Who Put Out the Olympic Flame? ... Sports Business

Who Put Out the Olympic Flame? … Sports Business

April 16th, 2008 by WILLIAM KERN

Have sports organizations like the International Olympic Committed become “illegitimate transnational powers” that are like “laws unto themselves?”

Columnist Henrique Montiero for Portugal’s Expresso asks, “Is the Chinese regime less brutal today than the Russian regime of 1980? Or, quite simply, is it that the world can no longer live without China, whose capital insures American banks? … a total boycott is dismissed. Because this, in addition to penalizing China, would result in discrediting the IOC, and more importantly, would cause enormous damage to businesses surrounding the Olympiad.”

By Henrique Montiero

Translated By Brandi Miller

April 14, 2008

Portugal - Expresso - Original Article (Portuguese)

Sport and its international organizations, such as the Olympic Committee, FIFA, the FIA, the ATP and others have become illegitimate transnational powers of sorts.

They are laws unto themselves. They impose their own regulations (sometimes without opportunity for appeal), their commercial interests are without regulation or anti-trust laws to contain them and - as everyone knows - politicians are at their beck and call, they influence decisions and, as a corollary to all this, they are subsidized for the enormous “services” that they provide.

It is for these reasons that the turnaround of leaders at the top of these organizations is so low. One recalls that at the IOC, the predecessor of the current president, who was elected in 2001, was in charge for 21 years!

The IOC decision to select Beijing as the host of this year’s Summer Olympics repeats two similar decisions to host the Olympic Games under dictatorship-regimes: 1936 in Berlin with Hitler; and 1980 in Moscow with Brezhnev.

But if the Berlin games, confronting a rising Hitler, were the biggest up to that point, the Moscow games, before a declining Brezhnev, were widely boycotted, having the fewest participants since 1956, the year in which they were held in the remote city of Melbourne, Australia.

READ ON AT WORLDMEETS.US, along with continuing translated foreign press coverage of the unfolding Olympic crisis as it pertains to the United States.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 16th, 2008 at 10:22 am and is filed under Corporations, Columnists, Human Rights, Newspapers, Freedom of Speech, Europe, Sports, History, China, Business. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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