TOKYO, Dec. 13, 2022—Everybody likes sports. Playing baseball, soccer, golf or anything gives you an uplifting feel and watching your favorite national team winning Olympic games with friends at sports bars is the most exhilarating experience in this otherwise cruel yet increasingly predictable society. Yes, sports for many is a contemporary last resort from the daily grinding of work, playing, watching, betting – and lastly, bribing.
The Dec. 9, 2022 arrest of the European parliament vice president, Greek socialist Eva Kaili, and four others, which followed the August 2022 arrest of a Tokyo Olympic board member, Haruyuki Takahashi for bribery not only not looking coincidental but increasingly rooting in sports almost as a given. The International Olympic Committee now has deferred decisions to hold the next winter games in Sapporo, the city that had been considered a top, unrivaled candidate until earlier December 2022, to preempt the recurrence of the massive – and still-widening – Tokyo game corruption scandal.
Years past, Pete Rose, an MLB hall of fame, for one was defamed for corruptive baseball sports betting, which makes it a minor incident when compared with Olympics and World Cup soccer but still is a scandal in a sport that prides itself as an icon of honesty and fairness. He also is accused of rape. Many sumo wrestlers had been implicated in corruptions too. Hundreds of other athletes playing in top international athletic circles like Rose are in the black or questionable camps.Hardly a week passes without reading or hearing about sports corruptions.
Why such prevalent irregularities? Sports, once considered pure and equal for all, has morphed into a money monster: Athletes anticipate millions of dollars and to pay them, organizers build gigantic facilities, and fans buy tickets for thousands of dollars. There’s also huge ad costs. In all, every switching station (part) of sports requires a huge gush or money, allowing guys with good nose to sniff around for a piece. And some famous athletes vie for high office of parliament even though they may be ignorant about politics and policies, like Herschel Walker who lost the December 2022 Georgia runoff Senate election and some Japanese lawmakers who previously were athletes.
This cannot go on for long. Olympic and world cup games should be dissolved and sports should be returned to where they belong to: communities, like little leagues were for kids and parents decades ago.
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Insight Into the Future