Opinion
The outrageous – and sad – double standards of the Olympics
Darren Kane
Sports ColumnistThese Olympic Games, despite all their glory and colour, do resemble a bit of a clown show.
Plainly, it isn’t enough that 23 Chinese swimmers escaped suspension and sanction, despite testing positive in 2021 for an obscure heart medication, not even able to be prescribed in Australia but which makes you swim significantly faster.
Problems in ParisCredit: Simon Letch
Above the line at least, none of them have even been publicly identified. We don’t know either which of the 2021 Chinese Olympic swimming gold medallists tested positive for the presence of clenbuterol in 2016 and 2017 but escaped penalty.
It has now been revealed by The New York Times that even more Chinese swimmers, including Tang Muhan, who will swim in her country’s colours at La Defense Arena, tested positive in 2022 for the presence of an anabolic agent, methandienone.
According to reports, Chinese authorities couldn’t determine how that prohibited substance entered the systems of those athletes, but nonetheless concluded the athletes had most likely unwittingly eaten tainted hamburgers at a Beijing restaurant. Sticking to the theme, all was kept secret from the world.
Outraged? Seems to be something decidedly fishy about China. It’s the secrecy and the expectation that we all buy into their excuses. You can’t tarnish all Chinese athletes, but if the Chinese authorities told me the sun was going to rise in the east tomorrow, I’d still get up before dawn to check.
There are two immediate takeaways. First, when an athlete tests positive for a prohibited substance, it’s not for anti-doping authorities to have to determine the route of ingestion. It doesn’t matter.
Second, regardless of whatever fictions masquerade as fact in Beijing, foreign athletes travelling to China (including Hong Kong, which for Olympic purposes is apparently now known as “Hong Kong, China”), for any reason, would do well to borrow from Shane Warne’s gospel: never travel without a suitcase full of cans of baked beans.
The worldwide anti-doping system, under the authority of the World Anti-Doping Agency, is replete with more holes than a half-tonne of Jarlsberg. The system doesn’t work and that should trigger outrage.
It smacks of audacity for the International Olympic Committee to force organisers of the 2034 Winter Games in Salt Lake City to seek to influence the FBI and US Justice Department to stop their investigations into Chinese doping, or risk having the Games taken away from the US.
The Games organisers can’t do that. The IOC knows it. The clause is designed solely to appease China. That’s outrageous.
The Canadian Olympic women’s soccer team’s head coach and her assistants were each banned by FIFA for 12 months for having the temerity to fly a drone over the ground where the team’s first-round opponents were training.
That’s clever gamesmanship. As a matter of law, in Australia at least, our High Court settled long ago that there’s no proprietary right in a spectacle. FIFA’s determination of “offensive behaviour” is where the outrage ought to be focused.
British equestrian Charlotte Dujardin, a three-time Olympian, was selected to represent Great Britain in Paris in her fourth Games. Days before the opening ceremony, Dujardin withdrew, upon publication of video footage appearing to depict her engaging in conduct seriously detrimental to the welfare of a horse.
Britain’s Charlotte Dujardin has withdrawn from the Paris Games after a video emerged that she says shows her behaving inappropriately while coaching other riders.Credit: AP
Leaving aside any curiosity as to why that four-year-old footage was made public now, Dujardin’s actions must be further investigated. Is it appropriate and correct that she’s not competing in Paris? Yes. Would it have outraged, if instead she rode in Team GB’s colours? Also, yes.
The investigations into Dujardin’s conduct may not prove to be justification for her absence from these Games. But likewise, you can’t countenance her participation.
Contrast that outcome, though, with the dreadful spectre of the Dutch beach volleyballer, Steven van de Velde competing in the shadows of the Eiffel Tower.
A decade ago, he purposely travelled to England, where he raped a 12-year-old girl multiple times, knowing she wasn’t even a teenager.
Steven van de Velde of the Netherlands competes in the beach volleyball.Credit: AP
He is a convicted child rapist who spent a year in jail and who is now forever listed on the UK’s sex offenders register.
It’s simple to just pile on about these matters. For who in their right mind would ever venture to defend the supposed right of a person who’s served out his sentence, for a crime reaching that level of repugnance, now being afforded an opportunity at redemption?
There’s a distinction between redemption and the process of being selected to represent your country on the world’s greatest sporting stage. Prevailing attitudes might be starkly different in the Netherlands about the criminality of van de Velde’s actions, and the Dutch Olympic Committee plainly is untroubled.
It’s a reality that van de Velde has been playing international-level beach volleyball for long enough now that he, as part of a duo, has a top-10 world ranking. Outrage didn’t strike last year, or the year before that, any time when van de Velde stepped out in national colours. His existence isn’t news.
What should outrage everyone is that the IOC has done nothing about it. Would a repentant, convicted child rapist exceed the fit and proper person test criteria to qualify for registration to play in the AFL or NRL? Could someone with van de Velde’s dark past represent Australia at the Olympics? Answering both questions, absolutely not.
But the Olympic Games are the IOC’s big party. The IOC has precisely no compunction in demanding that the FBI and the US Justice Department cease criminal investigations that might well reveal horrendous inadequacies in WADA’s efforts to combat systemic doping.
At the same time, the IOC has no rules, no standards of governance, no system and no desire to measure the fitness and propriety of people that nations want to send to the Games. The IOC has no process to refuse an athlete’s entry to the Games on straight-out character grounds.
That is nothing short of outrageous, and at the same time desperately sad.
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