Olympic Heritage: Coventry's failure, the Olympic Shop, the Riefenstahl films, the Nazi Olympics, motorways and German Olympic bids
The reporting on Nazi symbolism in The Olympic Shop deserves some background information and documentation. So here is a story about how the IOC basically blackmailed (German) Olympic bidders and how much money the IOC Group paid for the 1936 Olympic films financed by Joseph Goebbels.
This newsletter covers a lot of ground: the International Olympic Committee's (IOC) handling of its own history, mass murderers, despots, warmongers, state doping, the so-called Olympic Truce, an athlete who wants to commemorate murdered comrades and is therefore denied Olympic participation; once again, the business practices of the IOC Group in Lausanne and certain ethical and moral principles become clear... let's leave it at this incomplete list.
At the very bottom, you, the paying subscribers, will be rewarded with previously unpublished documents on the sale of the rights to Leni Riefenstahl's Olympic films by the Federal Republic of Germany to the IOC.
Let's start in Milan, where IOC president Kirsty Coventry from Zimbabwe faced some questions on Friday, the day after her much-discussed crocodile tears. Christoph Becker from the FAZ newspaper, one of the few knowledgeable sports politics observers in the world, asked the IOC president a question:
"Do you acknowledge the IOC is giving dictators a propaganda machine that they use in the worst cases to wage war against neighboring states in the world?"
Becker had prepared this question with references to, among other things, Russia's war of annihilation in Ukraine, the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, and the 1936 Nazi Olympics in Berlin and Garmisch-Partenkirchen.
His question could also be translated as:
Ms. Coventry, do you acknowledge historical facts?
Listen to Kirsty Coventry's response.
And pay close attention to how she answers.
