OLYMPIC GAMES

Volodymyr Gerashchenko, the secretary general National Olympic Committee of Ukraine (NOCU), has been suspended from his role after it was alleged that he was looking to illegally sell thousands of pounds worth of London 2012 tickets for cash.

A BBC investigation claims that Gerashchenko (pictured top) told a reporter posing as a United Kingdom (UK) tout he would have up to 100 tickets for the Olympics to sell – an act that is a criminal offence, punishable by fines of up to £20,000 ($31,500/€24,800).

Gerashchenko claimed he had "never planned to sell tickets in the UK" but Sergey Bubka (pictured below), President of the NOCU, revealed here that he has suspended his secretary general and ordered an independent investigation into the issue.

"We have only just got the information from the BBC regarding the illegal sales of the tickets," Bubka told insidethegames here where he is attending the SportAccord Convention.

"For us it is obviously a very unpleasant situation and I have already suspended Volodymyr Gerashchenko and ordered an independent investigation into what has happened.

"I spoke to him on the phone to tell him that he has been immediately suspended.

"I am leaving Québec City tomorrow evening, earlier than planned, to go back and deal with this issue personally.

"I will give him a chance to explain himself when I arrive back because that is my duty.

"We want to find out the truth and we will cooperate with both the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and London 2012 to get to the bottom of this issue."

The issue is a huge embarrassment for Bubka, the pole vault world record holder and Seoul 1988 Olympic champion, as he is an influential IOC member.

But the spotlight is firmly on Gerashchenko, who has served as the secretary general since 1997.

Strict rules, applying to countries outside the European Union, say tickets can only be sold to those who are resident within that country to stop tickets entering the black market.

But Gerashchenko has allegedly flouted the London Olympic Games and Paralympic Games Act, designed to stop Olympic tickets entering the black market.

A BBC reporter posing as an unauthorised ticket dealer from the UK spoke to Gerashchenko who is said to have confirmed he would be prepared to sell tickets.

The 56-year-old, who studied International Economic Relations at Kiev State Shevchenko University, is said to have told the BBC reporter: "I understand you're a dealer – that's why, for me, you are priority number one, the top, the person.

"In case we have extra tickets... we contact you."

During a subsequent meeting at a hotel near the Olympic Park in east London, Gerashchenko is said to have explained that he was in the process of distributing tickets to Ukrainian fans, coaches and officials as his National Olympic Committee had been allocated over 2,000 tickets.

However, once this process had finished, he would be prepared to sell up to 100 spare tickets.

Asked by the undercover journalist if payment could be made by bank transfer, he replied: "I think it is, when it comes, better cash.

"Possible?

"Better cash and finished with it – I hope to arrive 10 July."

Gerashchenko claimed he had "never planned to sell tickets in the UK" and had been making "diplomatic talk to satisfy the persistent interest of the ticket dealer."

"We have more demand than the number of tickets so we will use all tickets allocated to the NOC of Ukraine," he said.

"We will need more tickets and we will try to find them on the LOCOG Exchange page."

Gerashchenko said that the meeting with the undercover reporter "was unofficial, with no intention to make any real deal", either in writing or verbally.

Sebastian Coe (pictured), the chairman of London 2012, who is also attending SportAccord, praised Bubka for his swift manner in which he has dealt with the crisis.

"I take these things very seriously," he said.

"I have spoken to Sergey and told him that I am very pleased he has acted as promptly as he has.

"We have both written to the BBC to ask for the evidence so we can deal with the matter further."

Former and now Shadow Olympics Minister Tessa Jowell has already called for an investigation.

"I think it's shocking," she stormed.

"Here's somebody who's exploiting the system and if the charge against them is proven, the sanctions are very heavy."

"We take these allegations very seriously indeed," Mark Adams, IOC director of communications, told insidethegames.

"If proven we will not hesitate to impose tough sanctions."

By Tom Degun at the SportAccord Convention in Quebec City

Source: www.insidethegames.biz

May 23 - The United States Olympic Committee (USOC) and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) are "on the verge" of announcing that they have reached a deal over their high profile revenue-sharing dispute following negotiations that have been going on for more than three years.

An announcement could be made as early as tomorrow.

The revenue-sharing issue has been one of the most high profile topics of conversation in Olympic circles for several y while years now and has caused huge friction between the two powerful organisations.

The USOC currently receives a 20 per cent share of global sponsorship revenue and a 12.75 per cent share of US broadcast rights deals but many international officials, including the IOC, think it is too big a portion.

The issue was the main reason why the USOC was humiliated in Copenhagen in October 2009 when their Chicago bid was eliminated by the IOC in the first round of voting for the 2016 Olympics and Paralympics, which was awarded to Rio de Janeiro.

It came after New York's bid for 2012 also faltered, with London eventually awarded the Games, and America sat out the bid campaign for the 2020 Olympics and Paralympics, declaring that they will not bid for the Games again until they have reached an agreement over revenue sharing.

But it has emerged here at the Sport Accord Convention that the deal has finally been agreed and it now only needs to be rubber-stamped by the IOC Executive Board and the USOC Executive Board.

"We are very, very close to a deal," Mark Adams, the IOC director of communications, said here at a press conference in response to a question asked by insidethegames.

"No deal has been done until it has been agreed by our Executive Board and their Executive Board so at present, no deal has been done.

"But things are certainly looking very positive and we are heading in the right direction.

"We are certainly very close."

The move comes after USOC chief executive Scott Blackmun revealed at the Team USA Media Summit in Dallas last week that "positive news" was imminent.

"It is a complicated endeavour and that is why the discussions are in their sixteenth or seventeenth month at this point," Blackmun said.

"But I can tell you that we continue to make progress.

"We haven't gone backwards at any point in the discussions and I think we are much closer now than we were when we started in January 2011.

"I am hopeful, in the not too distant future, that we will have some positive news."

The move would have major repercussions in the Olympic Movement as it would open the way for America to bid for the Olympic and Paralympic Games again.

The deadline has already passed for a city for the United States to get involved in the 2020 bid race but an American bid for the 2022 Winter Games or 2024 Summer Games now appears to be a distinct possibility.

Denver have been touted as a 2022 Winter Games American candidate while numerous cities, including Los Angeles and Philadelphia, have already been talked about in terms of a 2024 Summer Games candidate.

-Tom Degun

Source: www.insidethegames.biz

Mexico City 1968, the first Summer Games I remember.

As a blindly patriotic eight-year-old, however, my memories revolve mainly around David Hemery, Britain's 400 metres hurdles gold medallist.

Or, to quote the BBC's David Coleman: "HEMERY!!"

My main recollection of the black power salute is of a tut-tuttingly English sense of mild disapproval.

What were we thinking?

More than four decades on, John Carlos (pictured above, right), one of the two American 200m medallists who raised gloved fists on the Mexico victory podium, is talking me through the lead-up to this historic gesture from a London hotel within racing distance of Wembley Stadium.

"We had been planning on doing a boycott of the Games," he tells me.

But many black athletes and other supporters of the civil rights movement "felt it was difficult for them to consider giving up their 15 minutes in the sun".

There was a vote and the boycott idea was dropped.

Once Carlos and the teammate he generally refers to as "Mr Smith" (Tommie Smith (pictured above, centre), the eventual gold medallist) had fought their way through to the final of their event, though, Carlos felt that he still wanted to "make a statement".

"From that point on we started bringing the artefacts together," he said.

I put it to Carlos, who ultimately crossed the line third, that at the halfway point in the final – which can be viewed here – he had the race at his mercy.

"I shut it down," he tells me.

"I didn't go there to win the gold medal...

"The last 80 metres I was striding, looking for Tommie to come.

"Ten metres from the finish-line I [remembered] Peter Norman (the Australian silver medallist).

"The most powerful part of his race was the last 20 metres."

Though first and third, rather than first and second, the two black Americans had made it to the podium, and it was here that they made the famous black-gloved salute that would change their lives, but also help to transform those of millions of others.

In the 21st century, protest groups of all stripes have become adept at commandeering the mass media to try to get their message across.

In 1968, though, Smith and Carlos' action was very much a novelty – and all the more shocking for that.

"It was the first time ever on planet earth that anyone had gone to a spectacle like the Olympic Games and done something as stunning as that," Carlos explains.

"It was right in their face.

"Not just people in the stadium, it was televised around the world."

Carlos' "artefacts" went considerably beyond Tommie Smith's now famous black gloves, one of which Carlos donned.

The two men took to the podium in black stockinged feet.

Carlos' tracksuit top was unzipped, displaying a string of beads honouring victims of racially-motivated lynchings.

And then there were the Puma shoes.

Carlos tells me he placed his shoe "right where the logo was visible for the world" because the company had come to his assistance on two important occasions.

During a trip to Trinidad in 1965, an airline strike had led to him being stranded there for an extra 30 days at a time when his wife was pregnant because, he says, no one else would honour his ticket back.

By the time he returned, he had lost his job.

"I went to Puma; they didn't know who I was but they gave me a job in the stock-room."

The company later also helped to send four members of the New York Pioneer Club Carlos belonged to, including one Bob Beamon, to California.

For these small kindnesses, Puma has a niche in one of the most iconic images in sporting history.

During the moments he stood on the podium with his left arm raised, one of the thoughts that flashed through Carlos' mind was a "vision" he had as a small boy.

"Everybody was excited," he tells me.

"I was on a box. I realised they were applauding for something I had done. I went to wave to the people. I'm right-handed, but I did it with my left hand. I barely got my hand up before people started cussing.

"In Mexico City 15 years later, that's what happened."

The reaction plainly got to Carlos.

He told reporters at a subsequent press conference: "You think of us as animals. Tommie and I heard them boo tonight and we saw their white faces. What I say is, and I want you to print this right or not at all, that white people who go to see blacks perform and can boo them like they did tonight, should not go to see us at all."

Not everyone booed: Carlos now describes the response of teammates and others as "mixed opinion; some with, some against; a mixed basket of fruit."

Sir Roger Bannister, the Briton who had broken the four-minute mile barrier, to his eternal credit, expressed the view that the podium demonstration was "a gesture conducted with dignity and poise and all very memorable".

Silver medallist Norman wore an Olympic Project for Human Rights badge.

Neil Allen, the man from The Times, wrote perceptively that Smith and Carlos had "made sporting history by becoming the first Olympic champions, not to make money, but to make racial political capital out of the most treasured moments of their sporting careers".

The boos were, of course, only the start of the two men's problems.

Indeed, Carlos reckons it took all of 35 years for the negativity of much of the initial reaction to their gesture to begin in earnest to be transformed.

In that difficult period, undoubtedly the most painful moments came after his first wife had taken her own life.

Carlos still believes that the overwhelming importance of their goals justified the dark times.

His and Smith's demonstration was, he argues, "very, very necessary to bring attention to social issues...

"It was like shock treatment.

"Our conscience had gone to sleep to such an extent we didn't care about the fate of our fellow man...

"We didn't want to hurt the Olympic Movement or take anything away from the athletes," Carlos says.

However: "We felt this was far more important; this was about humanity...

"How could you not say the Olympics had everything to do with humanity?

"Humanity is the blood and guts of the Olympics."

Before leaving Mexico, Carlos reveals to me, he had a hand in another substantial piece of sporting history – Bob Beamon's (pictured above) epochal 29ft 2½in long jump, a leap that shattered the then world record by not far off two feet.

"Bob and I grew up together," Carlos, who was born in Harlem, tells me.

Explaining how Beamon "almost didn't make the team", Carlos relates how he tried to offer the long-jumper helpful advice.

"I told him, 'It's like an aeroplane,'" he says.

"It doesn't just take off. It goes to the start-line, it gets psyched up and it blazes down the runway.

"I had him work out in the sprints. He had run 9.3secs in the 100 [yards]. So I got him up to speed and then said, 'Go work on your steps'."

The rest, as they say, is history.

I had expected Carlos to have mixed feelings to say the least about the Olympic Movement, but in fact he comes across as reasonably positive.

"I always cherish the Olympics because it does so much for young individuals," he tells me.

"Everyone who has a God-given talent has a right for the world to see it. That's what it's for.

"On the athletic field, it's fantastic, but in terms of administration and vision, they could do a lot better job."

It is also good to verify that the bronze medal hanging around Carlos' neck when he took his stand is similarly cherished.

"My mum has my medal," he tells me.

While it has, he says, "no significant value" to him, "there is a possibility it might mean everything to my kids.

"In the Carlos household, the medal is revered.

"I am happy that they are happy with it."

Amen to that.

-David Owen

Source: www.insidethegames.biz

In 1968 he raised his fist and helped make the Olympic podium a political one - and he is determined to keep the flame alive

Meet half of sport's most rousing double act. John Carlos and Tommie Smith were the 200-metre dashers behind the most iconic image of the umbilical link between the competitive arts and political reality: the "Black Power Salute" in Mexico City that seared through the 1968 Olympics like a 1,000-volt bolt, electro-shocking millions watching the first Games to be televised live.

The legacy, however, is complex. If they hadn't flung open the doors for those seeking to better society from an Olympic platform, would 11 Israelis have been killed in Munich four years later? Would gunmen be preparing to occupy London's rooftops? Yet perhaps even the most hideous prices are worth paying for freedom of speech. Besides, if Elvis Presley hadn't ignited rock 'n' roll, somebody else would have.

To Harry Edwards, linchpin of the Olympic Project for Human Rights that Carlos helped launch and whose badge he and Smith wore, the protest was "inspirational". Brent Musburger denounced them as "black-skinned stormtroopers" and became one of America's best-paid broadcasters. But the salute wasn't solely about black empowerment. Smith raised his black-gloved right fist as a symbol of precisely that but Carlos hoisted his left, to celebrate unity. He left his tracksuit open as a salute to Harlem's underclass, "to black and white".

To Jesse Jackson it was "a statement for the ages... an act of righteous defiance". Inevitably, the US establishment let rip with both barrels. "Angrier, Nastier, Uglier" sneered Time magazine. Avery Brundage, the ancient IOC emperor, anti-semite and Nazi sympathiser bent on insulating the Games from the meddlesome tentacles of the real world, saw only "warped mentalities and cracked personalities". Carlos calls Brundage "sport's J Edgar Hoover".

Nor was every African-American a brother. When George Foreman began his climb to fame, glory and grilling-machine fortune by winning the heavyweight boxing gold that October, he waved a miniature Star-Spangled Banner. For all his dignity, Carlos still bristles at Foreman's anti-solidarity, at Brundage's anti-humanity.

He is still strident and straight-backed, but a ligament problem impairs his walking. Fresh in from California, he is here for a tour taking in Brixton, Broadwater Farm and East Sussex, to promote The John Carlos Story with Dave Zirin, the co-author who has been lauded by the Washington Post as the "conscience of American sportswriting".

To spend 36 hours with this wise, laconic and vibrant sexagenarian is to enter the set of Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris. Time spools back, scenes are expertly plotted and you can't see the walls for legends. But instead of a Jazz Age bash with Ernest, Salvador, Scott and Zelda, the party is full-on Sixties and strictly black and white. Meet Ali and Miles, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King: the pillars of African-American resistance. Carlos has every right to be at their shoulders.

The defiant ones paid dearly. "Including Peter Norman," Carlos stresses, underscoring the role played by the silver medallist who was ostracised in his native Australia, whose 2006 funeral the two Americans attended as pallbearers.

In 1968 Brundage ordered them home, to death threats and dead ends; work came grudgingly. Shadowed by the FBI, Carlos resisted an invitation to become a drug dealer and resurfaced as a high-school guidance counsellor. Then, on the 37th anniversary of that historic night, a statue of the salute was unveiled at San Jose University, propelling him from his shell.

He has but one regret: "I knew I'd cope, man, but I never considered the impact on my family." It contributed, he feels, to his divorce and hisex-wife's suicide. No less heartbreaking is the rift between him and Smith. After Carlos claimed he could have beaten his co-conspirator to the gold, Smith took extreme umbrage, hitting back with interest. Carlos discusses it gingerly: the scars run deep. Smith, he reasons, "had trouble sharingthe recognition".

To enlighten and rouse other generations: that is the motivation now. Being a gifted storyteller bridges the gap, the account of Carlos's1967 meeting with Dr King almost unbearably poignant.

"Why are you backing the proposed Olympic boycott by the OPHR?" wondered the fearless 22-year-old. "He said it was like throwing a stone in the water and seeing it ripple to the edge. Then I asked why he was going back to Memphis, where he'd already had death threats. His reply never leaves me: 'I have to go back and stand up for those that won't stand up for themselves, and for those that can't stand up for themselves.'"

His sporting role models were "Jackie and Jack", Robinson and Johnson. The first African-American to play major-league baseball in the 20th Century, Robinson took his boots to Carlos Snr, a Harlem cobbler. What tattooed itself on his son's consciousness was the Brooklyn Dodger's courage. "Jackie had the balls, the balls to take everything they threw at him." Ditto Johnson, the first black heavyweight world champion. "Jack was more in your face. Think about it. It's 1910 and you're the first black sporting champion. And you like white women. To put up with all they did to him and still come out fighting – maan, that takes balls."

He had the balls too. Still does. The anger's gone – "You can't win angry, can you, man?" – but the fire is nowhere near out. As he states in his book: "I still feel the old impulses, the old compulsions, to stand up and be heard, no matter the price." The inscription inside my copy is his mantra: "We live to make history".

The salute was about more than Vietnam or King's assassination or the Tlatelolco Massacre of hundreds, maybe thousands, of Mexican students a fortnight before.

"It was about the stories my father told me about fighting in the First World War. It was about the terrible things he was asked to do for a freedom he was denied when he returned home. It was about him being told where he could live, where his kids could go to school, and how low the ceiling would be on his very life."

He was cheered at Occupy Wall Street, and that sense of duty endures: the need to keep on keeping on. Bring up Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods and Carlos defends their right to enjoy the fruits of resistance while excusing themselves from the front line, though he does wonder "what they see when they look in the mirror".

Following an impassioned Q&A session for a packed house at the University of Brighton's Chelsea School of Sport, a small Twitter frenzy erupts among the students. Later, in Lewes, where Tom Paine conceived The Rights of Man, Zirin reads a tweet aloud, prolonging each syllable of "inspiring". The inspirer leans back in his chair, plainly touched. The next day's tutorials bring more of the same.

Being John Carlos may not be the easiest job in the world, but you suspect it is among the most spiritually rewarding.

www.independent.co.uk