olympics – Declan Hill – Investigative Journalist & Academic

29SepSeptember 29, 2020

It was the best of trials. It was the worst of conferences.

It was the best of trials. It was the worst of conferences. Lets start with the best. In Paris, last week, a proverbial rocket hit the world of sport. The former head of the International Athletic Association Federations (IAAF) - Lamine Diack - was convicted of collecting millions of dollars in bribes and kickbacks.The actual scheme was shocking. Diack, along with many of his top aides - including his ‘thug’ son (his words) - was running a racket where athletes,...

Requiem for a Fixer

He was one of the best. Yet in the end, he was brought down in a futile attempt to fix a little team in a forgettable tournament. For those readers who do not follow the intricacies of the Singaporean legal system, you may have missed the story this week, that one was imprisoned for four years for match-fixing. The actual case involved Pal bribing the coach of the East Timor national team and some of his players with 15,000$ How Pal...

Canada’s Excellence at Sports – not!

For the last two weeks we have had to endure a wave of noise about Canadian athletes drive for excellence. The usual clichés have been spouted about our country "punching above our weight". We have even had the unseemly sight of an executive for a PR company telling us that all this good feeling around the Olympics was the result of the Stephen Harper government. The problem is that it is not true. It is not true that...