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. The IOC doesn't want anything to hurt the 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.
It felt like the IOC was reading off the script when it said that it had talked with missing tennis star Peng Shuai and everything was fine. They wouldn't show anyone the video they had, or make Peng available to talk to anyone else. Principal Skinner was trying to convince Supt. Chalmers that the northern lights were in his kitchen but that he wasn't allowed to see them.
The IOC is no longer selling that.
Mark Adams, an IOC spokesman, said that they can't give you absolute certainty. That is reassuring. The IOC did not hope that this would go away.
The IOC knows the answer to the question of whether the Games are more important than the safety of an athlete. We know what their answer is. The Games continued after the killing of the Israeli athletes in 1972, so the questionable safety of Peng certainly isn't going to sway the IOC. That will never happen.
It is a measure of how weak the story the IOC was trying to sell last week was that it admitted no one should believe them. Tells you everything you need to know about the IOC.
