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BEIJING, Aug. 19 (Xinhua) -- The world's media Friday mocked the alleged ticket scam of a top Olympic official for Europe, saying the scandal is "a huge embarrassing development" for the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the suspect has fallen "from grace."
The 71-year-old Patrick Hickey, an IOC executive member from Ireland, was arrested by the Brazilian police in a raid on his hotel Wednesday, on charges over the illegal scalping of Rio Games tickets on the black market with at least six others in a bid to make 3 million U.S. dollars.
The president of the Olympic Council of Ireland (OCI) as well as chief of the European Olympic Committees announced after his arrest that he was "temporarily" standing down from his posts.
Investigators have reported over 1,000 premier tickets were being sold for high fees and allocated to the OCI under Hickey's presidency. Tickets with a face value of about 1,000 U.S. dollars were sold for more than 8,000 U.S. dollars.
Agence France Presse (AFP) noted that "he finally got to the top of the world... and it blew right up in his face."
"At the start of the year, he penned an article ... in which he said: 'How do you follow a year like 2015?' The answer he certainly could not have envisaged was in police custody in Rio," said AFP.
Top police investigator Ricardo Barbosa was quoted by AP as saying that "when we are talking about the biggest sporting event that should uphold ethics and an international spirit, we found out that the Irish Olympic Committee ended up facilitating the ticket scalping scheme."
"After two decades of an astute and immaculately plotted progress through the highest corridor of IOC administration, it was a preposterous and surreal moment, " said The Irish Times.
The newspaper also described Hickey as "an unpretentious, highly able and sometimes abrasive Dubliner who had navigated a clever and unerring path to reach the highest echelons of sports administration."
"Wednesday's sudden and bizarre turn of events leave Hickey looking, for the first time in an extraordinarily sure-footed climb, extraordinarily vulnerable," The Irish Times commented.
British Financial Times said the "ticket-touting scam" has plunged "Irish sport into an embarrassing crisis."
"The controversy has cast a spotlight on the accountability of the OCI, which receives ... funding from the Irish government," said the newspaper. ' Noel Rock, a member of parliament for the governing party, said that "this is extraordinary and unprecedented, and casts a dark shadow over our Olympics," adding that the government should set up an independent investigation of the OCI's commercial relationships.
"The Irish public deserves answers as to what exactly is going on with the OCI," he said.
"The arrest will be a blow to the IOC which has made anti-corruption efforts a priority since a bribery scandal around the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics," AFP noted.
