These games will be a farce.

-PB

Could Australia's Chef de Mission being any less gracious?

Ridiculous way to carry on as a guest in someone else's country. (And a developing one at that.)

Granted there are issues but how about 'there's a few things that need sorting out and we're hoping they get fixed shortly' rather than slagging them off straight off the bat.

Just an awful performance by her.

Russia's Olympic crisis lays bare a prevailing political apathy in sport

That Russia’s participation could only be threatened by doping transgressions ignores what might be the least politically appealing Games in a generation

It's hard work for a country to get turfed out of the Olympics. You must seriously dedicate yourself to the task. It’s not enough to have a brutal, devious autocracy that flagrantly intimidates its domestic critics and is author of miseries all over the world. It’s not even enough to dope your athletes until they virtually glow in the dark.

You really need to get caught in the act so egregiously that the professional Pontius Pilates of Olympism can’t continue ignoring it – and even then, there is no certainty of their acting. After all, the movement has truckled to tyrants since its inception, with the justification that it sits at an Olympian remove from politics. The opening ceremony is a giant parade in which highly-trained, uniformed, national representatives march behind their country’s flags – nope, nothing political going on here, no respectability being conferred, no prestige on offer, all just citius, altus, fortius.

But then, perhaps the Olympics in this respect reflects our own prejudices, our ambivalence about sport’s political quotient, of which we’re queasily half-aware, while preserving a touching naivety about.

In the recent eulogies for Muhammad Ali, one encountered a note of profound nostalgia. Here was a proud, outspoken, racially defiant, politically engagé Caesar. When, some wondered, comes such another?

It’s certainly possible to argue never, not least because for many of the convictions Ali held he would now be anathematised. Conversion to Islam? Conscientious objection? Sympathy for enemy combatants (“No Viet Cong ever called me nigger”)? In the 1960s Ali had at least a counterculture in his corner. The social media shitstorms round an Ali figure today would leave us needing a new internet.

Ali was the harbinger of decades in which sport and politics seemed unavoidably, sometimes unapologetically, entwined. Sport was a forum for the dramatisation of Cold War rivalry and for the damnation of apartheid. Cricket could draw the Caribbean together, and ping-pong symbolised the thaw between the US and China. Football could pitch Honduras and El Salvador into war, and England into European disgrace.

Yet at some point there began a tilt back towards the ancient pretence, which flourished before Ali, that sport was most desirably a world unto itself – a tilt now so pronounced that an Adam Goodes or a David Pocock reminding us of the world beyond sport in even the most glancing fashion is received as the shrillest of campaigners.

So what happened? The simplest explanation for the seeming divergence of sport and politics is the interposition of business, with its preference for stable properties on which to project corporate messages and its partiality to the values of the entertainment industry. When the end of Cold War apparently ushered in a post-ideological age, only “causes” seemed to stand between sport and money, and these could usually be co-opted.

The emblematic athlete of the ensuing decade became Michael Jordan, reported to have recoiled when asked to endorse a black Democrat with the words: “Republicans buy sneakers too.” Sport’s “rebels” became those with colourful private lives, not those whose beliefs were at odds with the regnant culture.

Under the surface, sport was actually barely less political: its stealth neo-liberalism was merely less outwardly recognisable, more supple and pervasive. And on it everyone was unselfconsciously in: governments advancing electorally-appealing nationalisms, athletes burnishing shiny brands, corporates laundering mucky reputations, fans assuaging underlying anxieties, media enjoying and profiting from the spectacle. Sport was menaced more clearly by issues – doping, gambling, corruption, violence – than by state actors. These could, it was believed, be counterweighted by an expanded managerialism.

It’s this, I suspect, that has worsened sport’s susceptibilities in the face of the slow-motion collapse of the pre-9/11 order, during which countries have raced one another to moral bottoms and routinely abrogated international human rights protections while falling behind super-rich oligarchs. For these, sport is an avenue to global legitimacy, a salve for wounded national prides. No wonder marquee events have been pursued so covetously by regimes among the world’s murkiest – Russia, China, the states of the Gulf, the republics of Eastern Europe.

Far from resisting this embrace, sport has returned it, one of managerialism’s characteristics being that it always thinks it can do a deal. “Less democracy is sometimes better for organising a World Cup,” said Fifa’s erstwhile secretary-general Jerome Valcke not so long ago, in the spirit of Formula One’s Bernie Ecclestone praising Hitler being “able to get things done”.

And so impends an Olympic Games that is probably the most politically unappealing in more than a generation, in a tormented country wrung out just two years ago by the cost of a World Cup – yet there’s a strange reluctance to ponder the event’s deeper implications.

Our interest in Rio has been confined to speculating about the completion of facilities, indifferent to the favelas flattened, the public land gouged and the exchequer plundered in the process.

Our interest in Brazil has been restricted to the minimal threat of the Zika virus to participants, rather than to the poverty, inadequate sanitation, uncontrolled land use and pauperised public health systems that have helped spread it among Brazilians.

The Brazil of the XXXI Olympiad is a shadow of the nation that signed up for it, impoverished by a plunging oil price and the depredations of a kleptocratic elite. Yet the International Olympic Committee has no stake in affordability: its interests are selfish and transient. The people of Montreal spent 30 years paying off their Games. What burden awaits Rio’s disillusioned citizenry? Our party; their hangover.

So while the belated meting out of justice to Russia might offer a brief pang of righteousness, satisfaction should be short-lived. It is a truism that sports reflects the societies that play them. At the moment that has some worrying entailments.

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2016/jul/20/russias-olympic-crisis-lays-bare-a-prevailing-political-apathy-in-sport

Australia's Olympic Games Boss Kitty Chiller Demands Deployment Of 100,000 Troops In Rio

Chef de Mission Kitty Chiller urges Brazilian authorities to deploy their troops.

Kitty Chiller, Australia's Chef de Mission for the Rio Olympics, has urged Brazilian authorities to deploy security forces ahead of schedule in the wake of the gunpoint attack on Australian Paralympian Liesl Tesch and a team official in Rio overnight.

Chiller was talking tough outside the Australian Olympic Committee's Sydney headquarters as she demanded the early deployment of the 100,000 strong security force (made up of police, armed forces and security professionals) earmarked for the Olympic Games which run from August 5 to August 21.

"The Rio organisers need to introduce the extra security precautions as soon as possible before an athlete gets hurt. We have written to them today asking them to address this issue," Chiller said in an official statement.

She used much tougher language than that at her press conference.

"We are demanding that the organising committee and the City review whether the [security measures] they have in place are sufficient."

...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com.au/2016/06/21/australias-olympic-games-boss-kitty-chiller-demands-deployment/

The preach from this Chiller person is ridiculous. 16 page letter?

Rio Selection Sets Up James Magnussen For The Ultimate Redemption Story

One last shot for the 'Missile'

James Magnussen is off to the Rio Olympics after all, after world swimming's governing body FINA confirmed Australia's quota spot in the 4x100m freestyle relay overnight.

Magnussen missed Rio Olympics selection in his favoured individual events, the 50m and 100m freestyle, at the Australian Olympic trials in Adelaide in April. At that stage, the relay team had not yet qualified, and it appeared his Olympic dream might be over.

Now 25, the hulking, almost two-metre tall swimmer from Port Macquarie was the emblem of Australia's failure in London on both the behavioural and swimming front. He was involved in the Stilnox scandal before the games, and carried himself with a little too much swagger for most people's tastes.

When he missed gold in the 100m freestyle in London by just one hundredth of a second, it all seemed to make sense. A longer fingernail and the whole narrative would have been different. But what happened happened. To the humble go the spoils. And this bloke was the opposite of that.

...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com.au/2016/06/06/rio-selection-sets-up-james-magnussen-for-the-ultimate-redemptio/

Nick Kyrgios handed bad behaviour letter by Australian Olympic Committee: Kitty Chiller


Nick Kyrgios handed bad behaviour letter by Australian Olympic Committee: Kitty Chiller

"[They] received exactly the same letter that Nick Kyrgios did," Chiller said. "Admittedly, Nick's letter was 16 pages long. Theirs wasn't quite that long."
Kyrgios dramatically pulled out of contention for Rio on Friday, citing "unfair and unjust treatment" by the AOC, which he said had launched "unwarranted attacks" against him and had "chosen to publicly and privately disparage me". He said no one from the governing body had sought a meeting "to discuss their concerns".

A defiant Chiller rejected accusations Kyrgios had been targeted, said she had received support from across Australian sport for her stance on athlete behaviour generally and suggested Kyrgios would regret excluding himself from contention.
"I was surprised actually because, contrary to what was in his statement, we had reached out to him," Chiller said.
"He received a letter on the 30th of May, on Monday last week, asking him to basically please explain, to explain his side of the story. So we had reached out to get that from him. He chose to not respond to that and to withdraw. So, ultimately, it's his decision.
"We didn't unfairly target anyone. Anyone who makes a disclosure in their team membership agreement, which Nick did and other athletes and other officials have also done, they're treated consistently, they're treated fairly. Other athletes received exactly the same letter that Nick Kyrgios did."
Chiller said the letter outlined "the instances where we felt it could be perceived he had brought himself or the sport into disrepute and his was 16 pages long".
"I'm disappointed when any athlete doesn't understand what it means to be an Olympian," she said.
"I think it's something that in later years, if he doesn't get the opportunity to go to another Games, that he will very much regret it. I'm disappointed that an athlete of clearly so much talent and so much potential – you know, he is an incredible tennis player – I would love to see someone like that playing with the Australian Olympic crest on them. But I would also want that athlete to understand what it means and to respect the values of that being an Olympian means.
"Someone needs to stand up. Why I'm doing this is, we fought long and hard for the last three years to establish a set of behaviours for our team in Rio. There were comments after London that we didn't do that as well as we could. And we've worked really hard. And it's resonated with the athletes. The support that I've had from athletes and from team leaders and from sports has been incredible. I'm doing this for the 428 other athletes that we will have in Rio."
Chiller said that if Kyrgios changed his mind, he would have until June 17 to respond to the letter, as originally specified. The AOC executive would then "determine whether indeed he had brought himself, the sport or the Olympic movement into disrepute". Flanagan and Diamond face the same procedure, she said.
Meanwhile, Chiller said she respected golfer Jason Day's decision to miss the Games.
"Jason's been very clear that it's for medical reasons," she said. "I would love to see Jason there, but we fully understand if that's a decision he can't take."

http://www.smh.com.au/sport/olympics/rio-2016/nick-kyrgios-handed-bad-behaviour-letter-by-australian-olympic-committee-kitty-chiller-20160604-gpbnj3.html

Are you in a position to say that? How much do you know about WADA procedure?

As is the case at every Olympics & every Tour de France......

They'll probably be very strict in terms of their carrying out tests (making it difficult for athletes to get away with).

I found a rather telling statement from Raelene Boyle.

"I'm not sure what the IOC (International Olympic Committee) is trying to do with these sports, but I just think it is sad for the other athletes when you get third- and fourth-grade athletes winning gold silver and bronze medals," Boyle said.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-06-03/nick-kyrgios-to-regret-rio-olympics-withdrawal-raelene-boyle/7476130

The debate about whether sports like tennis should be in the Olympics might be fair enough. But her comments afterwards say it all. She thinks of tennis players and athletes from various other sports as "third- and fourth-grade athletes".

What a shocking person she is.

Australian Olympic Committee pushed Nick Kyrgios over the edge and it’s time to fix it

THE Australian Olympic Committee and its outspoken Rio team chief Kitty Chiller shouldn’t get to have it both ways over Nick Kyrgios.

After meeting the young tennis player down on his level of discourse for most of the last month — trading tough words in the public domain — Chiller clammed up as Kyrgios was taken to an inevitable end game on Friday, deciding to rule himself out of the Rio Games.

“Unfortunately, while I have expressed every intention of trying to win a medal for my country in Rio, it’s very clear to me that the Australian Olympic Committee has other plans,” Kyrgios wrote in a statement on his website.

He spoke of the AOC’s “unfair and unjust treatment”, and considering their silence over other potential Olympians facing pre-Games strife, his point is undeniable.

“While I have received assurances from Tennis Australia that I will be nominated for the Olympic team, the AOC has chosen to publicly and privately disparage me. Not one member of the AOC has reached out to me, my family, my team, or representatives of Tennis Australia, asking for a meeting or the opportunity to discuss their concerns.”

Kyrgios is an emotional athlete whose on-court actions point to a complex view of authority.

He was happy to go to the edge with Chiller, whose tough statements were clearly a matter of choice.

She gave him the push, with comments over the past month that were, if not designed to push him further from the Olympic Games team, certainly had that effect.

He’s not everyone’s cuppa — and there’s not much that a brash young millionaire athlete in a fish bowl sport would share in common with a 51-year-old former modern pentathlete. And Chiller’s Olympic experience has clearly shaped her opinion of who is the right kind of Olympian and who isn’t. At the Sydney Olympics she was forced to escape the rampant party animals of the athletes village to find a few fractured hours of sleep in a medical room at 2am the night before she finished 14th.

Different eras, different experiences and different levels of maturity. Yet Chiller has engaged Krygios at his level.

There has been much to like about her work this year. She has spoken loudly and often, pushing the Olympic message. One Olympics insider told me he couldn’t remember more chatter this far out from a Games since Sydney, due to her efforts. Most of that chatter, though, has been at the expense of public whipping boys Kyrgios and Bernard Tomic.

Chiller started this by publicly commenting on his suitability for the Olympic team and saying he was being watched.

When he responded — and only with a modicum of cheekiness, suggesting she watch an outrageous shot he played on court — she wouldn’t let it ride.

“We’ve had nothing official apart from some ill-advised comments about me and what it means to be an Olympian. I think some of Nick’s comments in social media in the past week shows he doesn’t really understand what it means to be an Australian Olympian,” Chiller said.

“As with any athlete. There are a couple of athletes on notice. Nick has just come off a suspended sentence from his International Tennis Federation. Any athlete that has just had a disciplinary action from their international federation is on watch.”

Those comments were a tactical and political error, a view as much as confirmed on Friday when Kyrgios played his card that cost an intrigued Australian public of the chance to see him in an Olympics, a sporting event a huge part of our country reveres.

And then after all the back and forth, and the tough talk, Chiller hid behind blandness.

A prepared AOC statement — with emphasis on “prepared” but carrying Chiller’s name if not her natural voice — washed its hands of Kyrgios.

“At this point, Nick Kyrgios, or any other tennis athlete, has not been nominated for selection on the Australian Olympic Team.

“In regard to selection every athlete in contention is treated equally and fairly.

“We have no further comment on this issue.”

He’s not our problem.

It’s the approach Chiller should have taken with Kyrgios from the start, and there’s no doubt her superiors at the AOC wish she had. Kyrgios was never part of her problem until named on the Olympic team, yet she made him just that.

It’s the approach Chiller and the AOC hierarchy have taken with hockey star Anna Flanagan, who allegedly covered up a drink driving charge, and Olympic champion Michael Diamond who faces court next week on a range of drink driving and firearms charges.

The question is why Chiller chose one path with them and quite another with Kyrgios, disparaging and upsetting the player and Tennis Australia even though he had yet to be nominated for the team.

It is an error that could deprive Australia of a medal but more than that, an athlete who can help make the Olympics more relevant to Australian sports fans. She should find a way to put it right.

Kyrgios says the AOC hasn’t spoken to him, nor Tennis Australia, about his potential participation in Rio. As hard as it would be for Chiller to stomach, she needs to do that now.
http://www.foxsports.com.au/olympics/australian-olympic-committee-pushed-nick-kyrgios-over-the-edge-and-its-time-to-fix-it/news-story/70cb326d160daa360af65fcaa0136033