By Fr Liam Kelleher
It is quite sad when the entire focus should be on the “clean’ Olympic competitors who have sacrificed so much to take part, that much of the media coverage has been directed to activities outside the fields of play. The ticket controversy is simply appalling, the boxing judging, the doping controversies, including the boxer Michael O’Reilly, the disqualification of teams and their reinstatement has really sullied the Olympic movement and if Baron Pierre de Coubertin was around he would be shocked.
Before we get to the really positives especially from an Irish point of view let’s get the negatives affecting the Irish out of the way first. The “Hickey Affair’ as it is now well referred to has been the biggest news of the games and a man who has done so much for the Olympic movement now languishes in jail here. Let me first say without hesitation Pat Hickey has done some fantastic work which cannot be denied but his obsession for power has finally been his undoing. I have known him since 1972 from my first Olympic Games in Munich all of 44 years ago and I was not happy with the antics that happened in Atlanta in 1996 during the “Sonia saga” which again was well documented at the time.
I was press officer for the then Irish athletic organization BLE and was totally embarrassed by what transpired. I remember talking to the Minister for Sport there, a fellow Corkman Bernard Allen and he commended me for my approach which basically was that the we should not wash our “dirty linen” in public. I saw …
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