The Lords of the Rings: Power, Money, and Drugs in the Modern Olympics

"The book covers the Olympics across a huge field and a huge range of players, too. The movers and shakers had very little to do with sport unless they happened to run an internationally successful sporting goods company, and not much has changed in that regard, but it started with Adidas and Horst Dassler, the boss of Adidas and so on. Lords of the Rings deals with some of the wheeling and dealing, and bribery and corruption around the Olympics. I recognized the Japanese company called Dentsu, which has been one of Japan’s largest advertising marketing companies for decades, and thought, ‘I just wrote about Dentsu recently, didn’t I?’ I had, because my new book covers a broad sweep of Olympic scandals. I looked up Dentsu, which was involved in the 1980s and 1990s with some of these events and scandals involving Dassler, Adidas and the sponsorship program that was developed by the IOC with prompting from these big names. In this book, Dentsu comes up in the chapter called “ISL Rules the World”. ISL is another multinational advertising company that has managed to be at the centre of various FIFA deals and various IOC deals. So, all of these players who are all interlocked have not gone away, and that’s depressing in many ways. I never expected very much of IOC’s so-called reforms, but here we have Dentsu in the thick of scandals in 1980s and 1990s, and Dentsu in the thick of scandals now. Japan’s bid took place seven years before 2020, in 2013. We have Japan’s former IOC member who was the president of Japan’s national Olympic Committee, Tsunekazu Takeda. He was involved in some kind of bribery that resulted in Tokyo winning the 2020 Olympics. Takeda resigned. He claimed he hadn’t been personally involved, but because it had been on his watch he fell on his sword. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . There are other bad actors involved in current or more recent bids. It demonstrates that the more things change, the more they stay the same. When I first read Lords of the Rings and the later book, single authored by Jennings, New Lords of the Rings , I was particularly interested in the bribery aspect because that was what was key to my first Olympic book. Simson and Jennings have a chapter called “The shoe size of the second daughter” , which is a reference to the way that bid committee members compiled dossiers on IOC members so that they could choose gifts—and these weren’t just trifles, these were gifts in the thousands or tens of thousands of dollars. These were distributed to IOC members whom they thought might be influenced by them—in other words all of them except Princess Anne, Dick Pound and maybe a handful of others. But in those days, as has been well documented, the vast majority of IOC members were completely susceptible to bribes. They’ve used that catchy title for the chapter to point out that bid committees left no stone unturned to try to work out how to bribe somebody in the best way possible to secure their vote and, as we know with the Salt Lake City scandals, this ranged from giving free tuition to sons and daughters or nieces and nephews of IOC members, to expensive jewellery for the wives, and so on. In those days, up until the so-called reforms, the entire 100-plus membership of the IOC jetted around the world to visit bid cities, and there would be between five and eight bid cities in those days, when bidding was more popular than it is now. So, they had a lot of top-flight international travel and top hotels, and wining and dining and gifts. And these were people who were very unlikely to be able to evaluate the pros and cons of the bid. There was a handful who had experience in sport administration, event planning and the urban architecture and the sports facility construction side of it. But a lot of them were the European aristocracy, with some sporting experience. A lot of them didn’t even have that. They were big-time businessmen. So that presented local bid committees with a big field of people potentially prone to bribery and, if they chose the gifts accordingly, they would have some success in shaping the eventual vote. He prided himself on so many things, including bringing peace to South Korea or something along those lines. He wanted the Nobel Peace Prize for that, but he didn’t get it. He was a former Francoist and ran a tight ship. He’d been a sports administrator in Franco’s Spain and that was the model he chose for his leadership style, which wasn’t opposed very much. Jennings really does a hatchet job on Samaranch in his later book and later articles, because the buck stopped with Samaranch. He wanted to be called ‘His Excellency’ although he had no official status whatever. When I was researching my last book, I was looking at articles by arbitrators who serve on the Court of Arbitration for Sport. The recent famous case with Caster Semenya was heard before the Court of Arbitration for Sport, which is an arbitration tribunal, not a real court, and one of the senior arbitrators is a Canadian, Richard McLaren. I was reading his work, preparing for my last book, as he had done some very important analyses in sports law journals. And even Richard McLaren was referring to Samaranch as ‘His Excellency’. “A lot of commentators, including me, have pointed out that the IOC has much less of a problem with awarding to dictatorships because they don’t have to worry about referendums. They’re not going to happen” So, it is just taken for granted that this guy is really really important. But Jennings would say he is just a jumped-up Francoist sport administrator and that it was on his watch that decades of bribery and corruption took place. And if he knew, and he could reasonably be expected to know, he certainly didn’t care. He himself enjoyed a pretty luxurious lifestyle. He had some kind of permanent residence in Lausanne, which no other IOC member would have, and he had a home somewhere in Spain presumably, with his wife, but he had a kind of furnished suite that was his year-round accommodation in Lausanne and lived very nicely, thank you. When his wife died during the Sydney Olympics, he flew home for the funeral and then flew back again, which tells you what kind of guy he was. Yes, Samaranch Jr is an IOC member."