Last updated on 02/01/2016
1/31/2016:
Here’s the story on the $400K in well-timed Nike and UO donations, by Saul Hubbard in the RG:
Phil Knight, Nike poured cash into Gov. Kitzhaber’s campaign coffers as he weighed request for state money for Eugene world track championship
Knight, Nike, UO officials gave nearly $400,000 to Kitzhaber in six-week period; UO says no “quid pro quo”
The 2016 session of the Oregon Legislature starts Monday. Given the news about Putin’s hush money and brown envelopes, UO lobbyist Hans Bernard has dropped UO’s plan to ask for $40M to pay for the “IAAF Family’s” hotel rooms and meals – #3 on the list of legislative priorities Bernard showed to the UO Board in December:
Instead he’s found some legislators willing to replace it with a stealth increase in the hotel tax that doesn’t mention the 2021 IAAF track meet. How’s that for transparency?
Meanwhile, the Swedes are calling out the IAAF’s Lord Sebastian Coe for refusing to fess up to the possibility that there was anything corrupt about awarding the 2021 championships to Eugene. Ian Herbert has the report in the British paper The Independent, here, complete with an interview with Camilla Nyman, chief executive of the Gothenburg tourism board:
Sebastian Coe will tell you, in that articulate and erudite way of his, that it was perfectly acceptable to award the 2021 World Athletics Championships – his organisation’s blue riband event – to Eugene: the town synonymous with the sportswear company which until recently paid him £100,000 a year for a “social engagement” role which he has not been terribly specific about.
A new cache of emails made available through Freedom of Information legislation reveal what a catastrophe the decision was, though, and nowhere is the lack of rigour more visible than in the letter sent by the Oregon state Governor, Kate Brown, to the then International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) president, Lamine Diack, in advance of Eugene, home of Nike, getting the nod. “I give you my personal commitment to apply all my powers and means to obtain the financial and legislative support in order to provide the funding necessary for the championships’ success in Oregon,” she writes.
… So Gothenburg carried on working and planning and waited on news from an IAAF conference for national federations. It was from there, “at just before midnight” on the eve of the event, as Nyman recalls it, that she received an email from a Swedish Athletic Federation representative to say that “something is going on,” that “the rules have changed” and Eugene may be gifted it. No one at the Swedish end knows whether money or personal connections brought the sudden change in the picture. None of the Swedes we have spoken to were asked to provide brown envelopes, though the bidding process had not even started at that stage.
Within 24 hours it was being announced that Eugene had been awarded the 2021 event and that there would, indeed, be no bidding process. Gothenburg were advised by some of their associates to find lawyers to prove that the IAAF’s actions had been constitutionally illegal but they decided against it, for fear of “making enemies everywhere”, as Nyman puts it. Ironic, in the light of what we now know about Diack.
The story notes that it was this email that broke open the 2021 scandal, obtained by the RG’s Diane Dietz from UO, but only after the Lane County DA ordered UO’s Public Records Office to release it:
I’m guessing UO and the UO Foundation and Track Town have a lot more of this on their servers, and perhaps those emails will come to light eventually.
Meanwhile, although Gothenburg’s politicians seem relieved to wash their hands of the IAAF, the British press and Parliament are going after IAAF President and House of Lords member Seb Coe like a hound-dog goes after a tick. Reuters reports that Coe has put out a half-assed denial of reports that he knew about the cash filled envelopes used in the bidding for the 2017 championships.
“Sebastian Coe had no actual knowledge of bribes being offered or received linked to the 2017 World Championship,” the spokesman told Reuters.
Parliament may call him back to explain what he means by “actual knowledge”.
While organizing committee for the London 2017 games is reportedly considering taking the IAAF logo off all the publicity material, fearing that guilt by association with the IAAF and Putin will cut into ticket sales, here in Oregon the politicians are saying this will be “good for our brand”. Sure.
1/24/2016: IAAF too dirty for Adidas
The BBC has the scoop, here:
Adidas to end IAAF sponsorship deal early in wake of doping crisis
By Mark Daly, BBC Scotland Investigations & Dan Roan, BBC sports editor
Adidas, the IAAF’s biggest sponsor, has told athletics’ world governing body it is to terminate their sponsorship deal four years early, the BBC has learned.
The sportswear giant informed the IAAF of its decision – understood to be a direct result of the doping scandal sweeping the sport – earlier this week.
Sources have told the BBC the move will result in tens of millions of dollars in lost income to the IAAF.
And it is sure to come as a major blow for embattled president Lord Coe.
Neither Adidas nor the IAAF have made any comment. …
1/19/2016: Runners sue IAAF for reparations? Brown envelopes? Lord Coe triple-dips?
It’s hard to keep up with the scandals at the UO Foundation’s new partners. The NYT reports that clean track and field athletes are considering a class action lawsuit against the IAAF on the grounds that they lost races, prizes and endorsement contracts to the dopers who were paying hush money to the IAAF:
“There’s so much stuff you can’t get back; it’s like a class-action lawsuit that we’re looking at,” said Alysia Montano, the American 800-meter runner who finished fifth at the 2012 Olympics behind two Russians accused of cheating and fourth at two world championships behind one of them.
“It would be a huge symbol, a huge gesture from the I.A.A.F. to recognize and take ownership of the fact that they really did mess up, and it’s not just the I.A.A.F.,” Nelson said. It would indeed be a symbolic gesture, as would be a revote for the site of the 2021 world championships. The I.A.A.F. Council last year awarded the event to Eugene, Ore., without a bidding process and with Diack pushing hard behind the scenes.
Then there are the “brown envelopes” that the organizers of the successful London 2017 IAAF championship bids are claiming passed between their Qatar competitors and the IAAF. London organizer Ed Warner claims Diack then used the support from Qatar to get London to fund the $7.2M prize money bill. He wants an investigation, and he wants Lord Coe and the IAAF to repay the money if the accusations are correct:
Interestingly the prize money issue came up in the Track Town bidding for 2019 as well. Lananna wanted the state to pay it. Kitzhaber’s aide Vince Porter was not real excited about that:
From what I can tell Track Town agreed to pay it as part of the 2021 bid – although it’s not clear from what pot. Maybe the UO Foundation’s?
Lord Coe, of course, knew nothing about any of this:
Speaking on BBC Radio alongside Warner, Coe said he was unaware of the claims and promised to look into them.
And then there’s the latest about Coe’s second job (or third, counting Nike) as CEO of the CSM sports marketing firm, from an advertising trade journal, of all places:
… The core of its sports business is CSM, headed by executive chairman Lord Coe. Yes that Coe, Sebastian, an Olympic gold medallist in Moscow and Los Angeles, former Tory MP and now the under-fire head of the IAAF (The International Association of Athletics Federations). Coe sold his Complete Leisure Group to Chime for a maximum payment of £12m in 2012.
Most of the ordnance coming at Coe is about his long membership of the IAAF during a period when it seemed to turned a blind eye to rampant doping among the athletics community. Some of it was prompted by his longstanding ‘ambassador’ role with Nike that paid about £100,000 a year (he finally, and seemingly reluctantly, dropped that) and now new questions are being asked about his role at CSM.
It’s hard to see how Coe can remain as ‘executive’ chairman of CSM, given his supposedly impartial IAAF role. On its website CSM says it “offers a complete range of services for everything that a brand, federation or governing body could need.” It goes further: “there is nothing in sport we can’t do.”
Hmm. International sport in the professional era is awash with money as broadcasters increasingly see it as relatively cheap, appointment-to-view content. Most sports governing bodies started as collections of enthusiasts who, mostly, gave their time free. Now they’re awash with money, these lightly regulated bodies provide obvious opportunities for chancers and crooks. …
Have you considered the possibility that your city got the WC without bribing Diack? It would be cheaper to just hint how much trouble he and his son would be in if the French were to get credible evidence of past bribes, and no danger of a clerk anonymously reporting the transaction to the tax authorities. That is common even in Zurich now that the Americans are paying for thumb drives, as Blatter has learned.
That had not occurred to us, Dude.
Not one penny of Oregon taxpayer money to the IAAF. Let Mr Knight and Nike pick up the tab.
From the BBC story: “too much reputational risk to its brand to continue its association with the IAAF.”
Fortunately, the University of Oregon has experts who know how to handle risk to its reputation.
Oh, wait . . . . .