2/18/2016: There are some good people on the UO board. You know they’re hoping the day will come when they can announce they’ve done something important for UO’s academic side. But that day is not today. Today Diane Dietz has yet another story on the effort and expense that UO’s leaders…
Posts tagged as “Track and Field Championships”
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 UK sportswriters aren’t buying WADA dope fighter Dick Pound’s old boy argument that Seb Coe should lead the IAAF. Coe looked the other way at years of corruption by Lamine Diack and his friends, including millions in bribes from the Russians to hide drug tests. How much did they…
The latest investigation of the IAAF’s doping problems is out. One of many stories here: [Former IAAF President Lamine Diack] is firmly in the line of fire. The report also concluded he: appeared to have created a close inner circle which functioned as “an informal illegitimate governance structure” outside the…
The IRS rumor is from a normally reliable source. I don’t know exactly what it’s about, and I assume that most of these investigations go nowhere, but fwiw Track Town’s recent 990 forms are here: DOJ Track Town 990 2015, DOJ Track Town 990 2014 The RG story by Diane Dietz is here: …
Jeff Manning has a long article explaining the current state of Track Town’s bid for the 2021 IAAF track championships, in the Oregonian here, I’ve posted a few snippets below. From the article: Even before track and field’s international governing body was wracked by bribery and extortion allegations in November, Track…
Reporter Saul Hubbard of the Eugene Register Guard lays it all out in meticulous detail, here. You know it’s serious when VP for PR Kyle Henley sends the reporters to talk to serious people, instead of Tobin Klinger. Several UO Trustees also ponied up Kitz cash: … Angela Wilhelms, secretary to the…
Sara Germano has the latest wildly improbable claim from Lord Coe in the WSJ here: Nike Inc. has pledged $13.5 million toward renovations of track and field facilities at the University of Oregon, part of an upgrade that would facilitate the venue’s hosting of the 2021 World Track & Field…
1/4/2016: Rumor down at the faculty club is that the legislators are backing away from the IAAF only bill, and instead preparing to load it up with pork for the rest of the state too, in hopes of buying the necessary 3/5 majority. 12/31/2015: Olympic Decathlete Ashton Eaton to lobby legislature for…
From an editorial in the Bend Bulletin over UO’s plan to hit up the legislature for more athletic subsidies, here: … There’s also more than a whiff of scandal around the meet. The controversy centers on the no-bid award that gave Eugene the right to host the games. It involves Nike, Sebastian…
Whoops, that’s what the Russian economists said Moscow would get from the 2013 IAAF championships: 8 billion TV viewers? World population is 7 billion. For Eugene, EcoNorthwest’s prediction is 600% higher – for a $568M “total output contribution” and the equivalent of 2,608 full-year job equivalents. All that from a 10 day-long…
Update: Diane Dietz reports Track Town’s Vin Lananna will ask the state to double the hotel tax, to pay the IAAF’s demands. In the RG here: The forecast budget includes state tax dollars to pay for: $7.2 million for prizes $14 million to host the broadcast $9 million for accommodations $6…
A long opinion piece, here: Reopening the bidding process would also allow further public scrutiny of Nike and its role in Eugene’s candidacy: welcome in light of the new I.A.A.F. president Sebastian Coe’s longstanding commercial ties to the company that he only recently severed; welcome, too, in light of Lananna’s…
That’s the word from UO’s Public Records Officer. She then graciously offers to get a copy from Track Town: 12/22/2015 Dear Mr. Harbaugh, The University does not possess the bid book you requested, as TrackTown provided the bid book directly to the Register Guard. It is our understanding that Mr.…