Olympic Committee president gears up to...

High-profile All Blacks must decide within the next four months whether to pursue a gold medal at next year's Olympic Games.

New Zealand Rugby plans to unveil its first squad, which will feature an amalgamation of sevens specialists, Super Rugby stars and All Blacks who have signalled interest, in late May.

A wider squad must also be submitted to the New Zealand Olympic Committee by August 5 - one year out from the games in Rio de Janeiro. Up to 26 players will then be confirmed in the squad announced after the Rugby World Cup in October. That squad will be whittled down to 12 players for the Olympics.

While speculation that Warriors playmaker Shaun Johnson would switch codes has faded, Gordon Tietjens' wish-list is expected to include brothers Julian and Ardie Savea, Liam Messam, Sonny Bill Williams, Charles Piutau, Ben Smith, Hosea Gear and Victor Vito. Of that group, only Williams has no previous sevens experience.

NZR general manager rugby Neil Sorensen and player relationship manager Ben Castle, the former Chiefs prop, will canvas several of those players in the coming months.

"Ben and I are going around in the next couple of months to talk to players Titch may be interested in about how it might work in 2016 in terms of whether they can play any Super Rugby and how many sevens tournaments they'd have to play," Sorensen said. "It's going to be personalised to a large extent.

"The Super Rugby teams need to know sooner than later so they can talk to other players. Knocking it off in May this year gives everyone certainty.

"You're looking at a mix of specialist gurus, the experts who have played sevens for a few years, and a smattering of other players like Sonny Bill. I certainly don't see it being eight All Blacks and four other guys. It won't work like that."

Tietjens, All Blacks management, Super Rugby coaches and the NZR board held discussions recently about the difficult juggling act they face in 2016.

With $2.4 million pledged towards the men's sevens team over the next two years and $2m for the women during the same period, double Olympic gold is high on the agenda.
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But with Richie McCaw, Dan Carter, Ma'a Nonu, Ben Franks, Jeremy Thrush, Tony Woodcock, Conrad Smith, Keven Mealamu and Charlie Faumuina all expected to leave the New Zealand scene, along with other mid-tier talent, after the Rugby World Cup, the All Blacks will confront a challenging rebuilding phase. Coach Steve Hansen will have a lot on his plate ahead of Wales' three-match tour in June next year and the high-profile tour by the British and Irish Lions in 2017.

Striking a balance in priorities creates clear dilemmas.

Players such as Piutau must essentially choose between cementing their spot in the post-World Cup All Blacks outfit or attending the Olympics.

Details are still being worked through but it is understood those that opt for the sevens route will miss six to eight weeks of Super Rugby, depending on their level of sevens experience, conditioning and natural abilities. They are also not likely to be available for the All Blacks until the end-of-the-year tour to the northern hemisphere.

Chiefs coach Dave Rennie is, however, confident Williams will turn out for the franchise next year.

"There's no doubt going to an Olympic Games is pretty special," Rennie said. "If he commits to sevens he'll still play some Super Rugby. We just won't have full access to him.

"With Sonny he couldn't just play sevens and sit out for three weeks. We've certainly been talking to Titch around that. It's going to be the same for all the franchises. If you've got some guys involved then you'll get some access to them."

NZR is also keen to ensure that those who chase a gold medal are not left out of pocket.

"If they are currently earning $10 and they get picked to go to Rio then they'll earn the same," Sorensen said. "It's just a matter of how we supplement that for their Super Rugby franchise."

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The Olympic spirit has come to this: Two authoritarian countries are vying to host the 2022 Winter Games, competing to endure a huge financial strain for the benefit of burnishing their public image. The withdrawal of Oslo in October left Beijing, China’s capital, and Almaty, the largest city in Kazakhstan, as the contenders. They formally submitted their bids to the International Olympic Committee this month.

That helps explain why the president of the International Olympic Committee, the German lawyer Thomas Bach, pushed through landmark human rights reforms at a big Olympic summit meeting in Monaco last month.

For the first time, host countries must sign a contract that requires protections for human rights, labor and the environment. These “international agreements and protocols” are meant to protect against abuses such as Russia’s anti-gay law, passed ahead of last year’s Winter Games in Sochi, and the labor and human rights abuses before and during the 2008 Summer Games in Beijing. These reforms are about to get a rigorous test in the global spotlight — whether the 2022 Games are in China, which welcomed journalists to Beijing in 2008 with a censored Internet, or Kazakhstan, which locks up critics and closes down newspapers.

Over the past decade, Human Rights Watch has documented how major sporting events are also accompanied by human rights violations when games are awarded to serial human rights abusers. Repressive countries promised to respect media and other rights to secure the events, then reneged and relied on international sporting bodies to stay silent.


As these countries prepare for events, forced evictions without fair compensation free up space for the massive new infrastructure construction that Olympics require. Migrant workers are cheated and labor under long hours and sometimes deadly working conditions. Construction leads to environmental and other complaints. Activists who object are silenced or jailed. Beijing locked up critics of the Olympics. In Russia, an environmentalist drew a three-year prison sentence, and members of the feminist band Pussy Riot were beaten and detained, for their protests of the Sochi Games. Given the abuses, is there any hope for change?

If there is the political will to implement them, the contract reforms could improve conditions in countries that host big sporting events. Autocrats are increasingly turning to international sporting events to boost their global standing, so the regulations adopted by their governing bodies might be the only way to make human rights advances in some of the most abusive places.

At Sochi last year, for example, the I.O.C. pressured the Russian government to take action against the theft of wages from workers who helped build Olympic venues and infrastructure. Some 500 companies were investigated, and inspectors found that thousands of workers had been cheated out of more than $8 million in wages. The general director of a top construction company was arrested on suspicion of withholding wages. This action resulted from a specific reform from the 2009 Olympic Congress: a promise that the I.O.C. would intervene in the event of “serious abuses,” including abuses of migrant workers.

In Iran, hard-liners and reformists alike cheer the country’s volleyball successes. A law student, Ghoncheh Ghavami, was jailed in Iran’s notorious Evin prison last year after she protested a ban on women entering a stadium to watch an International Federation of Volleyball World League match. In November, the federation (known as FIVB, the acronym in French) called on the Iranian government to release Ms. Ghavami, and affirmed its commitment to “inclusivity and the right of women to participate in sport on an equal basis.” The federation warned that Iran’s policy could limit its ability to host international tournaments in the future. Ms. Ghavami was released on bail shortly thereafter, but not before a revolutionary court convicted her of “propaganda against the state” and sentenced her to one year in prison. She is appealing.

In 2012, Saudi Arabia allowed two women, at the last moment, to compete at the London Summer Games. But it still forbids sports for all girls in state schools and has no women’s sports federations. The Saudis should win a gold medal in brazenness for sending a 199-member men-only team to last fall’s Asian Games, claiming, “Technically, we weren’t ready to introduce any ladies.”

Human rights and sports crises are not limited to the Olympics. Russia, despite its record of worker abuse, was awarded the 2018 World Cup. This summer, authoritarian Azerbaijan will roll out the welcome mat for the first European Games in Baku, despite escalating repression, including the December arrest of a top investigative journalist.

As Qatar builds an estimated $200 billion of infrastructure for the 2022 World Cup, hundreds of South Asian migrant workers have died working on construction projects. FIFA, the governing body of world soccer, is ripe for institutional reform. In May, it will hold a once-in-a-generation presidential election, in which the current president, Sepp Blatter of Switzerland, will seek a fifth term against stiff competition, including Prince Ali bin al-Hussein of Jordan, who has championed reforms to advance women’s participation. Those candidates should back human-rights-based reforms to the FIFA Charter and set out their position on the human rights, discrimination, corruption and labor crises that have dogged the body.

The Olympic reforms passed in December mean that if future host countries fail in their duty to uphold rights, the I.O.C. is now obliged to enforce the terms of the hosting agreement — including the ultimate sanction of withdrawing the Olympics. And for those who break rules like nondiscrimination, the punishment should be a ban on playing and hosting, as the I.O.C. imposed on apartheid South Africa from 1964 to 1992 and Taliban-run Afghanistan from 1999 to 2002.

Mr. Bach has started the ball rolling, but with abuses mounting around global sporting events, it’s time for other sporting federations like FIFA to begin reforms. Fans, corporate sponsors and the general public are increasingly turned off by human rights violations. The I.O.C. reforms aren’t a panacea, but they represent an important step forward.

Minky Worden, director of global initiatives at Human Rights Watch, is the editor of “China’s Great Leap: The Beijing Games and Olympian Human Rights.”

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I do not know Brian Lewis, president of the T&T Olympic Association, but in one stroke he has earned my admiration.
According to an ad on Radio I95.5 Lewis, accompanied by a few sporting and media personalities, intends to walk the full 26 miles of the T&T marathon route next Sunday to build momentum for the 2024 Olympics.
His goal? T&T must start preparing, from now, to win ten gold medals in that world celebration of athletic prowess.
Thank you, Brian. Somebody got it, finally!
I am hoping sometime soon, someone, somewhere in the national leadership will follow Lewis’ example of strategic thinking. But the vacancy up there is just part of the overall crisis that we face; instead, we get daily doses of irresponsibility and mediocrity.
Sadly, this is on display in the Government’s responses to the world energy crisis. Successive governments have talked repeatedly of the need to diversify the economy, particularly because of our dwindling oil and gas reserves and the severe consequences the country experiences with every cyclical crisis.
This Government has been no different. What is different is its failure to explain to the population the severe impact of the crisis on T&T, and the “new normal” being created. At the policy making level, this demands structural adjustments and drastic alterations in the expectations, spending and overall lifestyles at the level of the citizen.
To the Finance Minister’s credit, in the 2015 budget, he did explain his proposals to use two state enterprises, invesTT and exporTT, to stimulate activity in other sectors.
He proposed incentives in the areas of food and beverages, the creative arts, entertainment and maritime, yachting and financial services—what he called “the re-balancing of the economy in favour of the non-oil energy sector and the development of a sustainable economy”.
But in recent weeks all this has changed; every aspect of Government activity in 2015 demands much more than even the strategic thinking that Lewis has demonstrated.
Our immediate challenge is the falling revenues from the oil and gas sector. First, the Finance Minister, admittedly under personal pressure from his alleged role in the ten-year-old TCL insider trading issue, must convince the population that the Government possesses a strategic formula to deal with the shortfall.
Unfortunately his response—asking individual ministries for a $45 million cutback each—reflects haphazard analysis and poor evaluation of state resources, with little thought about the exploitation of possible alternatives.
Then there was the Prime Minister’s response, again ill-prepared and without the necessary budgetary evaluation, that her Government’s social and make-work programmes would be untouched.
At present, the Government needs to show that it has a long-term strategic understanding, and that it possesses a comprehensive framework, a conceptual map, to diversify the economy, probably into some high-end industries.
But to date, its performance has been all about not the politics of the common good, but the retaining of power. Last week, I warned that this year will unfold in three phases, the current “Seductive” phase, to be followed by the “Intimidatory”, then the “Blunderbuss”—a friend preferred the word, “Bazooka”—in which the masks are off, and any and everything goes, because it is not about strategic, national planning—but the retention of power.
It played out last week with the AG jumping to claim victory in Emailgate, because of a possible error in the judicial system. He was right, however. The Opposition Leader’s attorneys should have been more alert in the matter.
The country has entered the phase in which anything goes. So those attorneys should have been in “red alert” mode, particularly after the statements by the family of the late Dana Seetahal and the allegations of the former assistant sports director on social media.
Probably, that red alert should extend to the anticipated legal battles when the Opposition Leader is summoned in the Las Alturas Commission of Enquiry. That sitting begins next week.
In the meantime, I continue to search for the positives, such as Sunday’s 26-mile march in the T&T marathon.

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