BAKU is humming with the customary accompaniments to showcase events: lavish new facilities are being finished, sponsors schmoozed, and human-rights activists and awkward journalists locked up. For June’s European Games—an unconvincing new tournament that Azerbaijan is hosting—the brutal regime is using the formula it honed at the Eurovision Song Contest of 2012, and hopes to deploy for the Olympic games of 2024. Smile, spend big and suppress dissent.
Sport is separate from politics, and can even be therapy for it; or so its organisers often maintain. What does it matter if some faraway goon blows his petrodollars on a summer jamboree—or a winter one, as will now be the case for the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, which FIFA, football’s disgraced governing body, this week farcically moved to December to avoid the intolerable heat? It matters. Frivolous as they seem, staging these events in ghastly places not only tarnishes FIFA, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and other overseers. It renders all involved complicit in corruption, and worse.
As a new study (reviewed on page 82) makes clear, democratic governments and their pinched...
from The Economist: Leaders http://ift.tt/1Bh7Hpp
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