One year ago, while watching Fifa bigwigs being escorted to police cars by hotel staff literally shielding them with their own dirty linen, I remember thinking that the IOC couldn’t have matched this. There were $29m (£22m) Amex bills, there was the hilariously timed release of a vanity movie, there was the stop-motion implosion of Sepp Blatter. The IOC, for all their baroque scandals and malevolence down the years, were at least not this bad.
My apologies. Once again I hear Michael Corleone [The Godfather] just managing to keep a lid on his frustration as he asks me: “Who’s being naive, Kay?”
Nobody can hate sport as much as the IOC – not even your average UK government sports minister. Not even the World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada), whose president Craig Reedie took so much trouble reassuring the Russian sports minister that “there is no intention in Wada to do anything to affect [our] relationship.” So the revelations of the past few weeks that centred on (but are far from limited to) the Russian state doping programme are not, in one sense, a shock. Wada’s budget is $27m, making it marginally more expensive than the IOC’s bar tab in an Olympic cycle, but dwarfed, perhaps, by its prostitute bill.
This week the former chief investigator for Wada detailed how his efforts to investigate Russian doping were frustrated – frequently by Wada, he alleges – and offered his take on the fact that despite all the revelations and all the IOC’s power, 271 Russian athletes will be competing in Rio. “The action the IOC took has forever set a bar for how the most outrageous doping and cover-up and corruption possible will be treated in the future.”