Friday Sep 6 2013 How Putin and a Sheik are m anipulating the Geopolitics of W orld Sports

Kremlinology of Sport
This decade the place to be for the major sporting events is Vladimir Putins Russia. Likewise for the most highly sought after positions in world sport it is recommended to first go through the tsar of sport and his Arab acolyte.
Hans Vandeweghe

This summer, the Circus called Sport has already descended on Moscow for the newest Olympic act Rugby Sevens World Cup, on Kazan for the World University Games and again on Moscow for the Athletics World Championship. Next, there will be the Judo World Championship in 2014 in Chelyabinsk, swimming in Moscow in 2015 and the Ice Hockey World Championship in 2016 and the Football World Cup in 2018 all over the country. However, the next big date is scheduled for February 2014, for the Winter Games in Sochi, in the North Caucasus, the first city with palm trees to organise the games of ice and snow. It is too easily asserted that Sochi was a gift for Putin from the International Olympic Committee in 2007. The decision to choose Sochi was not illogical and on top of that there was a notable personal appearance by Putin who held an inspired speech that won the bid for the Russian candidature. th On that 4 of July 2007 in Guatemala City, Putin actually spoke English and even took a prosaic view: 'Today, there would be no Olympic flame if Prometheus had not stolen the fire from the Olympic Gods. The punishment was that he was bound to a rock and that rock is the mountain Fisht just outside of Sochi.' In mythology, Prometheus is chained to the mountain Caucasus, but according to Putin it was that one specific rock. Nevertheless, his story struck a chord and it was his attempt at speaking English, something that he has never even done with Bush and Obama, that helped him score points among the IOC members. In the second round, Sochi won by a nose with 51 to 47 votes from the SouthKorean Pyeongchang (which pocketed the 2018 Games four years later). An acceptable outcome, except for the fact that not a single snowflake in subtropical Sochi has ever stayed on the ground longer than ten minutes and the Olympic stadium is in marshland where malaria mosquitoes still reined a

couple of years ago. Outside of Sochi, the spot where the chained Prometheus lost a piece of his liver each day to eagle Aethon, there is snow. That snow is still there now, but at a higher altitude, because last winter the Russian army moved the snow to stock it for the important winter that is coming. Three years later, on 2 December 2010, it was also not an illogical decision to award the FIFA World Cup to Russia. Lending the sixth football economy a helping hand and not the almighty and super wealthy Premier League, why not? England went out in the first round and despite the Euro crisis Spain and Portugal did manage to get seven votes as against thirteen for Russia. There should be more going on before one can speak of gross corruption. But something that does come very close, and has been proven in the meantime, is the fact that the 2022 edition has been awarded to Qatar, in the middle of the sweltering desert summer. In Sochi, Putin has come under attack because he mobilised all state-run companies to sponsor events and awarded his personal chum Arkady Rotenberg, who made his fortune supplying pipelines for Gazprom, contracts worth 7.4 billion. Arkady and Boris Rotenberg were Putins judo partners when he was still active.

The New Kingmakers

Putin and the Russians are not only concerned about Olympic sports. From next year until 2020, but also afterwards if they have their way, the Formula 1 Circus will descend on Sochi. The underlying thought is clear: Russia as a sporting nation absolutely needs to be able to gain its footing next to the US. When it comes to Olympic medals they still have a lot of catching up to do. In London, Russia ended in fourth place, with 22 medals less than the US,

which topped the medals board. Those 22 medals were gold, every single one of them. However, power in sports cannot always be read off the medals board. Power in sport can be achieved by having the right people elected to the right positions and especially by awarding sport to the right organisers or organising countries. Results will then follow naturally: a country that organises a lot automatically performs better. A country that has lots of sports administrators in high places can organise a lot and therefore win a lot. Russia will get its fourth IOC member this week in the person of Alexander Zhukov, member of Putins party and chairman of the National Olympic Committee. It is to be expected that St. Petersburg will submit its candidacy for the 2024 Summer Games and will also go on to win that bid without a big hoo-ha. The struggle for dominance in sport between countries and continents is of all time. When sport became an economic factor in the eighties, the Latins and Latinos started showing an interest in the top positions. The protagonists were Spaniard Juan Antonio Samaranch as President of the IOC, Brazilian Joo Havelange as the big football boss, the Italians Primo Nebiolo in athletics, the Mexican brothers Mario and Oligario Vazquez-Raa in the IOC and the International Shooting Sport Federation and their fellow countryman and volleyball chair Rubn Acosta, who referred to himself as doctor without actually holding the degree. With exception of Oligario V-R, they all fell from their pedestal, were banished or passed away. Nearly every single one of them were a product of The Club, a lobby group that collected money from sports marketing to help their fellow directors progress to the top positions. The Club was an invention of Adidas boss Horst Dassler, the eighties sports kingmaker. When Dassler had to give up his fight with cancer at the age of 51, he left a void, but his kings stayed in their positions for a while longer. Samaranch pulled strings for better or for worse for vacancies in world sports, but was too old and not very thorough. His successor Rogge kept well out of the games his predecessors played and that sometimes caused resentment in the Olympic corridors. 'Rogge swears by integrity and quality, but he would have done better to make more of an effort to put the right people in the right place. The ones in power now will only lead to trouble,' is what you pick up in the Olympic corridors.

Vizer as head of the powerful umbrella organisation SportAccord (the union of international sports federations) was the last straw for many. Vizer won convincingly by 52 votes to 37 against Lapasset, the French President of the International Rugby Board and one of Jacques Rogges confidants. Vizer is no ordinary sports leader. Earlier, he had already succeeded in reaching the highest echelon in the International Judo Federation and at the time beat a South-Korean who had the support of just about the entire Asian economic and sports lobby groups. Vizer had also built up a favourable position: he had the Arabs, the oligarchs and Putin behind him. Vizer has an Austrian passport, but is Romanian by birth and a military man by training. He became rich in the casino business and subsequently through successful investments, in security firms, among others. Vizernews.com is a website that neatly maps out his dubious trajectory in the grey zone. Vizer moves around in an armoured car and is always accompanied by at least two bodyguards. 'Big time mafia, without a doubt', is the opinion of a former Belgian judoka who knows Vizer personally. After his coup at the IJF, Vladimir Putin, who was subsequently appointed honorary president of the Judo Federation, invited Vizer. After his putsch at SportAccord he surprised friend and foe with a few well-aimed shots at the Olympic organization: the announcement of the first joint world championships for 92 (yes, ninety two) disciplines in 2017, a worldwide Sports lottery and a worldwide Sports bank. All to be run by his SportAccord. Jacques Rogge's reaction spoke volumes: 'I think the sports calendar is quite full, but this is in any case a matter to be dealt with by that Mr. Vizer and my successor.' Some observers believe this is Vizers way of becoming an IOC-member as quickly as possible; otherwise the IOC will have yet another competitor. Vizer also immediately jettisoned the noble SportAccord principles, together with the director who he replaced with a 28-year-old from the Judo Federation. The fight against illegal gambling, doping and such like, have now become secondary to his own SportAccord Games, for which he has already bagged six sponsorship deals from companies. Not surprisingly, Russian companies.

Ahmad Al-Fahad Al-Sabah

Vizer is not the only Putin appointment. The Hungarian Tams Ajn of the International Weightlifting Federation (IWF), the Serbian Nenad Lalovic of the Wrestling Federation and the Russian oligarch Alisher Uzmarov (owner of Metalloinvest and media group Kommersant and President of the state-run holding Gazprominvest) of the Fencing Federation are all presidents with close ties to

Big Time Mafia

Concerns about leaders in the international sports establishment and particularly about who planted them there, are a relatively recent phenomenon, sometimes even as recent as the last months. The election of Marius

Putin. For Lalovic, who is especially keen to keep his wrestling in the Games, Putin even rustled up the support of...Franz Beckenbauer who is not known as a big wrestling buff. Beckenbauer admits openly that he is on Gazproms payroll. But Putin would not be able to do anything if he did not get any help from prominent sports leaders in the top echelons. This week, Ching-Kuo Wu of Taiwan will be included in the Executive Board, the IOCs inner cabinet. He is one of Putins figureheads, via his old friend, the Kuwaiti Ahmad Al-Fahad Al-Sabah, the most active kingmaker of them all. 'Putin and the sheik are cheek by jowl,' according to an old hand in the Olympic corridors. When 'the sheik' is mentioned, you know this refers to Al-Sabah, the emirs nephew. Kuwaits current National Security Minister met Putin when he headed the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries. Al-Sabah is a modern Arab: he poses in his keffiyeh in official photos, but in practice this womanizer, wine lover and hardened smoker loves prancing around in a leather jacket, with his long mop of black curls draped on his shoulders. He is a king himself because he is simultaneously the president of the Asiatic Olympic Council (OCA) and of ANOC, the Association of National Olympic Committees. In addition, he chairs the Olympic Solidarity Commission, which distributes 435 million dollars amongst smaller countries. Al-Sabah does not even hide the fact that he can fix elections. He could precisely predict the final score in the election fight between Vizer and Lapasset. Once he even gave away that he made the difference in 2001 during the elections for the IOC Presidency in Rogges favour by not jumping on the South-Korean Kims bandwagon. There are probably also plenty of appointments, decisions and/or elections ascribed to the tsar and the sheik that they had nothing to do with, but they did prepare the election of the ninth president of the IOC in the tiniest detail. Their candidate is German Thomas Bach, who has been an IOC member since 1981. Completely coincidentally, Bach is also the president of the German-Arab Chamber of Commerce and counsel for a company that was bought by Kuwaitis. He also lobbies for Siemens and arranged Kuwaiti investors for the German giant via Al-Sabah. Meanwhile, influential German blogger Jens Weinreich alleges that in June there was a heated argument at the Beau Rivage hotel in Lausanne between Bach and AlSabah. Allegedly, Bach asked his sheik friend during the discussion to play kingmaker a little less emphatically, but only after the IOC members openly started to get annoyed about it. In June, Putin and Al-Sabahs closeness was illustrated yet again in Putin's St. Petersburg at the SportAccord

Convention, where the machinations in the corridors to elect the right man for the job as sports pope were in top gear. During the lunch in the Lenexpo organised by him, Putin and the sheik withdrew twice together and Rogge, who was the resigning pope of sport, a lame duck and therefore uninteresting, did not get more than a handshake. Putin did spend the entire lunch talking to Thomas Bach. That was easy because in the past, Putin had been the highest-ranking KGB officer in the DDR for six years and still speaks fluent German. That creates a bond and offers opportunities for future cooperation.