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Business News/ News / Business Of Life/  The slippery and the corrupt
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The slippery and the corrupt

Sports organizations and the men who head them are curious entities who slip through, past, above and below governance and ethical issues due to long years of historical practice

Sepp Blatter (centre) resigned from the post of Fifa president just days after being re-elected. Photo: Fabrice Coffrini/AFPPremium
Sepp Blatter (centre) resigned from the post of Fifa president just days after being re-elected. Photo: Fabrice Coffrini/AFP

NEW DELHI :

There are several times when as a sports journalist you think miserably—again? Again? The same story?

This misery doesn’t arise from the thrill of victory and agony of defeat stuff; that’s mostly fun because of the crazy cast of characters involved. Mind you, those crazy characters can often turn their internal strife—tennis’ Leander Paes versus Mahesh Bhupathi, Indian hockey’s random sackings, star cricketer bickering—into the most dreary, petulant soap operas. Their on-field performances, though, always ensure our permanent tolerance.

The “again?" dirge arises from tales of elections around sports bodies, rivalries between officials, and other such institutional scandals and wranglings. We take to sports journalism right at the start, as fans of athletic ability, of skill that cannot be replicated, of personality traits born from competitive fire. When we find ourselves reporting on the internecine strife in sports organizations, it becomes enforced medication. Like swallowing a dose of extremely bitter tonic regularly because it builds strength and is good for the immune system. So what if nausea is one of the after-effects? Be tough, dammit, put up with it.

The last week has offered us a similar high dosage. First the Fifa election, the arrests of its officials in Switzerland in a Navy-SEALs-to-Osama-bin-Laden-type mission, Sepp Blatter’s re-election, the ensuing after-effects and Blatter’s resignation as Fifa boss.

In between, Marius Vizer, the head of SportAccord, an “umbrella" organization for international sports federations, Olympic and non-Olympic, had a go at the International Olympic Committee (IOC). He said it was “headed for destruction" because its system was “expired, outdated, wrong, unfair and not at all transparent". More fighting followed, and the man resigned.

How could Indian sports administrators be far behind. Lalit Bhanot, former Indian Olympic Association (IOA) secretary general, who was jailed for his involvement in the 2010 Commonwealth Games corruption scandal, was elected vice-president of the Asian Athletics Association (AAA). He has joined the AAA’s “president for life", Suresh Kalmadi, whose Wikipedia entry describes him as a “tainted politician and...sports administrator…involved in many scams." While Bhanot’s time in jail was close to a year, Kalmadi served 10 months. Their names show up in wire service copies as either “scam-tained" or “corruption-tainted," but they ain’t gone anywhere.

Yawn. Again.

In the midst of such bunfighting, what happens to the beauty of sport? The jogo bonito? Regardless of messy official infighting, the fans still pack the terraces and the cash registers are still ka-ching-ing. Why bother then about the ugly dynamics between dudes in grey suits with thinning hair and double chins?

The question does haunt us hacks in the business, but for about 5 minutes. Too bad our sense of aesthetics is sullied, our rose-tinted view of the sporting world besmirched. Whenever we feel sorry for ourselves, the words of Günter Grass’ Nobel Prize lecture ring helpfully: “It is a fact of life that writers have always and with due consideration and great pleasure spit in the soup of the high and mighty." Replace “writer" with “journalist" and file the damn story.

This is because the soup in sporting administration has only got cloudier. The ever-increasing mash-up of scandals featuring sporting organizations like Fifa, the IOC, nations, event organizers and sponsors has given rise to questions that perplex those who follow sport. Why can’t their high and mighties be controlled? How do they continue for so long? What’s this unseemly clinging on to their positions? Is there no remorse, let alone guilt?

No. Sports organizations and the men who head them are curious entities who slip through, past, above and below governance and ethical issues due to long years of historical practice. An April report by global civil society organization Transparency International describes them as belonging to a “special class".

Sports organizations “are not governmental, not intergovernmental and not international bodies like the UN or WHO," says the report. They are registered as “non-profit" organizations or, like in India, as “registered societies" or “associations". It is from these older, more “noble" amorphous origins that their officials currently derive their power. Regardless of their “non-profit" intentions, we must remember sports administrators in the past were far from altruistic, kindly patriarchs involved in spreading youthful health and global goodwill.

In the first half of the 20th century, they exercised control and exclusion through race, gender and often nationality. While cultural barriers may have been dismantled over the last 50 years, control and power are now retained due to a growing pile of global revenue and the burgeoning of sport as a medium of mass entertainment through television. The “non-profits", particularly the larger ones like Fifa and the IOC, are, in fact, corporate entities with billion-dollar earnings, gained from television rights fees and commercial sponsorships rather than gate receipts. Their status as non-profit bodies allows them taxation benefits under Swiss law​s and an ability to steer clear of accountability and laws which other businesses fall under.

The rules of these organizations were after all put in place by the old patriarchs in the early years of the 20th century. No wonder most allow you to stay in top office ad infinitum. It is how fiefdom operated. At the very top, all you need to do is formulate a plan to work the room and ensure that a constituency of voters could be kept happy. The Indian Olympic bodies follow another revenue model: that of taxpayer rupees and moaning in public about autonomy. Imagine what could Kalmadi and Bhanot do if the AAA was a billion-dollar money churner.

The wretchedness of the sports journalist’s “again" lament was given clarity by a piece of writing by David Meggyesy, a former linebacker for the St Louis Cardinals (now called Arizona Cardinals) football team. Modern sport, Meggyesy writes in an foreword in What’s My Name, Fool? Sports And Resistance In The United States, has become a mass entertainment mechanism “delivering messages of mass consumerism and celebrity." The values it pitches as a fundamental part of its “success myth" are “competition, respect for rules and authority, fairness, winner takes all, aggression, teamwork, hard work, playing by the rules".

These ideals are always pinned on to the players, the athletes, rather than its non-participating elite—the officials, franchise owners, sponsors.

Why can’t those rules and values apply to​ these non-participating elite as well? It’s a very fair question.

Sharda Ugra is senior editor at Espncricinfo.

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Published: 03 Jun 2015, 07:59 PM IST
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