Here's the headline:
The Putin-backed strongman who threw the Paris Games into chaos
Banned from the Games, Russia wanted to upend the Olympics. Enter [a Russian power broker] and the boxing ‘gender controversy.’
And here's how the article starts:
With the future of international boxing hanging in the balance, as it so often is, the 2006 election of its top official featured the usual chaos: bribes, shouting matches and shows of physical intimidation in the lobby of an upscale Dominican hotel.
But the body flying down an elevator shaft was a new twist.
[The] president of USA Boxing at the time, was on his way to his room when something heavy slammed the top of the crowded elevator.
“We all thought the elevator was going to crash,” [the USA Boxing president] said of his fellow boxing delegates, who were there to select the next president of the International Amateur Boxing Association, the sport’s global governing body. Authorities found a man’s battered corpse in the elevator shaft. It was the boxing delegate from Mali.
[The USA Boxing president], who later became the association’s executive director, said the dead delegate was found with thousands of dollars of mysterious origin. Mali embassy officials didn’t rule out foul play, the Associated Press reported at the time, but nobody was charged in the death. A spokesman for the Santo Domingo police recently declined to comment.
Multiple boxing officials who were in Santo Domingo for the vote said the suspicion among their peers was that the Mali man had solicited bribes from both sides — and one of them didn’t appreciate it.
