This evening Timo Lumme, who on Wednesday was appointed marketing director of the International Olympic Committee, will no doubt experience a tremor of anticipation as he takes his seat to watch the Opening Ceremony of the 28th modern Olympic Games.
Leaked details suggest the ceremony will be heavily laden with classical Greek references and symbolism. It promises to be quite a spectacular; featuring a meteor storm, blazing arrows and - in what is, in my experience, a new twist – a pregnant woman plunging into a sort of giant birthing pool formed by flooding part of the stadium. Perhaps the organisers misunderstood that when IOC President Jacques Rogge talks about scaling down the Olympic Games, it is contraction not contractions which he has in mind.
This will be the world premiere of The Olyad, a kind of Iliad with Rings on for those whose only knowledge of Homer is that he’s married to Marge.
In many ways the opening ceremony is a manifestation of how the International Olympic Committee views the Olympic Games and wants the world to view them. It will be designed to deliver a million positive images of youth, physical perfection, camaraderie, international harmony and the central role of sport in culture.
If one forgets for a second those dodgy moments when it looked as though they would still be grazing sheep on the site of the Olympic village when the first competitors checked-in, bringing the Games back to Athens can be seen as a propagandists’ masterstroke.
Unfortunately, the symbolism and those ever-present reminders of the ancient Olympic ethic appear likely to serve only as a yardstick by which to measure the chasm which appears to exist between Olympic ideal and Olympic reality.
And that is the challenge that faces Timo Lumme from his first day in office.
Last week – in reference to the pantomime at the Football Association – I referred to the way that the IOC had escaped commercially unscathed from the Salt Lake City corruption scandal. Sponsors may have wavered but they stayed on because the public was able to make a clear distinction between the avarice of a handful of anonymous blokes in blazers, and the athletes who are the stars of the show.
But the IOC now faces a different crisis. The rash of positive dope tests in the run up to the Games and the genuine expectation that there will be many more as the action unfolds, strikes at the very heart of the Olympics. What the public cares about is athletes and the competition between them. If they believe that competition is tainted by drugs the whole Olympic edifice crumbles. Bent IOC members can be replaced because nobody cares about them. But if an increasingly savvy public thinks it is being consistently conned by a bunch of junkies in spikes, the public will turn off, disengage and that will be that.
The Olympic Games is perhaps the purest and most challenging sponsorship opportunity of all, not to mention one of the most expensive. With no in-stadium branding the sponsor really has to buy into the Olympic ideal, brand and heritage and reflect and promote its positive values in every single piece of material produced and every activity they embark on. If they lose belief, they loose everything.
Over the next 16 days we can expect each and every failed drugs test to be hailed as a major achievement. Their detection will be presented as yet another example of the authorities’ absolute determination to get to the black heart of the matter.
Yet the reality is that testing regimes are far from fallible and some cheats will, inevitably, prosper. And that is why the IOC and every significant sporting body in the world must look at investing more of their income to ramping up the rigour of their testing programmes.
The IOC must continue to position itself as the world’s champion in the battle against doping and take whatever steps it can to ensure that NOCs and individual sports federations stay in line. Perhaps one way of doing so is to follow the example of the British immigration authorities who are able to fine airlines a significant sum for every passenger that they bring into the United Kingdom without correct papers.
If NOCs were to be hammered for every one of their team members who failed a drugs test at the Olympics, they might be even more rigorous in the way they invest in and manage their own testing programmes. Who knows?
Beyond the kitsch in-synch of the opening ceremony, the Olympic Games remain a wonderful festival of sport and, with Sydney as the benchmark, live up to their billing as the greatest show on earth. One cannot doubt the sincerity of Jacques Rogge, Dick Pound and other prominent Olympic family members in their determination to stem the tide of doping. The rest of the sports community must not simply applaud their efforts but, in the words of John Kerry, report for duty and join battle alongside them.
If this battle is lost Timo Lumme will be both the newest and last IOC marketing director, because if the public loses interest in the Games and what they stand for he will have nothing to sell.
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This week also brought a fresh perspective on the pantomime at the FA. This time from FIFA president Sepp Blatter.
For those recently returned from Mars, the background is that the FA’s chief executive was forced to resign along with its communications director after bungled attempts to cover up the fact that both the CEO and England manager Sven Groan Eriksson had had affairs with a secretary, who was subsequently, and cruelly, dubbed The FA Trophy.
The prurient English may have been aghast but not The President, who told Associated Press: “It's enriched the summer non-footballing season in England.
“It isn't an incident, it is something good.
“It is human relations, and football is also human relations. It is better than violence or ... tackling from behind. Football is part of our life, and in our life if you have attractive people in the room then such things happen.”
This clearly requires no further comment.
