Samaranch Aside, Corruption’s as Ancient as Games

Juan Antonio Samaranch, you’re no Theodosius I.

When faced with the challenge of reforming the Olympic movement of his day, Theodosius did not expel a few graft-grabbing representatives from a handful of poor or insignificant city-states--small fish tossed into the kettle to save the skins of the rich and more powerful.

Nor did he issue “the most serious of warnings” or form a couple of committees or order up any rigged “votes of confidence” in the Roman Senate.

Theodosius, Emperor of Rome in AD 394 (and therefore rightly entitled to be addressed as “Your Excellency”), decided the only way to reform Olympics rife with corruption and bribery was to shut them down altogether. And so, decrying them as a pagan festival and a grotesque affront to Christianity, Theodosius ordered the Olympic Games banned in 394.

They would not be resurrected for another 1,500 years, when a French baron named Pierre de Coubertin, still reeling from his country’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, determined that an international sporting competition would be a fine way to train France’s young men for the next round with Germany.

Forget the “arena of noble ideals” pablum the International Olympic Committee has been spoon-feeding us for decades. Long before Salt Lake had a city, let alone an Olympic bid committee filled with stumbling bumpkins who didn’t know how to say no, corruption has been a fundamental pillar of the Olympic Games. Bribery, cheating, extravagant gift-giving and runaway self-interest have an Olympic history as old and as rich as the competition itself--dating to 776 BC and the first recorded account of the ancient Greek Olympics.

The ancient Games even had their own version of the IOC, the hellanodikes--a select clan of imperious competition judges who dressed in regal purple robes, sat in special seats at ground level inside the Olympic stadium and held absolute authority over an athlete’s right to compete. The hellanodikes enjoyed the sumptuous feasts and entertainment that they in turn denied the athletes, forcing the competitors to sleep on coarse animal hides on the hard ground and adhere to a spartan diet of nuts, figs, barley bread and porridge--a tradition that thrives today, with the IOC luxuriating in five-star hotels and the competitors slumming in a glorified barracks known as “the athletes’ village.”

Initially, Olympic athletes in Greece competed only for honor and a measly olive wreath, but that all changed once big business and politicians got involved. As the Olympics then served as a surrogate battlefield for the always-warring neighboring city-states, victory at the Olympics soon merited the same awards as a triumphant soldier-hero returning home. Olympic champions received cash awards equivalent to five years’ wages for an average worker, free food and lodging, lifetime pensions, even statues in their honor.

Fractious city-states didn’t compete for the glory of hosting the Games, since they were held every four years at the same place, at Olympia. Instead, their graft-greasing energies were directed at the athletes, many of whom became history’s first free agents, moving from city-state to city-state, signing on with the highest bidder.

One famous example was Dicon, the great sprinter who won the Olympic dash for Caulonia of Sicily, then repeated the feat four years later for Syracuse, then a part of Sparta, which was at war with Athens. Dionysius the Elder, ruler of Syracuse, had bought off Dicon, prompting outrage throughout the Olympic host site. Lysias, the great orator of Athens, denounced Dionysius for his treachery in front of the Olympic crowds and, very likely, Athenian chariot mechanics conspired to sabotage Dionysius’ fleet of champion riding machines.

Rather mysteriously, all of Dionysius’ chariots came apart during the climactic race.

The greatest farce of the ancient Games occurred after the Roman occupation of Greece, in AD 66, when the Emperor Nero set aside his fiddle and announced he would compete in the Games--accompanied by 50,000 bodyguards, roughly the same size as Samaranch’s security force during the Atlanta Games, give or take.

According to the Greek scholar Spiridion Lambros, who co-authored the first official history of the ancient Olympics in 1896, “All Greece, terrified, yielded to the ambitious emperor’s desire for success. . . . Everywhere the spectators applauded for him, his rivals let themselves be overcome . . . and the umpires hastened to lay at his feet crowns of which his head was not worthy.”

During the prestigious chariot race, Nero actually fell out of his chariot, causing the rest of the field to stop and wait for the emperor to climb back in before allowing him to win in a rout.

Somewhat surprisingly, Samaranch has yet to reintroduce the chariot race as a full-medal Olympic event.

Concluded Lambros: “The appearance of Nero in the Games shows clearly both what had been the decline of the Greek spirit, and how miserably the Olympic Games had fallen.”

Yet, the Games proceeded for another 300 years, eventually degenerating into a crass debauched circus that, if reports are to be believed, provided a blueprint for future IOC visits to Nagano and Salt Lake City.

In 394, Theodosius, sufficiently disgusted, pulled the plug.

Sixteen centuries later, Samaranch pulled the Olympic pins from the lapels of 10 IOC scapegoats--human sacrifice was big in the ancient Games as well--and formed a few committees and vowed to stay the course through the end of his “mandate” in 2001, at which point he can handpick his successor with the intent of ushering the IOC into a new millennium of Olympic abuses not yet even imagined.

But then, that’s progress.