Dear readers and subscribers, in just a few days, the Paris Olympic Games will open on and around the Seine. Tomorrow, the IOC session will open pompously at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, they just don't learn, they don't become modest. And from Wednesday, if I've seen correctly, the first competitions will already begin.
Paris will be magnificent, absolutely marvellous, the IOC has invested around three quarters of a billion dollars in the production of the images, you know, it's like always with the Olympics: it's the images that count.
Iconic images will be produced en masse in Paris, the most iconic city in the world. Nothing that has ever been produced at the Olympic Games can compare with this.
These images are the core business of the IOC Group. Everything else is secondary. The propaganda is huge. But can iconic images heal any wounds?
Deep wounds, triggered by wars and crises (often enough triggered by despots with whom the IOC Group does and will continue to do fantastic business, as the chainsaw monster MBS has just been honoured with twelve years of hosting the Olympic E-Sport Games). Deep wounds, triggered by systemic misconduct within the Olympic family, which in its mechanisms – whether you like it or not, dear readers, it's the truth – resembles mafia-like organisations in parts.
The power of images cannot be defeated. You can only counteract important details and perfect the image, because as we know, there are quite ugly, sad and extremely shady elements alongside these iconic images.
That is the task of journalism. That's how we see our job in THE INQUISITOR project and elsewhere where we publish our journalistic products. So in the coming days and weeks, we will continue to counter the propaganda of IOC Sun King Thomas Bach and his Napoleonic ally Emmanuel Macron with a few details.
No more and no less.
And all this under increasingly poor working conditions with more and more fundamental restrictions on journalistic freedoms by the IOC.
Read the thread!
The IOC is further restricting freedom of movement + press freedom @Paris2024. The restrictive media policy under IOC Holiness Thomas Bach and chief propagandists Mark Adams/Christian Klaue, who are paid millions during the Olympic cycle, continues ... /1 @AIPSmedia @RSF_inter pic.twitter.com/ZqF9Xm2Pwl
— SPORT & POLITICS (@JensWeinreich) July 15, 2024
There will be daily reporting as far as we are able, including daily articles (you could also call them live blogs) in which we provide you with details that we consider important. There will also be the usual analyses and background information, documents and explanations. We are a small team, but some of us are among the world's best experts in our fields.
Once again: no more and no less.
Let's put it this way, with the necessary restraint: whenever the iconic images start to crack, you've come to the right place and should find what you're looking for.
You will find some details here that you won't find anywhere else.
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Over the next few days, we will be regularly pointing out that good journalism doesn't come for free, and certainly not revelations.
And with that, a few more recommended reads for today:
Romain Molina has not only published his latest book these days – "Le livre noir des jeux olympiques" (link to Amazon) –, he has also worked on a number of topics for THE INQUISITOR and will continue to do so in the coming weeks.
You may read:
Romain Molina
Romain Molina
Romain Molina
Andy Brown
Romain has uncovered many scandals in French sport with his tenacious research over many years – for several media outlets in France and abroad.
Romain appeared as an expert witness in the spectacular committee of enquiry on all the scandals in French sport. There he described, among other things, how his attempts to convince the Ministry of Sport to take action failed. Documents presented by Romain Molina were ignored one after the other.
The investigation report states, for example:
"The analysis made by journalist Romain Molina, who believes that the Inspectorate General's report on the French Football Federation is not a complete analysis of the situation in the French game, is a good one.
'In France, we've always attacked one person in particular, often the presidents of the federations: Mr Laporte in rugby and Mr Le Graët in football. But at no point do we attack the system, as if one person were responsible for all the treacle, all the filth. Either people are being taken for fools or there is a lack of knowledge, but either way, it won't solve the problems. We've saved systems who turned a blind eye to abominable acts, without ever tackling the root of the problem."
WADA has recently taken an interest in our articles, which is partly due to these contributions, mainly by Craig Lord (currently mainly in State Of Swimming +) and Andy Brown:
Andy Brown
Jens Weinreich
I have recently written two articles in German about two excellent TV documentaries that you should definitely watch. (Feel free to use a translation programme of your choice):
Jens Weinreich
Jens Weinreich
It's about doping and the latest TV documentary from Eye.Opening.Media by Hajo Seppelt, Nick Butler et al, including new details on alleged Chinese mass doping. And it's about a film by Robert Kempe and Tom Klees, "War and Games", which is also internationally unique!
Allow me two quotes from my articles on SPORT & POLITICS, only roughly translated for you.
On Team Seppelt's 88 minutes doping documentary:
What Eufemiano Fuentes says there in front of a hidden camera is substantial, it is simply a very important piece of the puzzle in the big story: it belongs in the very best sense of the word on the Olympic History Channel, which nobody should confuse with the IOC's Olympic Channel.
It doesn't appear on the IOC channel.
And you see, we're already in the middle of July 2024. It's only a stone's throw from Barcelona 1992 to Paris 2024 in terms of content - and back again. Incidentally, Seppelt's team also tries to make this connection in the latest work, even mentioning Moscow 1980 again, the old story that already preoccupied the older generation among us journalists in the 1990s, Manfred Donike with his private retests of the 1980 doping samples in Moscow, which were officially clean but actually contaminated with testosterone.
That's a total of two hours of video for you, but you've got everything, not everything, but a crash course through recent doping and Olympic history: Moscow, Seoul, Flo-Jo, Barcelona, Fuentes, Charlie Francis, Balco, Sydney, Jones & Montgomery, cycling, WADA, Berendonk & Franke, GDR, Spain, USA, Rodchenkov, Russia, the IOC, Athens, London, Olympic retests, history falsifiers, propagandists and of course recent findings on alleged Chinese mass doping in swimming.
Best Olympic education, I love that word, as it should be.
This kind of Olympic History Channel is more important than ever. Because against it (also with the millions paid by the public broadcasters, it has to be said!) there is a huge propaganda campaign controlled by the IOC Napoleon and France's Napoleon, which serves us Paris 2024 as an incomparable, wonderful, fair festival of peace for humanity.
Fuentes describes the past. What Spain did, the French also did back then, setting up a doping system (with an IOC member as sports minister in a leading role, Guy Drut), which was then smashed again at some point. A few decades later, shortly before the Games, things are looking pretty terrible behind the scenes in French sport, because it's clear that medals have to be won, whatever the cost: "On the road to Paris 2024: 'omerta at all levels', a 'rape culture' and 'systemic dysfunctions' in sport".
On Kempe's great "War and Games" documentary:
Kempe and Klees were (the list is not exhaustive) in Afghanistan, Moscow, Kiev, Israel, Kazan, Ramallah, Lausanne and elsewhere for the documentary - but while other documentaries like to peddle how great the presenters are at research and what they've seen and spared no expense or effort, it doesn't matter in this film, which incidentally deserves much more than 46:11 minutes. It is a quiet film, with impressive images and quotes. The makers keep a discreet distance, it may be that someone appears in the film, but that wasn't important to them, and that's a good thing. They hold back on commentary, which is even better than good for this subject.
So it's all about the IOC's so-called Olympic Truce, Paris is staged as a single peace festival, it's about the IOC's postulates (yes, Thomas Bach often pops up with fragments from his Sunday speeches) and it's elegantly made clear that the heads of the Olympic organisation didn't waste too much energy on keeping in touch with those affected, to put it mildly. There were one or two visits (Bach in Kiev, for example) and a bit of money flowed, that was it. There is no colossal criticism of Bach/IOC, it all runs elegantly alongside and should even be easy to understand for viewers who lack a lot of background information and are not so familiar with the topic.
The statements are mostly breathtaking and leave you speechless. It becomes clear (once again) that there can be no real peace in sport between Ukraine and Russia and Israel and Palestine for years to come. The suffering is too great. The points of view are too politically extreme, especially on two sides.
Even the opening sequence is powerful. Gymnasts training in Kiev. In the usual presenter reports, someone would rush in front of the camera and murmur: We're here in Kiev and it's getting dangerous, you can already hear the alarm signal, we're going to the bomb shelter ...
But Kempe and Klees let it go. You're immediately caught up in the atmosphere.
Then the Ukrainian Olympic gymnast tells them that Dad hasn't been in touch for three days and she's worried.
"The fear is so destructive," says Mariia Vysochanska.
You need that first little break.
If I've understood correctly, she later says that sport could help Ukraine to continue to exist.
No, it doesn't get any smaller than that. And who, if not a person affected, has the right to say such sentences.
Even the Taliban's highest sports official, Ahmadullah Wasiq, has his say. "Sport plays a key role in global politics," explains the fiend. He has already realised that. Then he announces: "There are no women's sports in Afghanistan at the moment." End of the announcement.
The Palestinian Olympic boxer Wasim Abusal says:
"The more intense the war gets, the more determined I become. A Palestinian does not surrender. Some athletes already have martyr status."
The NOC presidents of Israel (Yael Arad, IOC member) and Palestine (Jibril Ar-Radzhub) also appear in the documentary. Arad in particular is clearly suffering, although Ar-Radschub, I'm sorry to say, just comes across as a pompous bigwig. Don't mix sport & politics, you know: Ar-Radschub is the full-time secretary general of Fatah, he is also the head of the very busy football association.
A few years ago, Ar-Radschub once said on a petition for a minute's silence in memory of the Israeli victims of the attack at the 1972 Summer Games in Munich:
"We don't have a nuclear bomb, but I swear, if we had a nuclear bomb, we would have used it this morning."
Kempe and Klees manage without such archive snippets. They let people talk, they show and they don't overload the whole thing. And towards the end, you even believe that the dreadful Irina Viner (formerly Usmanova) and Putin's playmate Alina Kabaeva are now talking. Kempe, who has often travelled to Russia (and to Ukraine during the turmoil of the war), can be trusted to do so.
But it remains with the close-ups during Putin's BRICS Games in Kazan. And that's no small thing, because other TV producers would have commented and/or added a sequence saying that they had tried everything in a top-investigative way, but Viner and Kabaeva didn't want to talk.
Until the next newsletter, stay curious and subscribe to THE INQUISITOR!
