ATR Guest Interview -- Richard Peterkin: Calling It as He Sees It

Tracey Holmes is an award-winning senior reporter and anchor with ABC News (Australia). She has covered the Olympic Games since Barcelona 1992 and hosts a weekly sports issues podcast called 'The Ticket', where this interview first appeared.

Holmes has also worked for CCTV (China), CNN (Middle East) and Australia's Olympic broadcaster, Channel 7. She is a senior lecturer in journalism at UTS, Sydney and mentors numerous young reporters around the world.

The International Olympic Committee is searching for relevance: plagued by corruption scandals, with bid cities falling by the way side and a growing reputation for being out of touch.

One of its members, from the small island nation of St. Lucia, sees the need for change.

Richard Peterkin represents a different breed of Olympic guardians - the type the establishment is not quite sure how to handle.

He’s not a power broker, more a backbencher, with a lot to say. Although he prefers to spell that ‘Bach-bencher’ - in the service of current IOC president, Thomas Bach, with the organization grappling for relevance on a number of fronts.

Speaking on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s ‘The Ticket’ program on Sunday he said the IOC, like all global organizations, is not immune from politics. But Peterkin believes it can be handled better.

"I still feel perhaps the IOC is seen as being a little too aloof, a little too elitist and too arrogant in making assumptions that whatever they’re doing was so good for the world that everybody should just well and truly accept that it’s going to bring great legacy and benefits to the world."

The next Olympics are only 14 weeks away, the Winter Games of PyeongChang. Ticket sales are slow, North Korea is just over the border ramping up threats of nuclear war, and the general fascination with what was once ‘the greatest show on earth’ is in decline.

The IOC is even investigating how to make esports part of the Games as a way to attract the next generation of Olympic consumers.

Bid cities for future Games are dropping like flies.

While governments say ‘yes’ to spending billions of dollars to host the event, more and more, the people are saying ‘no’.

"To be fair the IOC and President Bach were aware of it when he came to office and he tried to address some of these things with his Agenda 2020."

"But I don’t think for one minute that they actually felt or thought that it would get as risky as it is with the number of cities dropping out."

Peterkin says the IOC remains ‘very concerned’ and that the casual observer views this growing rejection as ‘something basically wrong with the model’.

The Sochi Winter Games of 2014 had a price tag upwards of $51 billion. The cost of bidding alone now carries a price tag of around $100 million with no guarantee of success.

Peterkin also says the rise of populist movements around the globe, as well as social media, are playing their part in influencing electorates to vote ‘no’.

Corruption scandals in Olympic sports governing bodies, such as FIFA (football) and the IAAF (track and field), have also impacted on the IOC and, he says, the idea of ‘Olympic legacy’ has not been adequately explained.

"The IOC has actually tried to put out a rationale and a justification of legacy, even after the Rio Games, by trying to point to a number of things that show staging the games has benefited the cities or countries - but it has not been very successful at that."

"I remember when we had the IOC session back in London 2012, and the session was a couple of days before the Games started, and I had the temerity to ask a question as to how do we measure legacy and how do we overcome the negative questions you tend to get right up until the first day of the games.

"Having asked that question I was then put in my place by one of the IOC guys saying, ‘you, of all people, are an IOC member, you should understand what legacy the games will bring – I shouldn’t have to tell you what it does.’

"It was that kind of arrogance that was potentially part of the problem because the assumption was - you have the Games, you get legacy.

"The sad part about it is that a majority of the countries of the world – particularly small ones like St. Lucia – get a tremendous benefit from the IOC in terms of the money we get on an annual basis which our government can’t afford."

The National Olympic committee in St. Lucia is not government funded but through the Olympic Solidarity program it gets half a million dollars in a four-year cycle to assist athletes, provide scholarships, coaching development and technical courses.

But there’s a downside.

"You see I am from a tiny country…so when I get in there, while everybody is friendly and nice and what not, what I find is that I’m kind of expected to toe the line and accept that the people elected to the executive board are well informed, they’re smart people, they know what they’re doing, the decisions they make are correct. So when something is brought to you as a member, you should go along with it.

"And so, to some extent, we became a rubber-stamping organization with the one significant difference being that we got a chance to vote on who would stage the games and sometimes the results of those votes were not quite what we expected."

"To that extent you might say there are some corrupt members who may have taken money over the years … that will never go away, that’s a human thing: if somebody wants something badly enough they will cheat, as athletes do with doping, or they will bribe in order to get what they want."

As it seems is the case with the now suspended Honorary IOC Member, and head of Brazil’s Rio 2016 Games, Carlos Nuzman.

Last month he was arrested and charged with corruption, money laundering and bribery.

Peterkin summed up the reaction at IOC headquarters with one word: "Panic."

"Rio was a problem Games."

"I don’t think most IOC members are corrupt, I think it’s a minority, and I think that same minority you will find in every global organization, in every country, in every business.

"How do you keep people honest, you tell me?

"Recently we all just had to sign a new ethics agreements saying we won’t do this, and this, and this, so if it’s found out later we did, then we can automatically be expelled."

Peterkin also says the call for more independence of IOC established sports bodies such as the World Anti Doping Agency (WADA), the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) and the newly established Independent Testing Authority (ITA) is justified.

"I believe we’ve come to a time in the world where there’s such a lack of trust in business, and in global organizations, that perhaps we just need to give into that and say ‘you know what? We must have completely 100 percent independence’’.

"Even if it means you lose a little bit of representation and influence, but if it pacifies all of those who are really concerned about whether its doing the job properly, and you buy the trust and confidence of them, then it’s a victory in a sense."

"Maybe in this particular instance we need to give it a chance."

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