Column: That Time … Dédé the Sardine and the Olympic big fish

‘The IOC are truly masters of the universe,’ he told me. But in Tokyo, it may face a villain too powerful to overcome with pageantry.

Dédé the Sardine was an Olympic big fish. “I’m a master of the universe,” Dédé said a few years before he passed away in 2016 at the ripened age of 97. Dédé was born André Guelfi. His cronies on the International Olympic Committee called him the Sardine, a tribute to their pally having made his fortune in pilchards. Back on shore, Guelfi was a consigliere to fabled sports godfather and IOC President Juan Antonio Samaranch, who in 1980 figured out how to use television and corporate sponsorship to resurrect the dying Olympic Games into the prosperous multimedia behemoth now hospitalised and unvaccinated for COVID-19 in Tokyo.