Last Summer, a letter was leaked to the Los Angelos Times that Lance Armstrong had written to the International Olympic Committee. In the letter, Armstrong called for the forced resignation of Dick Pound due to his slanderous public comments and his lack of ethical involvement in athlete affairs as the head of the World Anti-Doping Agency. It did not take very long for Dick Pound to respond and insult Lance Armstrong for writing the letter in the first place.
It took a while, but the IOC has decided to officially reprimand Dick Pound for his comments.
In a rebuke considered rare because it involves one of its own members, the International Olympic Committee officially reprimanded Pound for comments that might have damaged the legendary cyclist’s reputation. […] According to the IOC’s decision, dated Feb. 2, the organization’s ethics commission recommended that Pound had “the obligation to exercise greater prudence consistent with the Olympic spirit when making public pronouncements that may affect the reputation of others.”
This of course did not phase him in the least. If there is one thing that Dick Pound lacks it is tact. In response to his public reprimand, he told the newspapers that this was the IOC’s way of trying to get Lance Armstrong to stop bothering them, since “Lance Armstrong has probably killed a Brazilian rain forest with all the paper he has used to file his complaints […]”
Whether Lance Armstrong cheated or not, I think that Dick Pound has continually overstepped his authority and shown that he is not impartial and that he does not adhere to any sort of ethical standards in the way that he deals with athletes. A reprimand is a nice start, but I do not think that it really goes far enough and I doubt that it will be very long before the next controversy is publicized between him and somebody who may or may not be doping.
While he may have done a lot for WADA early in his career, I can not imagine that the circus that he keeps around himself and all of the embarassment that he has brought to the position in the last half dozen years is really worthwhile. Lance Armstrong seems happy to at least have gotten the reprimand out of the IOC, and that is likely all that we will see.
(Source: ESPN.com)
Recent Comments: