By Roy Masters
"We've got there," AOC president John Coates says, confident the Rio Olympics would begin with the plumbing and power problems at the athletes village fixed, the police in place, the sporting venues functioning and the vexed issue of Russian drug cheats resolved.
Coates, who is also a member of the IOC executive, has not spared his own organisation from criticism when describing conditions at the village as "deplorable".
Experienced: AOC president John Coates is familiar with the notion of collective responsibility. Credit: Getty Images
"When the Rio Organising Committee took delivery of the venue from contractors, they didn't conduct due diligence," he says.
"On the Australian team's arrival, they were appalled by the conditions."
It took the stinging criticism of Australia's chef de mission, Kitty Chiller, to prompt action.
"The Organising Committee started to take notice and thousands of labourers were brought in to fix the water, electricity, gas and sewerage," Coates said, before the Mayor of Rio handing the keys of the Australian residence to Chiller on Wednesday.
"Other nations experienced the same problems.
"It's been a remarkable turnaround since the stress test when the rooms flooded and all the lights blacked out.
"Seventy thousand police have been brought in to secure the area and word is the sporting venues are all good.
"The IOC staffers who have been in Rio since May should have exercised the same vigilance with regard to the athletes village as they have with the venues, rather than accept the word of the Organising Committee."
Coates spoke to Fairfax Media from London, en route to Rio, following Sunday's IOC executive meeting in Lausanne during which the decision to delegate the decision was made to hand over Russian drug cheats to the international sports federations.
IOC President Thomas Bach summoned Coates, who is chairman of its Legal Affairs Committee, to the IOC headquarters three days before the conference with other executive members.
"I was given the role to explain to the IOC membership and the Russians, the notion of collective responsibility, a moral concept unlike individual justice, which is a legal one," explains Coates.
In other words, Coates, a lawyer, had to navigate the minefield of forcing Russian athletes to take responsibility for their state-sponsored doping regime which had already led to the exclusion of the Russian track and field team for Rio while guaranteeing natural justice to athletes who have not doped.
In a delicate piece of Orwellian language, the IOC decision declared: "Russian athletes have to assume the consequences of what amounts to a collective responsibility in order to protect the credibility of Olympic competition ... [but] the rules of natural justice ... has to be applied.
"This means that each affected athlete must be given the opportunity to rebut the applicability of collective responsibility in his or her individual case."
The notion of collective responsibility is something with which Coates is familiar.
In 1980, Coates was a member of the Australian Olympic team when Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser joined US President Jimmy Carter in calling for a boycott of the Moscow Olympics following Russia's invasion of Afghanistan.
While many nations fell in line, Australia, as a National Olympic Committee did not, leaving the decision to the individual sports and athletes.
"Carter and Fraser took collective responsibility on our behalf," Coates said.
"It scarred the Australian athletes who chose not to go to this day.
"The fallout for collective responsibility was great."
This week, when the time came to inform the ROC president, Alexander Zhukov, of the IOC decision, the task fell to Bach and Coates.
Zhukov had made an impassioned plea to the IOC not to ban all his country's athletes, pointing out it would punish the clean ones. He had been forced to sit for two and a half hours before learning of the vote.
Zhukov had his problems with Coates.
A month earlier, when Coates awarded Australian walker Jared Tallent, the gold medal from the London Olympics which had been stripped from a Russian drug cheat, the AOC boss made a pointed speech at the ceremony in Melbourne.
He described Russian sport as "rotten to the core".
Zhukov responded by pointing out Coates was president of the Court of Arbitration for Sport and implied it would be a travesty of justice if Coates' view influenced CAS who were then yet to hear an appeal by the Russian Athletics Federation against the ban by the IAAF for participation in Rio. The appeal was ultimately unsuccessful.
"Relations between us were not good," Coates concedes.
"But after I told him the outcome of the IOC decision, I reflected that the situation sat perversely with what we had experienced in 1980.
"I told him that we had to bear collective responsibility and it was ironic that it was for something which his country [the invasion of Afghanistan] did."
This is merely one of what Coates's AOC deputy, Peter Montgomery, describes as the "exquisite ironies" of Olympic history.
Bach won a gold medal in fencing representing West Germany at the 1976 Montreal Olympics and was the defending Olympic champion as the Moscow Games approached.
However, his West German Olympic Committee joined the American boycott and he could not defend his title.
So, 36 years later, as IOC boss, he could put himself in Russian shoes.
Montgomery, a four-time water polo Olympian and an AOC vice-president for 16 years, says: "Bach was in the awkward position of being accused of going soft on Russian drug cheats but not giving the chance to Russian athletes who resisted the opportunity to take drugs and had trained for four years to go to Rio."
Lord Sebastian Coe, Great Britain's dual gold middle distance runner from the Moscow and Los Angeles Games, is also in the position of "exquisite irony".
Montgomery sat for 11 years with Bach and Coe on the IOC Athletes Commission.
"Both were very strongly against doping," he says. "They supported life bans for drug cheats."
Coe, after being president of the London Olympics Organising Committee, fought a long and sometimes bitter campaign against Ukrainian pole vaulter, Sergie Bubka, for presidency of the IAAF.
"Coe won the ballot, against Bubka, who won gold medals for the former Soviet Union, and then all this drugs mess falls in Seb's lap!" Montgomery said.
If there is nothing new in Olympic history, it's certainly true of the drama in the lead-up to the summer games.
The first one of the modern era, in Athens in 1896, would not have occurred, except for the generosity of a Greek American, George Averoff, who funded the stadium construction.
Each Games I have covered since 1988 has been preceded by fear and hope.
In Seoul, the North Koreans were expected to invade; Basque terrorists were rumoured to bomb Barcelona; Coca-Cola was expected to drown Atlanta and the Sydney Olympic Games were supposed to be a ticketing and transport disaster.
The 2004 Athens Games followed the September 11 Twin Towers attack and six times the money spent on security in Sydney was wasted guarding against a disaster which was never going to eventuate; deaths from respiratory diseases caused by polluting factories were anticipated in Beijing and the London bombings took place one day after the city won the bid to host the 2012 Games.
Yet none of these cataclysmic events transpired.
It's true that Rio has experienced problems never encountered, such as the Zika virus, a disease probably unknown when athletes went to the 1968 Mexico Olympics.
Furthermore, it has suffered the double whammy of two unrelated problems – the traditional challenges of security, unfinished facilities, crime, together with the Russian boycott.
The IOC has banned countries before, such as South Africa for its apartheid policy and the Games from 1976 to 1984 were boycotted by nations for political reasons.
Sure, there has not been the last minute disruption that will occur with the exclusion of Russian athletes unable to demonstrate they are clean and their subsequent replacement, evidenced by Wednesday's late call to the Australian womens' rowing eight .
As Coates says, "Many of the Russian athletes have to jump high hurdles to get to Rio.
"I'm told there are gymnasts who have never left Russia, so it will be hard for them to produce a negative drug test result taken in a foreign country."
But if the Games were in Chicago, Tokyo or Istanbul, this would still be a problem. Olympics in Istanbul?
The Turkish city has bid six times for Summer Olympics and was runner-up to Tokyo for the 2020 Games.
Imagine the problems heading to Istanbul for a festival of fun with martial law now imposed.
Rio may prove to be a good choice, after all.