SYDNEY-The most dysfunctional family in sports is back for its biannual reunion, and it is about to park its fat butt in your living room for the next 17 days.
Make room for it, because face it, you haven’t got any choice.
The family, of course, is the Olympic Family, which makes the Gambino Family look like the Osmonds.
And the head of the Family, the benevolent dictator, Juan Antonio Samaranch, makes the heads of boxing’s crime families – the WBA, the WBC and the IBF – look as magnanimous as the Holy Trinity.
Samaranch and his crooked little family have brought their traveling con game here to Sydney, and don’t be misled by the humbling little experience they had with Salt Lake City.
It is business as usual Down Under.
Once again, the first five gold medals of the Olympics go to Senor Samaranch, in the categories he has established as his alone: Greed, Hypocrisy, Corruption, Arrogance and Incompetence.
Those are what your Olympic rings stand for ladies and gentlemen, and for as long as these “Games” last – and don’t assume for a moment that it will be for very much longer, even if Samaranch’s accomplices,
NBC, have bought the rights to the next four – things probably are not going to change very much.
The Games don’t begin until Friday, and already, this beautiful city is a mess, its hopes for a financial windfall are in tatters, and it is becoming clearer and clearer that perhaps, the disaster that was the 1996 Olympics wasn’t all Atlanta’s fault after all.
Perhaps what is wrong with the Olympics is the Olympics themselves.
Like the 800-pound gorilla that has outgrown its cage, the Olympic Games have become too big, too unwieldy and too incorrigibly corrupt to serve anyone’s purposes aside from those of Samaranch and his cohorts.
Sydney’s bid to host the 27th Olympiad was accepted in 1993, which means they have had seven years to prepare for this party, and guess what?
Suddenly, they realize they didn’t buy enough beer, soda and onion dip.
Like the debacle that befell Atlanta four years ago, Sydney has found itself to have “underestimated the size of the transport task” and is desperately seeking hundreds more bus drivers to cope with the crowds.
And yet, the crowds are nowhere near what the city had hoped for and expected.
At the same time the town finds itself short of buses, Sydney hotels are bribing local cab drivers to bring in people, since an incredible number of hotel rooms remain vacant. There is a $25 per-person bounty waiting to be claimed by Sydney cabbies who “steer” patrons to any one of a dozen downtown hotels.
Meanwhile, the IOC and its honorable president, blissfully unaware of the disaster it is about to leave in its wake, cruise the city in limousines and try, with colossal arrogance, to spring four members of the IOC jailed in various parts of the world for crimes ranging from bribery to embezzlement.
Samaranch and the chairman of his Ethics Commission, Keba Mbaye, have been lobbying – and subtly threatening – the governments of Indonesia, Sudan and Bulgaria to allow their fellow crooks out of jail in order that they, too, can share in the IOC windfall that is the Olympics.
The very fact that the IOC can even have an Ethics Commission is funny enough. It is like Saddam Hussein having a Human Rights Committee.
But the fact that all the dirt surrounding the Olympic Games never seems to sully the hands of Samaranch is not funny at all.
The same way a rat can squeeze through a hole the size of a dime, Samaranch is able to wriggle free of any and all scandals surrounding his beloved Games.
This will be Samaranch’s last Olympics, but not because of the Salt Lake City scandal, or the burning of Atlanta, or the repeated embarrassments of bribery, corruption and drug positives.
He is out only because he is 80, and under IOC rules, it is time for him to step down.
Thank heavens for the passage of time, because it is about time for Samaranch to go.
And he can take his legacy with him, the creation of a spectacle big enough to draw a $4 billion network TV contract, and at the same time too big to work in any practical fashion.
Unless you are camped in front of your TV set, the Olympics really isn’t very much fun. It is too inconvenient to get from one venue to another, too expensive to buy tickets for, too imbued with arrogance to be truly enjoyable.
Over the course of Samaranch’s 20-year reign as IOC President, the Olympics has established itself as the richest party in sports – and also, the dirtiest.
On Samaranch’s watch, the Olympics went from a great gathering of the world’s best amateur athletes – those who perform for love of country rather than lust for money – into a two-week shoe-and-merchandise commercial occasionally interrupted by sporting events involving professional athletes.
The athletes have grown bigger, faster, richer and more famous.
Also, more infamous. It is no secret among people who know what they’re watching that the only clean competitors at the Olympic Games are the ones who lose, and the only ones who get caught are the ones the IOC wants to catch.
Four years ago, an Irish swimmer named Michelle Smith showed up in Atlanta with skin so pockmarked Neil Armstrong could have planted a flag in it, and swimming times that were suddenly seven and eight seconds faster than any she had ever posted before.
But she won four golds and everyone loved her. Of course, she tested clean every time.
Two years later, surprise, surprise, it was discovered that Smith had a little help from her friendly pharmacist. She won’t be back.
This year, someone in some sport will accomplish something similar to what Smith did in Atlanta. Very possibly, the chances of that athlete testing positive for anything stronger than coffee may well depend on what kind of TV ratings he or she can pull in.
You see, the Olympics are all about gold, but not the kind that hangs around the neck on a ribbon.
The Olympic ideal is now the worship of the almighty buck, and in their greed to grab themselves a slice of the pie, cities like Sydney and Atlanta, and two years from now, Salt Lake City, get in so far over their heads they need shovels to dig their way out.
The IOC doesn’t care about any of that. It is too busy raking in the cash with both hands to notice the wreckage it leaves behind.
In the three days since I have been here, the short bus ride from the media village has lengthened from 20 minutes to 30 minutes to 45 minutes, as traffic has worsened.
And accommodations for the press – which would have to improve radically to qualify as Spartan – have declined to the point where not only comfort, but health and safety, has been compromised.
The other night, a columnist from an upstate New York paper arrived to find that his room somehow was without a heater. Since it still winter in Sydney – spring begins in this hemisphere on the same day fall begins in New York – that created a bit of a problem.
With night-time temperatures dropping into the 30s, the columnist was told to “take an extra blanket and snuggle tight for one more night” while another heater could be found.
The walls in the village – known, not-so-affectionately, as The Cellblock – are so thin every time Joel Sherman burps in the next room, I can smell what he had for lunch. When the guy in the room behind me takes a shower, I get wet. And when a phone rings anywhere in the building, everybody grabs a receiver.
You won’t see any of this on NBC, nor does it really affect your enjoyment of the Games.
It is just further evidence that as an event, the Olympics has become too big for any city or any organization to handle or run or manage efficiently.
This is what Juan Antonio Samaranch has wrought. Like all accomplished thieves, he takes the money and runs, leaving his victims to wonder what the hell went wrong.
