Thursday, August 11, 2016

Revealing priorities

Ireland is having a bad Olympics: a boxer sent home for doping, an official allocation of tickets ending up on the black market, and reminders of the unfair outcome of the Athens marathon when an Irish gobsh*te tackled the race leader. Someone whose name is a common thread to all these stories is Irish Olympic Council president Pat Hickey.

What was Pat Hickey reaching out to the media about in the run up to the Rio Olympics? Er, defending Russia from the slings and arrows of its doping tribulations --

[Irish Times] --  A new report expected to call for an outright ban on Russia from competing at next month’s Rio Olympics has already been slammed by Pat Hickey, president of the Olympic Council of Ireland (OCI), who has questioned both its “integrity” and “credibility” just prior to publication. Hickey, a member of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) executive board, has also admitted to being “shocked” that both the US and Canadian anti-doping agencies are backing this outright ban on Russia, asking “what mandate they have to lead an international call for a ban of another nation in the Olympic family.”

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