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On New Year’s Day, I read a disturbing report in The New York Times. It described a federal investigation into whether representatives of the international organizations responsible for the management of the Olympics and enforcement of anti-doping rules were covering up the use of performance-enhancing drugs.
Nearly two dozen Chinese swimmers had allegedly tested positive in 2021 for the use of a banned performance-enhancing drug, and international officials were suspected of covering up the results. At least one of the swimmers was on the relay team at the 2021 summer Olympics that defeated the highly decorated Katie Ledecky and the American team, despite the fact that the American team broke a world record in that competition.
The article described the delivery of a witness subpoena to a top international swimming official just after he attended the 2024 Olympic swim trials in Indianapolis, where U.S. Olympic officials had expressed serious concerns at a board meeting about the allegations and their potential impact on the Paris games. Gene Sykes, chair of the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee, said the allegations “challenge the very foundation of what fair competition stands for.”
This raised significant alarms within the International Olympic Committee and the World Anti-Doping Agency. Ah, you say: Good for them—they want to prevent this kind of misconduct, so they moved immediately to disqualify any athlete who cheated.
I am sorry to report that this is not what the IOC and WADA did. Instead, they put significant pressure on U.S. Olympic officials and Salt Lake City officials, who were seeking to host the games in 2034, to get the investigation shut down.
The international officials threatened to hold up the award of the 2034 games to Salt Lake City, and to refuse to seat Sykes, chair of USOPC, on the IOC. The international officials pressured the Americans to push for an end to the federal investigation as a condition of both occurrences. And the Americans agreed: Even the governor of Utah promised to lobby President Biden to end the investigation. He might well have known such lobbying would be pointless, at least in today’s America, where the U.S. Department of Justice operates independently of political pressure; nonetheless, he took the pledge.
The article brought back memories of other scandals in the Olympic games over the years, including the last time Salt Lake City hosted the games, in 2002. Members of the Salt Lake City bid team spent millions bribing members of the IOC board in order to win the bid. They provided lavish travel and even paid college tuition for children of IOC members, enabling them to study in the United States.
That bribery scheme began after Nagano, Japan, beat out Salt Lake City to host the 1998 games, allegedly by bribing the IOC board members. Mitt Romney was brought in to clean up the scandal; he restored the moral authority of the Olympic Committee and made the games successful, leading to his later (mostly) successful political career.
There are also countless stories about the IOC turning a blind eye to cheating by, in particular, totalitarian countries. Who of my vintage doesn’t remember the beefy East German women athletes? At the 1980 Moscow games, the use of drugs was rampant. An Australian report said, “There is hardly a medal winner at the Moscow Games … who is not on one sort of drug or another.” The reaction of IOC? Apparently, “Meh.”
The Olympic Games are supposed to showcase the beauty of fair competition. When will the IOC stop tarnishing that image?•
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Daniels is a retired partner of Krieg DeVault LLP, a former U.S. Attorney and assistant U.S. attorney general and former president of the Sagamore Institute. Send comments to ibjedit@ibj.com.
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