“I’m getting worried,” Pat Hickey admitted two years ago. “I’m coming close to sainthood now. I haven’t had a good row in about five years!”
Be careful what you wish for.
On that evening as Hickey (71) watched the unveiling of a long-term vision, the European Games in Baku, with some 36 heads of state suited and booted (including one V Putin), it would have been impossible to imagine Wednesday's events. An early morning arrest filmed live; marched out of the Windsor Marapendi hotel in his bath robe; his Olympics credentials and passport displayed at a police conference in downtown Rio.
After two decades of an astute and immaculately plotted progress through the highest corridor of International Olympic Committee (IOC) administration, it was a preposterous and surreal moment.
There was relevance in the robe. It was through a facility in judo that Hickey came to prominence. He represented Ireland in judo, although not at Olympic level and details of his specific tournaments have proven elusive.
His energy within the Irish Judo Association was sufficiently impressive for Lord Killanin, the Irish peer who had served as president of the IOC, to recommend Hickey for the role of president of the Olympic Council of Ireland (OCI) in 1989.
Adroitness
Almost immediately, Hickey used a combination of energy and adroitness at international level. He was barely two years in the role when it fell to Dublin to host a European Olympic Committee (EOC) general assembly in 1991. Following the dissolution of the USSR, 15 new countries sent delegates.
He recalled: “Twelve to 14 of these countries had no money. They were destitute; they barely had enough to eat. So we looked after those people very well and since then those guys have stayed with me solidly. I became very popular in the east of Europe, more so than in the west.”
As he strengthened his profile internationally, Hickey consolidated his position as the leader and face of the Olympic Council of Ireland, easily subduing three challenges to his leadership.
The most recent involved James McDaid. "The guy who tried to wipe me off the planet – that great minister for sport James McDaid who set up Richard Burrows to run against me with Tony O'Reilly backing him up – well, he ended up with egg all over his face because I hammered him," Hickey said in an interview with Malachy Clerkin in The Irish Times.
“Then we went to Sydney in 2000 and he tried to take the accreditation off John Treacy. And we said, ‘No – we’ll f**king decide who gets the accreditation. And what have you got against poor John Treacy anyway?’
“It was brilliant! He actually went through political channels then and got on to the Australian department of foreign affairs. And he got a letter back saying, ‘If you want to go to Sydney, you have to go through Pat Hickey’. He was raging! It was great!”
Continued rise
Hickey emerged unscathed through several rows with the Irish Sports Council and his relations with successive sports ministers varied greatly. He continued to rise within the “family of the International Olympic Committee”, serving as president of the EOC since 2006 and one of just 15 members of the IOC’s executive board when his arrest took place.
Ironically, Hickey had flagged his intention to step down as president of the OCI after the London Olympics and certainly before Rio. He is due to preside over the EOC until next year.
“I’m lucky: I’m an IOC member until age 80. I’ll be 71 when my time as European president is up so if I’m in good health, I might just sit back and enjoy my life as an IOC member. Or I might see if there’s another term in me, I don’t know yet. I love being involved with sport, I love being around athletes, I love the politics of sport. Because I’m a volunteer, it means that no one can have a grip on you. No one can tell you what direction you should be going in. Politics is in your blood, you know? For an Irish guy to rise to the top of Europe is some achievement.”
And that was always how Pat Hickey perceived himself: an unpretentious, highly able and sometimes abrasive Dubliner who had navigated a clever and unerring path to reach the highest echelons of sports administration.
He was an auctioneer with an office on Dorset Street whose role enabled him to move through the most rarefied function rooms and banquets of international sports and political power.
That evening in Azerbaijan, on the opening night of the inaugural European games, which Hickey envisaged as his legacy to the Olympic movement, he seemed unassailable. The Baku games were the subject of intense scrutiny because of Azerbaijan’s record on human rights and press freedom. But that night, the ceremony was a triumph; a coronation.
Outspoken critic
The first intimation of Wednesday morning’s trouble began to circulate just after the London games in 2012. The former Brazilian footballer Romario, an outspoken critic of both Fifa and the IOC, in his role as a socialist party member in Brazil’s House of Representatives, referenced Hickey in a detailed blog entry expressing concerns about Olympic ticketing practices ahead of Brazil’s hosting of the 2014 World Cup and the Rio Olympics.
"Everyone knows of my concern to ensure that all our citizens can afford tickets for the World Cup and the Olympics. So I am concerned to read reports that Mr Hickey granted Ireland's allocation of tickets for the Olympic Games in London to a private company that packaged them with hotel rooms and sold them to wealthy clients."
Wednesday’s sudden and bizarre turn of events leave Hickey looking, for the first time in an extraordinarily sure-footed climb, extraordinarily vulnerable.
A spokesperson for the IOC repeatedly stressed their colleague was entitled to the presumption of innocence. They also said the ticketing charges were a matter for the Olympic Council of Ireland.
