Greed trumps rights for women ski jumpers

The decisions of the B.C. Supreme Court, the B.C. Court of Appeal, and now the Supreme Court of Canada, by denying leave, are very troubling.

The lower courts decided the contract between VANOC and the International Olympic Committee giving the latter "supreme authority" over what sports will be included was not subject to Canada's Charter of Rights and Freedoms because IOC is located in Switzerland.

Even though the B.C. Supreme Court decided IOC had acted in a discriminatory manner and that VANOC was under the Charter because it delivered a "uniquely governmental activity," its contract with the IOC tied its hands on this particular human-rights issue. And make no mistake, this is a human-rights issue, not a case of women ski jumpers failing to meet international standards.

In November 2006, the Olympic Programme Commission recommended to the IOC that women's ski jumping not be included in the 2010 Games because it had not had a world championship. They also decided there wasn't a strong base of athletes at the international level who jumped with consistency.

At that time, 83 women ski jumpers competed in 14 nations at elite events. As of 2009 there are 160 women from 18 nations.

But the IOC did add skier cross for 2010. In 2006, there were 34 women from 10 nations in that sport, but the recommendation came on the heels of another programme commission report that totalled "viewer hours" from the 2006 Torino Olympics.

At those Games, snowboard cross had been added, even though it was equally sparse on the numbers side. But snowboard cross appealed to the magic "15- to 25-year" age group Olympic sponsors like McDonald's, Samsung and Coke love.

Despite its infancy as a sport, this BMX-on-snow event and the other two snowboarding events, half pipe and parallel GS, pulled in 112,728,260 viewer hours, second only to figure skating.

Skier cross for 2010 doesn't come close to meeting IOC selection criteria. But young people going fast and crashing is money in the bank in terms of selling broadcast rights in the age of video games.

BMX debuted as a sport at the 2008 Beijing Games. Indeed, the IOC's 2008 "Marketing Fact File" shows Olympic broadcasts revenue went from $1.3 million US in the 1993-1996 quadrennial to $2.2 million US in the 2001-2004 quadrennial. Broadcast rights for Vancouver and the London 2012 Games are 30 per cent higher.

Imagine how many young consumers watch Coke commercials while waiting for a collision to occur? The IOC and VANOC swapped human rights for greed.

All revenues combined in the 2001-2004 quadrennial, according to the IOC, saw over $4 billion go into its coffers. Just try, however, to obtain access to the real goods on the IOC and its income. Switzerland categorizes the mainly old, male, self-electing group as a "non-profit sports club," thus saving the organization the bother of even the regular 20 per cent Swiss tax. There's a reason they locate in that very secretive and agreeable country.

The IOC can be very agreeable, too, especially when it comes to its members. Franco Carraro, president of the Olympic Programme Commission, is an IOC member from Italy and former president of FIGC -- the Italian soccer federation. He had to resign from FIGC just months before he made his recommendation about women's ski jumping because police had wiretapped his phone and found overwhelming evidence of his involvement in game-fixing that involved top clubs such as FC Juventus, AC Milan, ACF Fiorentina and SS Lazio.

The FIGC decided Carrraro must not make any sport-related decisions for the next four-and-a-half years.

He immediately appealed and by the time November rolled around he had this sentence removed. It was replaced with an 80,000-euro fine.

VANOC knew all of this when it accepted Carraro's recommendation to keep women's ski jumping out, but add skier cross, though nothing of this scandal is mentioned in the tens of thousands of pages of documents VANOC fed through the so-called Canadian justice system when it extolled the virtues of the IOC.

How could anyone question the integrity of an organization that believes so much in fair play that it hunts down athletes and checks their pee to make sure they don't cheat?

Feel like wearing your red mittens now?

Laura Robinson is a former provincial champion in Nordic skiing.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition December 30, 2009 A15