Dishonored Games

Having worked seven Olympic Games this book still proved insightful to my first {Korea in '88}. I knew a lot of what was being stated, but the detail and sources of information gathered for this book was outstanding. Hats off to the authors for doing a great job. The Olympics have changed and although there is still some issues with the 'Club' things are a lot better. I hope that they continue to get weeded out and the Games return to how and whom they should be for...the athletes and the fans.

Dishonored Games, as the title implies, is about how the Olympic system has been corrupted by big business and international politics. Yes, this is a subject we hear about often enough these days, but Simson and Jennings take it all the way. The central figure of the book is International Olympic Committee President Juan Antonio Samaranch, about whom most of us (including myself) know absolutely nothing. Samaranch, it turns out, served under the fascist Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, an ally of Hitler. After WWII, Samaranch governed the Catalonia district, where Barcelona is the capitol, and it was he who made sure that those who questioned the government were tortured or were "disappeared." When Franco died in 1977, Samaranch was run out of the country in disgrace. But he had gained much of his power through the manipulation of national sports, raking in the money that comes with that territory. He had made many friends in the international sports community, and by 1980, he had gotten himself "elected" President of the IOC. Having the Olympics in Barcelona was in many ways Samaranch's way of "retaking" the city. There is also the story of Horst Dassler, the German businessman who founded Adidas and used the company to create the system of product endorsement which has come to symbolize the death of the "art" of sports today. Together with Samaranch and other sports dignitaries, Horst's business heirs manipulate elections and other government affairs the world over, through bribery, favor-trading and even prostitution, to fill the already bursting coffers of the IOC. It is all incredibly frightening. The only problem with the book is its style. Simson and Jennings are obviously very angry over the whole subject, and that anger comes across a little too strongly. But their frustration is understandable. In the introduction, they write, "To our surprise it has turned out to be the most difficult investigation we have ever undertaken. In recent years, we have written, or made TV documentaries, about the Mafia, the Iran-Contra affair, terrorism, corruption within Scotland Yard and other dark areas of public life. The world of Olympic, amateur sport has proved to be the hardest to penetrate. Never before have we found it so difficult to obtain on-the-record interviews, documents and original sources. It is a secret, elite domain, where the decisions about sport are made behind closed doors, where money is spent on creating a fabulous life-style for a tiny circle of officials, where money has been siphoned away to offshore bank accounts and where officials preside forever, untroubled by elections." Shortly after their book was released, Simson and Jennings found that the IOC had slapped them with criminal charges. Not in any of the 30 countries in which the book has been published, where democratic laws of freedom of speech exist, but in the IOC's home country of Switzerland. They must have been on to something