Fuck me sideways
Dick Pound saved the Olympics. Canadians are calling for him to run FIFA
Not only that, but he seems to be a goldmine of quotes. I particularly enjoyed the following from Wikipedia:In January 2007, Pound responded to Floyd Landis' testosterone test following stage 17 of the Tour of France, an event (and a stage) which Landis initially won, but of which he was stripped after failing a dope case and losing at arbitration. Pound declared "I mean, it was 11 to 1!" referring to the testosterone-to-epitestosterone level. "You’d think he’d be violating every virgin within 100 miles. How does he even get on his bicycle?"[18]
I guess now we'll see if Blatter is responsible for the current culture, or just the scapegoat.
The E60 report on FIFA pretty directly implicated him in corrupt culture but also portrayed him as an extension of the previous President. He was the General Secretary since 1981 and was groomed to succeed João Havelange. Blatter and Havelange oversaw the rise of the World Cup to its current popularity, largely through bribing smaller member states. The reform candidate in the 1998 election was narrowly defeated. His election was influenced by bribery, I believe from the same Qatari man who brought the World Cup there for 2022. So Blatter probably made things a lot worse. The whole special is on ESPN.com if you aren't one of those people who bitches about ads and in general about video not downloaded off of BitTorrent. It's worth watching but I was expecting it to be more about the Nepalese slaves building up Qatar which I'm more interested in as a news story and I'd like to see covered more.
Blatter won the election Friday something like 130 to 70, right? You gotta figure none of those 70 will vote for Platini, and some percentage of the Blatter fans will balk at his presumptive successor. So if someone can put together a dark horse campaign for the emergency election...
I'm sort of expecting some push for Prince Ali, who I expect to be no better than anyone else.