At least the IOC is admitting its lies, in a way

The IOC admitted yesterday that the charade they tried to pull was pretty much full of shit, without saying it was full of shit, to try and save whatever face it could. You see, the IOC doesn’t want anything to hurt its precious Games that are just two months away and in Beijing, even if that means being in cahoots with a government that disappears a citizen, allegedly, for accusing a former government official of sexual assault on top of treating human rights like something to be prodded off the bottom of their shoe with a stick.

So last week the IOC tried to sell that it had talked with missing tennis star Peng Shuai and everything was fine, and it sure felt like it was reading off the script that the Chinese government had handed them. Of course, they wouldn’t show anyone the video they had, or make Peng available to talk to anyone else. This was the world scale of Principal Skinner trying to convince Superintendent Chalmers that the northern lights were in fact in his kitchen but that Chalmers wasn’t allowed to see it to confirm.

Well, the IOC isn’t at least selling that anymore.

An IOC spokesman, Mark Adams, said, “We can’t provide you with absolute certainty on anything.” Man, that’s reassuring. If the IOC hoped this would all go away, it didn’t.

The only question facing the IOC is whether the Games are more important than the safety of an athlete, and we know the answer. Or we know what their answer is, to be more accurate. After all, the Games continued after the slaying of the Israeli athletes in 1972, so the questionable safety of Peng certainly isn’t going to sway the IOC, Except the IOC does hold the hammer here, and could pretty much guarantee the safety of Peng by threatening to take away the Games. But that will never happen.

It’s something of a measure of just how weak the story the IOC was trying to sell last week that it pretty much admitted no one should believe them just days later. Tells you just about everything there is to know about the IOC.