Mark Zeigler: Controversy, scandal and international incidents are practically Olympic sports

PARIS – Modern pentathlon is an Olympic sport. It consists of five events: pistol shooting, epee fencing, a 200-meter swim, show-jumping on unfamiliar horses, and something called the laser run where competitors fire laser pistols at five targets.

Artistic swimming is an Olympic sport. So is slalom and flatwater canoeing, team handball, badminton, skateboarding, sport climbing, taekwondo, BMX freestyle cycling, break dancing and don’t forget about trampoline.

So is controversy, scandal and international incidents.

Storm de caca, as former U.S. Olympic press officer Bob Condron liked to say.

It’s not listed on the official Olympic program of 48 sports. But it’s part of the Games. Always has been. Always will be.

Put 10,000-odd athletes from 200-odd nations in the same hot, overcrowded city for three weeks, and something is going to happen. Ryan Lochte is going to happen.

You remember Lochte. At the 2016 Games in Rio de Janeiro, he went out on the town with three fellow U.S. swimmers and claimed they had been robbed by gunman posing as police, preying on the city’s reputation as a criminal haven. Security video footage later showed the green-haired Aquaman, after a night of revelry, vandalizing a gas station bathroom when they found it locked and then merrily returning to the athletes’ village.

“The Lochte Mess Monster,” the tabloid headline in the New York Daily News screamed. “‘Rob’ tale exposed as boozy coverup.”

“Liar, liar, Speedo on fire,” the New York Post trumpeted.

There have been no overt acts of Ugly Americanism in Paris, other than tourists trying to order in a French restaurant (speaking louder doesn’t mean the waiter will suddenly understand English), but there’s still time. And the rest of the world has provided plenty of fodder even before torch touched caldron last Friday.

Let’s start with our friendly northern neighbors, eh?

A staffer on the Canada women’s soccer team thought it would be a good idea to send up a drone and spy on New Zealand’s practice ahead of their Olympic opener, presumably to gather some tactical intel that would help the reigning gold medalists decipher the 28th-ranked Kiwis. Never mind that French police had been openly vigilant in grounding drones in the run-up to the Games for security reasons and admitted to media they were confiscating an average of six per day.

When police identified the drone’s operator and his intentions, Canada’s soccer federation quickly apologized, saying a “non-accredited analyst” was at fault and it was sending him home along with the assistant coach who oversaw him, like they were rogue operators.

Then stories started surfacing that both the Canadian men’s and women’s teams had been doing this for years, that it was part of unwritten job responsibilities. Head coach Bev Priestman stepped down, and soccer’s world governing body penalized the team six points, or the equivalent of two wins, in the Olympic soccer tournament.

Drone-gate was Monday. On Tuesday, dressage rider Charlotte Dujardin, poised to become Great Britain’s more decorated Olympic athlete with a seventh medal in Paris, withdrew from the Games after a video surfaced of her whipping a horse in practice. “An error in judgment,” Dujardin said.

Japan removed the 19-year-old captain of its women’s gymnastics team for “smoking and drinking,” which are against the law in Japan until age 20 … but the Netherlands allowed a convicted rapist to play beach volleyball.

In 2016, Steve van de Velde pleaded guilty to raping a 12-year-old British girl and was sentenced to four years in a British prison. He served 12 months before being returned to Dutch authorities. He returned to volleyball and qualified for Paris at age 29.

Despite a petition signed by more than 100,000 people imploring the Dutch Olympic federation to leave him home, it did the opposite: arranging for special accommodation outside the athletes’ village and not making him available to the media in defiance of International Olympic Committee policy.

On Wednesday, two days before the opening ceremony, the Games started. The first official sporting event was a men’s soccer match between Argentina and Morocco in Saint-Etienne.

Morocco was leading 2-1 in the 16th minute of added time when Argentina’s Cristian Medina appeared to equalize. Angry Moroccan fans rushed the field in protest. The officials sent the players to the locker room and cleared the stadium, then brought the players back on the field while the goal went to video review.

Offside – no goal. Morocco 2, Argentina 1.

“What happened on the field was a scandal,” Argentine coach Javier Mascherano said. “This isn’t a neighborhood tournament, these are the Olympic Games.”

Exactly.

Friday’s opening ceremony was a four-hour extravaganza that involved parading 7,000 athletes down the Seine in boats amid choreographed performances on the river’s banks and bridges.

One of the skits, during a segment called “Festivity,” featured a long dinner table with a woman in a blue dress and silver halo flanked by drag queens. To many, it bore a striking resemblance to Leonardo Da Vinci’s famous “The Last Supper” painting of Jesus’ final meal before his crucifixion.

Christian leaders around the world weren’t amused, calling it a “mockery” of their faith and denouncing the skit in the harshest terms.

Storm de caca.

Olympic organizers initially said nothing, then pulled video footage of the scene from official websites — then, as the global furor grew, issued a sort-of apology. The ceremony’s artistic director, Thomas Jolly, insisted it depicted a pagan festival, and if there was any mockery, it was of Dionysus, the Greek god of wine and revelry.

Canadian skateboarder Cordano Russell, who lives in San Diego and is open about his Christian faith, was asked if he was offended by the scene. He listens to Christian rap while competing. His church back home raised money to send his family to Paris.

Russell took the high road, without the aid of a drone.

“For me, nobody is perfect,” Russell said. “I know I’m not perfect. I fall victim to sin. Sometimes people make mistakes. It’s not like people can’t come back from that. I’m not condemning them. I just pray for them.”

Pray for us all. The Olympics still have 13 days to go.

Originally Published: July 29, 2024 at 5:27 p.m.