Opinion | Another day, another scandal – thank goodness there’s still some who believe sport can ever be cleaned up
New documentary ‘Dirty Games’ outlines the human cost of some of the shameful sports stories of recent years
Japan seemingly made some dodgy payments during the bidding process for the 2020 Olympics. Russia’s team at the 2014 Winter Olympics might have been doped to the gills. Michel Platini, who epitomised the ‘beautiful game’ as a player, finally resigns as Uefa president after failing to overturn his ban for a suspect US$2 million payment.
Those were just the main dirty-sport headlines over the past few days. Let’s type ‘corruption’ into our sports wires search box: ‘Canadian takes over scandal-plagued Concacaf’; ‘Doping: Kenya Olympic threat after Wada ruling’; ‘Swiss court clears extradition of ex-Nicaragua soccer boss Rocha to US’, etc, etc. Our wire stories are only archived for four or five days before being purged, by the way.
Almost every day brings fresh evidence of the dirty, dirty world of sport. It’s easy to become jaded: as a sports journalist (the editor has just broken down in a paroxysm of laughter for some reason), I confess I read the Guardian’s exclusive about Japan and the New York Times’ exclusive about Sochi – both excellent, important pieces of reporting – more out of a sense of duty than anything else. Actually, come to think of it, I’ve still only skimmed the NYT piece.
Assuming that most everyone involved at the top, top levels of sport – the ‘three comma club’ as coined by an obnoxious billionaire in HBO comedy Silicon Valley – is at the very least turning a blind eye to some form of corruption, if not actively guzzling at the trough like a starving sow, is a terribly cynical attitude that has never let me down.
The three commas club (contains bad language)
