Dick Pound has overlooked other Olympics corruption.
Sometimes you wonder, do the bosses of sports really care about their athletes or about the logo? The answer is pretty simple, the barons of sports care much more about the logo that brings in money than the performers themselves. After all, all athletes and that includes Babe Ruth and Michael Jordan and Wayne Gretzky and Pele and soon Tom Brady are replaceable. The logo is always there. Richard Pound, the former Canadian International Olympic Committee delegate and the former President of the World Anti-Doping Agency, wants athletes to be on call for drug testing or else. In 2005, Pound accused the National Hockey League of covering up that about a third of its 700 players were using some form of steroids. Pound never provided any proof. Pound never found the 230 or so players he accused of being juiced up but went on to say. “I feel like the NHL must have found an old Major League Baseball doping playbook in the back of a taxi somewhere, because they’re doing the same sort of things. And then to pretend that it doesn’t happen in hockey is just absurd.”
Pound never talks about the corruption that seemingly always surrounds the Olympics or whether IOC officials care about athletes’ health. Many places don’t want the Games because of costs and throw in the allegations of corruption in Rio during the Brazil 2016 Games and Tokyo for its delayed 2021 Olympics, there is a problem. Pound was around during the time in the 1990s when Salt Lake City delegates bribed IOC venue voters. The Salt Lake City organizers were caught after people in Toronto called them out. There are laws against steroid usage around the world. But the IOC doesn’t want to criminalize performance enhancing drug use, calling it cheating is better as it leaves less taint on the logo.
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