Controversy, scandal are all part of the Games

PARIS – Modern pentathlon is an Olympic sport. It consists of five events: pistol shooting, epee fencing, a 200-meter swim, show-jumping on unfamiliar horses, and something called the laser run where competitors fire laser pistols at five targets.

Artistic swimming is an Olympic sport. So is slalom and flatwater canoeing, team handball, badminton, skateboarding, sport climbing, taekwondo, BMX freestyle cycling, break dancing and don’t forget about trampoline.

So is controversy, scandal and international incidents.

Storm de caca, as former U.S. Olympic press officer Bob Condron liked to say.

It’s not listed on the official Olympic program of 48 sports. But it’s part of the Games. Always has been. Always will be.

Put 10,000-odd athletes from 200-odd nations in the same hot, overcrowded city for three weeks, and something is going to happen. Ryan Lochte is going to happen.

You remember Lochte. At the 2016 Games in Rio de Janeiro, he went out on the town with three fellow U.S. swimmers and claimed they had been robbed by gunman posing as police, preying on the city’s reputation as a criminal haven. Security video footage later showed the green-haired Aquaman, after a night of revelry, vandalizing a gas station bathroom when they found it locked and then merrily returning to the athletes’ village.

“The Lochte Mess Monster,” the tabloid headline in the New York Daily News screamed. “‘Rob’ tale exposed as boozy coverup.”

“Liar, liar, Speedo on fire,” the New York Post trumpeted.

There have been no overt acts of Ugly Americanism in Paris, other than tourists trying to order in a French restaurant (speaking louder doesn’t mean the waiter will suddenly understand English), but there’s still time. And the rest of the world has provided plenty of fodder even before torch touched caldron last Friday.

Let’s start with our friendly northern neighbors, eh?

A staffer on the Canada women’s soccer team thought it would be a good idea to send up a drone and spy on New Zealand’s practice ahead of their Olympic opener, presumably to gather some tactical intel that would help the reigning gold medalists decipher the 28th-ranked Kiwis. Never mind that French police had been openly vigilant in grounding drones in the run-up to the Games for security reasons and admitted to media they were confiscating an average of six per day.

When police identified the drone’s operator and his intentions, Canada’s soccer federation quickly apologized, saying a “non-accredited analyst” was at fault and it was sending him home along with the assistant coach who oversaw him, like they were rogue operators.

Then stories started surfacing that both the Canadian men’s and women’s teams had been doing this for years, that it was part of unwritten job responsibilities. Head coach Bev Priestman stepped down, and soccer’s world governing body penalized the team six points, or the equivalent of two wins, in the Olympic soccer tournament.

Drone-gate was Monday. On Tuesday, dressage rider Charlotte Dujardin, poised to become Great Britain’s more decorated Olympic athlete with a seventh medal in Paris, withdrew from the Games after a video surfaced of her whipping a horse in practice. “An error in judgment,” Dujardin said.

Japan removed the 19-year-old captain of its women’s gymnastics team for “smoking and drinking,” which are against the law in Japan until age 20 … but the Netherlands allowed a convicted rapist to play beach volleyball.

In 2016, Steve van de Velde pleaded guilty to raping a 12-year-old British girl and was sentenced to four years in a British prison. He served 12 months before being returned to Dutch authorities. He returned to volleyball and qualified for Paris at age 29.

Despite a petition signed by more than 100,000 people imploring the Dutch Olympic federation to leave him home, it did the opposite: arranging for special accommodation outside the athletes’ village and not making him available to the media in defiance of International Olympic Committee policy.