POSTED: 2012-02-02 05:02:02
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
THE NEIL WILSON COLUMN / An exclusive, authoritative series from Sports Features Communications
LONDON: Much hysteria in Britain in the last year over its recruitment of foreign athletes to aid its Olympic campaign in London this year. Plastic Brits is the pejorative tag attached to the track, handball and wrestling athletes who have sought an easier route to Olympic selection – and generous financial support - than in their countries of birth.
Less excitement in places such as Kenya and Ethiopia whose athletes are being ‘stolen’ by the Gulf States and Turkey because they have loads of talent to spare, after all - and none at all in the United States where two of the three men’s spots in the marathon team went to former foreign nationals.
There is a sign, however, that attitudes to the easy transfer of national allegiance are hardening. Little Lithuania has thumbed its nose not just at its mighty neighbor Russia but at the very personage of its president, Dimitry Medvedev.
Medvedev personally gave a Russian passport to a Lithuanian Olympic medal contender in modern pentathlon, Donate Rimsaite. She had been in Russia only one year, and although it is claimed she had married a Russian his identity is not revealed and she continues to compete under her Lithuanian name.
Medvedev made his offer at the urging of one of Russia’s oligarch who happens to be president and sponsor of its modern pentathlon squad. In normal circumstance, even married to a Russia, she would have had to wait for its nationality beyond the London Games.
The passport smoothed her way to compete for her new country in international events last year but now she has been blackballed from the Olympics. The Lithuanian Olympic Committee insisted by a vote of 49 to one that she serves the full three year qualification that the IOC transfer of allegiance rule imposes.
The suspicion in the Baltic state is that Rimsaite was lured not by love but lucre. Lithuanian modern pentathletes are poor cousins to the heavily supported Russians.
Critics of the veto argue that Lithuania is only protecting from competition its remaining medal contender, Laura Asadauskaite, a world bronze medallist when Rimsaite, the two-time European champion, won silver.
The irony there is that Asadauskaite made it known that she was against the veto, saying she believed that athletes should not be stopped from competing in the Olympics. She had some support for that view among other athletes but not within the NOC.
The veto is timely. It sends a reminder around the Olympic family that the IOC has put power in the hands of the jilted nations. There is a rule in place to guard your crown jewels from grasping giants with bank balances. You just have to have the courage to use it.
NEIL WILSON reported his first Olympic Games in Munich in 1972. He has since covered another nine summer and nine winter Olympics for various newspapers, including The Independent and the Daily Mail with whom he has worked for the last 19 years as Athletics and Olympic correspondent. He was Britain’s Sports Journalist of the Year in 1984 and is the author of seven books.
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