Ireland:The most annoying thing about the Irish Olympic Rio fiasco is not the shame that the president of the Olympic Council of Ireland (OCI) Pat Hickey has brought on us. It is that we needed the Brazil police to expose what was going on and do something about it.
It’s not like we had no warning in Ireland that something was amiss. There had been rumors floating about at the London Olympics in 2012 that something peculiar was going on with the sale of tickets allotted to the OCI.
There seemed to be no shortage of Irish tickets available to people with enough money to pay for expensive hospitality packages. But tickets for ordinary Irish sports fans at face value prices seemed to be impossible to get, unless you were very lucky.
The Brazilian soccer legend turned national politician, Romario, was so suspicious about what was happening in London at the time that he spoke about it in the Brazilian Parliament, naming Hickey. Since the Olympics was coming to Brazil next Romario had good reason to be concerned and he repeated his concerns to the Brazilian police who began to take an interest.
Somehow, however, there seemed to be no concern about this in Ireland, either then or in the intervening years, right up to last week. No political voices were raised here asking questions. The gardai showed no interest.
Instead, Hickey continued to be part of the Irish elite, rubbing shoulders with the president, the taoiseach and other senior figures in politics, business and sports.
The mutual back-scratching continued, with the OCI giving free tickets, trips and hotel stays to politicians and the same politicians giving state funding to the OCI with no proper oversight of how it was being spent. Hickey had been head of the OCI for nearly three decades, which breaks all the rules for good governance, and seemed to be untouchable.
The warning signs were there for anyone who wanted to see. A major British ticketing company called THG which had been the authorized ticket reseller (ATR) for the OCI at the London Olympics in 2012 and the Winter Olympics in Sochi in 2014 was again in line to be nominated by the OCI to be in charge of the sale of Irish tickets for Rio.
But the Rio organizers refused to accept THG (they had already questioned the company’s then chief executive in Brazil about ticket touting at the 2014 World Cup). Yet this did not raise any red flags in Ireland.
Nor was there any concern here when the OCI then appointed Pro10 as its ATR, even though this small Co. Kildare-based company was new and had no experience in dealing with Olympic tickets. As it turned out, it did not even have the resources to put its own representative on the ground in Rio during the Games.
The Brazilian police believe that Pro10 was used by Hickey simply as a channel to move OCI tickets through to THG. Yet no one here seems to have suspected that such a scenario might have been underway, even though there were clear links between Hickey and THG (for whom Hickey’s son had worked during the London Olympics).
As you will know from news reports, an Irishman called Kevin Mallon, who is a director of THG, was arrested in Rio two weeks ago with more than 800 Olympic tickets in his possession — most of them OCI tickets for the best events at the Games — and is now in jail there as investigations continue.
THG was not the Irish ATR for the Rio Games, so what he appeared to be doing was illegal. This is what led the Irish Minister for Sport Shane Ross to go immediately to Rio for a meeting with Hickey and demand answers.
How did a THG executive get so many OCI tickets? Instead of answers Ross was given the runaround by Hickey, despite the fact that nearly half the OCI’s funding is taxpayers’ money.
But this humiliation of the minister was then overtaken by events when Hickey was arrested in his hotel early the next morning. The latest news is that he is now sharing a cell with Mallon.
