The years-long case also implicated one of Africa’s top track athletes, four-time Olympic medalist Frank Fredericks of Namibia who rose as an IOC member to take a seat on its executive board. The former IAAF president’s conviction marked a spectacular fall from grace for such an influential figure in the world of Olympic sports.Īt the sentencing last week in Brazil of its one-time most senior Olympic official Carlos Nuzman, the court was told bribes were paid so that the Diack family could help secure several IOC votes for Rio in 2009. His son was sentenced in his absence to five years in prison. In May, Diack returned home to Senegal from France, where he had been under house arrest, after a local soccer club paid a bond of about $600,000 to let him leave.ĭiack was convicted on multiple charges of corruption during his tenure, some of it related to the Russian doping scandal. Instead, a controlled in-house process picks a single preferred host for IOC members to rubber-stamp.ĭiack was sentenced to four years in prison, two of them suspended, in September 2020 for covering up the payment of bribes by Russian athletes involved in doping cases and the financing by Russia of political campaigns in Senegal. The IOC has now scrapped the traditional bid campaigns and contests that proved vulnerable to abuse, and IOC members no longer vote from a range of candidates. Among its opponents was a Chicago bid supported at the vote in Denmark by then-President Barack Obama.Īn ongoing French investigation has linked Papa Massata Diack to financial wrongdoing connected to Tokyo’s winning bid to host the 2020 Olympics. They were linked to extorting cash from runners, to cover up their doping cases before the 2012 London Olympics, and taking bribes from Brazilian officials to help ensure Rio de Janeiro was picked as the 2016 Olympics host. “With the death of Lamine Diack, Senegal loses one of its most illustrious sons,” the west African country’s President Macky Sall said via Twitter.Ī former politician in Senegal, Diack became head of the IAAF in 1999 and saw the sport flourish during his time in charge, in part because of the popularity of sprinter Usain Bolt.īehind the scenes, Diack and his son Papa Massata Diack were involved in wrongdoing that would taint the integrity of their sport and the IOC’s bidding contests and votes to choose Olympic host cities. Diack died in his home country, Senegal, where he was allowed to return this year from France after being detained under house arrest for several years and then convicted of various corruption charges linked to abuses of his prominent positions in world sports.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
January 2023
Categories |