The Conversation
Olympic anti-corruption
The 2024 Paris Games were another step forward for the Olympics as a tool for combating corruption, professor Andy Spalding wrote recently in The Conversation. Here’s an excerpt:
The Frenchman Pierre de Coubertin resurrected the Olympic Games 125 years ago in hopes that they could provide an example of diverse nations competing, with good will, by an agreed-upon set of rules.
Among those rules the world most eagerly wants respected is the anti-corruption principle: that power ought not be abused for private gain, that athletes and businesses alike will compete by common rules with transparency and accountability.
After 25 years of repeated violations — and the dramatic plummeting of the Olympics brand ... the International Olympic Committee amended its “omnibus host city” contract to include ... a clause obligating the host city to adopt leading anti-corruption measures.
With the Paris Games [at] an end, the eyes of the sporting world will soon turn to the United States and what the State Department has called the nation’s “most important decade” in sports. In the space of 10 years, the U.S. will host the 2026 FIFA Men’s World Cup (with Canada and Mexico), the 2028 Los Angeles Summer Olympics, the 2031 Rugby World Cup, and the 2034 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics.
The U.S. lacks the two features of France’s anti-corruption framework that made [its] anti-corruption revolution possible. The U.S. encourages but does not mandate that companies adopt anti-corruption compliance programs. And it lacks an agency that provides the kind of anti-corruption compliance support that the Agence Française Anticorruption gave Paris.
As a result, the organizing committees of these U.S. events will exist in a kind of anti-corruption blind spot. So I believe the U.S. will have to innovate, lest it drop the anti-corruption baton that France will soon hand off. Do Americans still wish to be a global anti-corruption leader — in sports if not beyond? As the country faces a megasports spotlight for the next 10 years, it may find itself looking in the mirror.