IOC’s Jacques Rogge and ‘sex of the angels’ -- a politically incorrect joke
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ISTANBUL -- International Olympic Committee president Jacques Rogge of Belgium made a strange joke Thursday night at a dinner celebrating both the 100th anniversary of the Turkish Olympic Committee and the Friday opening of the 37th General Assembly of the European Olympic Committees.
It was politically incorrect at best and likely offensive to anyone whose ancestors suffered under four to five centuries of rule by the Ottoman Empire. Rogge said he was giving some advice to European Olympic Committees President Patrick Hickey of Ireland.
Rogge noted that in 1453, there was an international religious colloquium in this city, then called Constantinople, on the subject of ‘the sex of the angels.’
What the conference organizers did not know, Rogge said, was that the Sultan Mehmet II was at the gates with an army that, as the IOC president put it, ‘chased everyone out of the city -- and it has been called Istanbul since.’
Rogge seemed to be celebrating the siege that not only ended the colloquium but brought down the Byzantine Empire, leading to Ottoman conquest of the Balkans.
Rogge said to Hickey, ‘Don’t have ‘sex of the angels’ on the agenda.’
-- Philip Hersh
