体坛官员为何如此不可救药 What's wrong with sports officials

Next Friday, Fifa is expected to elect a new president who isn’t keen on elections. The Bahraini royal Sheikh Salman al-Khalifa has suggested that voters agree on a single candidate before the vote, though modesty precludes him from naming a name. “If we go to election, there will be losers,” he explained. Better to “have a clear indication on who will be elected”. The sheikh sounds like a worthy successor to Sepp Blatter. He does deny complicity in the torture of Bahraini footballers, calling the allegations “nasty lies”.

近日国际足联(Fifa)将选出一位对选举反感的新主席。巴林皇室成员谢赫萨尔曼·阿勒哈利法(Sheikh Salman al-Khalifa)曾提议投票人在投票前商定一名候选人，尽管出于谦虚他不好意思说出自己的名字。“如果我们要走到选举那一步的话，就必然会有输家，”他解释说。更好的安排是“明确知道谁会当选”。这位酋长听起来像是塞普•布拉特(Sepp Blatter)的合适接班人。他否认涉及虐待巴林球员案，称这些指控是“肮脏的谎言”。

But Fifa isn’t alone. The International Association of Athletics Federations, tennis, American football, volleyball and various other sports are also sunk in scandal. Why are sports officials so embarrassing?

但是，国际足联并非特例。国际田联(IAAF)、网球、美式足球、排球和其他很多运动也都深陷丑闻。体育官员为何如此不可救药？

The history of sport divides into two eras: before TV money, and since. Pre-TV, the old wHite men who ran sport tended to be pompous but not greedy. From the British toffs who invented modern sport, they had copied Victorian customs: blazers, elaborate titles and bans on women. Having swallowed the Victorian notion that sport builds character, they considered themselves morally superior to governments, business and the press. They also tended to feel superior to grubby players and fans.

体育的历史分为两个时代：电视转播费登台之前和之后。在电视时代之前，那些管理体育界的白人老头往往自大但并不贪婪。他们从开创了现代体育的英国纨绔子弟们传承了维多利亚时代的习俗：西装、煞有介事的头衔以及禁止女性参与。在照搬了维多利亚时期有关运动锤炼性格的理念后，他们认为自己在道德上高于政府、企业和媒体。他们还倾向于觉得自己比粗鲁的球员和球迷更高一等。

Before TV, the world mostly left sports officials to their own devices. They were viewed as harmless old fools supervising children’s entertainments for no money. Nobody bothered to regulate them.

在电视出现以前，这个世界基本上放任体育官员自己做主。他们被视为照看孩子们娱乐的傻老头，没有优厚收入，但也没什么害处。没人费心去监管他们。

Practically the first power brokers to pretend to take them seriously were the Nazis. Sports officials were easily flattered by a regime that preached fitness and discipline. Baron Pierre de Coubertin, founder of the modern Olympics, got behind Berlin. He told critics that using the Games to promote Nazism was just like Los Angeles using the 1932 Games to promote tourism. Avery Brundage (future president of the International Olympic Committee) extolled Nazism for making Germans more athletic. João Havelange (future president of Fifa) returned home from the Berlin Games marvelling at Nazi organisational skills. As late as 2009, Bernie Ecclestone, boss of Formula One, was praising Hitler’s ability to “get things done”. (Ecclestone later refined this by saying he only meant Hitler until 1938.)

差不多第一批假装重视体育官员的权力掮客是纳粹。提倡健身和纪律的政权很容易赢得体育官员的好感。现代奥运会的创始人皮埃尔•德•顾拜旦(Pierre de Coubertin)当年支持柏林。他向批评者表示，利用奥运会来推广纳粹主义，与洛杉矶利用1932年奥运会推广旅游没什么差别。后来出任国际奥委会(IOC)主席的埃弗里•布伦戴奇(Avery Brundage)，当时赞赏纳粹主义使德国人的体格更强健。后来出任国际足联主席的若昂•阿维兰热(João Havelange)在从柏林奥运会回国后惊叹于纳粹的组织能力。直到2009年，一级方程式赛车(Formula One，F1)的老板伯尼•埃克尔斯通(Bernie Ecclestone)仍在赞美希特勒的实干能力。（埃克尔斯通后来解释称，他只是指1938年以前的希特勒。）

Most sports officials eventually dropped Nazism but they continued to marinate in Victorian pomposity. When the BBC journalist David Davies took a job at the English Football Association in 1994, he found that entering FA headquarters was like “stepping back into 1894 … A fading portrait of the Queen, painted when she was very young, stared down … On rather dusty shelves stood silver trophies from bizarre places around the world, some of which no longer existed.”

多数体育官员最终放弃了纳粹主义，但是他们仍然沉浸在维多利亚式的浮华之中。1994年当英国广播公司(BBC)的记者大卫•戴斯(David Davies)加入英格兰足球总会(English Football Association)时，他发现进入总部就像是“回到1894年……一幅褪了色的女王画像——画于她非常年轻的时候——俯视着一切……落满灰尘的架子上放着来自世界各地奇怪角落——有些地方甚至已经不存在了——的银色奖杯。”

But TV changed sport. For a start, it inflated its importance. Where once only Hitler had bothered to flatter sports officials, in the TV age all politicians did: just look at the photograph of President Obama in the White House cooing over the soccer shirts that Blatter and Trinidad’s Jack Warner (both now banned from football) had brought him for his daughters.

但是，电视改变了体育。首先，电视使体育的重要性大幅膨胀。曾经只有希特勒费心捧高那些体育官员，但是在电视时代，所有政客都加入了拍马屁大军：你只要看看在白宫拍的那张照片就知道了。照片中，美国总统奥巴马对布拉特和特立尼达(Trinidad)的杰克•华纳(Jack Warner)——二人如今都已被驱逐出了足球界——送给他女儿的足球球衣欣喜不已。

TV money especially changed sport. There was less money than there might have been, because TV executives tended to be cleverer than sports officials, but many officials felt entitled to trouser their share. After all, these men thought that they themselves embodied their sports — “the football family”, as Blatter called Fifa.

电视转播费更加明显地改变了体育。以往的钱不是很多，因为那时的电视台高管倾向于比体育官员更聪明，但许多官员认为自己有资格捞一把。毕竟，这些人认为自己代表着体育项目，就像布拉特把国际足联称为“足球家族”。

The sums they trousered eventually got so large that fans and journalists complained. Sports officials were genuinely outraged. How dare young whippersnappers without blazers criticise men who had given decades of their lives to “the good of the game”? Surely the officials deserved to travel the world first-class, like all the other sports officials they knew? (It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his expense account depends on his not understanding it.)

最终，他们捞取的利益金额大到了球迷和记者开始抱怨的程度。体育官员真的非常气愤。这些不穿西装的狂妄的年轻人，怎么敢批评那些为“体育事业”奉献了数十年的人？这些官员难道没有资格坐一等舱奔波于世界各地，就像他们认识的其他体育官员一样吗？（当一个人的报销账目取决于他什么都不懂时，你很难让他搞懂任何事。）

Happily for sports officials, they were free to ignore the world. Most global sports federations were based in discreet Switzerland, where they enjoyed a degree of “self-regulation” that bankers just dreamt of. And so the officials dismissed criticism. Almost refreshingly, they never bothered learning the modern corporate language of PR, which is why Blatter kept coming up with howlers like advising women footballers to wear “tighter shorts”.

对于体育官员来说，好在他们可以固守自己的独立王国，忽视整个世界。全球多数体育联合会的总部设在谨慎低调的瑞士，他们在那里享受着银行家们只能梦想的“自我监管”。于是，官员们对批评声置之不理。近乎令人耳目一新的是，他们从不费心学习现代企业公关套话。这就是布拉特为何不断语出惊人，比如建议女足球员穿着“更紧身的短裤”。

Even today, sport’s ideology remains: world, keep out. Only last October, Paquerette Girard Zappelli, the IOC’s chief ethics and compliance officer, issued the ritual warning to leave sport alone, telling the Play the Game conference in Denmark: “When you speak about interference of governments into the National Olympic Committees, this is absolutely key: this must not be!” (The official language of sports officialdom is bureaucratic Globish.)

即使在今天，体育界的观念仍然是：世界，别插手我们的事情。就在去年10月，国际奥委会的首席道德与合规官帕格莱特·吉拉德·扎培利(Paquerette Girard Zappelli)还在发出例行警告，要求不要干预体育。她在丹麦的Play the Game大会上称：“当你谈论政府干预国家奥委会时，这一点绝对关键：这绝对不行！”（体育官员的官方语言是典型的官僚用语。）

But now sport has entered a new era: government control. “Self-regulation” has simply got too embarrassing. The dawn raids by fraud investigators on football officials in Zurich last May marked a turning point. The American and Swiss justice systems continue to dig into Fifa. Switzerland is tightening its laws for sports federations. In response, even Fifa is doing something about its corporate governance. One day, sports federations might be as clean as corporations. That sounds like damning with faint praise but, in fact, it would be a step forward.

但是，现在体育进入了一个全新时代：政府控制。“自我监管”简直到了让人情何以堪的地步。去年5月，欺诈调查人员对苏黎世的足球官员发起的黎明突袭标志着一个转折点。美国和瑞士司法机关继续深挖国际足联的问题。瑞士正在收紧适用体育联合会的法律。作为回应，甚至连国际足联也在进行某种程度的企业治理。未来，体育协会或许会像企业一样干净透明。这听起来像是反讽，但事实上，这将是进步。