledge of wrongdoing. That story is not done, and in the dark redacted depths of the Epstein Files is a Russian Olympic accreditation that may one day haunt the Olympic Movement to its grave (we explain more below but here's the link to the story that lifted an Olympic accreditation out of Epstein's swamp:

From Italy with love: a Russian Winter Olympian as part of Epstein’s global network

The 2006 Winter Olympics in Torino, an underage Olympian, Jeffrey Epstein, Terje Rød-Larsen, Zubair Khan, crypto, law firms, banks in France, Monaco and Switzerland: this story, which may has begun 2006 at the Olympic snowboard competitions, has many elements, even a potential FSB/GRU honey trap.

THE INQUISITORJens Weinreich

• the crimes of Montreal 1976 that were perpetrated during an Olympic Games on IOC watch at a time when an IOC-accredited laboratory was headquarters to East Germany's systematic doping program, again, on IOC watch.

And after that lot, we'll remind ourselves of the cost of Putin's war on Ukraine, how it affects athletes, not only Ukrainians but many more beyond, how it affects all of us, and who picks up the bulk of the bill for the costs that ensure that Olympic bosses can go about their lucrative lifestyles and Games business even as the world goes to rack and ruin and the vast majority of athletes train on to deliver the 'ultimate sports show' on less than the minimum wage in the whole of Europe and much of the rest of the world of nations that make the Olympic podium.