Adding to the IOC's woes is the embarrassment of a large, undisclosed number of its press passes to the announcement meeting Friday having gone missing.
According to Reuters news service, it's not just a handful, either.
So many have disappeared that the IOC has had to throw up its hands – something it pains the stiff-neck micro-managers to have to do – and reissue all 1,500 passes.
New passes had to be printed up in different color, different format from the first batch to keep from opening the doors to all manner of unwanted "press representatives," conceivably including individuals irate that Beijing is apparently to be the lucky winner.
If the IOC had counted on Moscow as an unlikely venue for anti-Beijing demonstrations erupting, it counted wrongly.
The trouble began Monday, when a group of Tibetans, opposed to the dictatorship in Beijing, called a news conference for Tuesday to let the world press know they thought it an outrage to award Beijing the XXIX Olympiad in light of its widespread suppression of religious freedom and other human-rights throughout Tibet, which China regards as a rebellious province.
Getting word of that, the Moscow embassy of the People's Republic of China, according to the Moscow Times, began putting the heat on the Russian Union of Journalists to block the news conference.
That could be a foretaste of how China intends to manage the sports press if Beijing gets the 2008 Games.
The intimidation worked, but not for long. By Monday evening, the Tibetan sponsors of the event had persuaded the House of Journalists to change its mind and reinstate the news conference.
As it turned out, the Chinese diplomats, apparently unaccustomed to how reverse public relations works, had made their situation only worse. Now the press was really interested.
When the news conference took place Tuesday, Ngawang Gelek, chairman of the Tibetan Culture and Information Center in Moscow, told the Moscow Times that the Chinese government was bent on destroying the Tibetan people with religious persecution, imprisonment, destruction of cultural treasures and mass emigration.
"If China succeeds, that will send the wrong message that the IOC supports authoritarian rule and brutal oppression," he said. "Tibetans are becoming a minority in their own country."
Gelek said there were now 7 million Chinese in Tibet, compared with 6.5 million Tibetans.
It wasn't only Tibetans who were protesting awarding the Games to Beijing. Russian human-rights advocates added their voices.
A prominent one, Sergei Kovalyov, who is also a deputy in the State Duma, Russia's parliament, told the Moscow Times that if Beijing gets the Games it would be as reprehensible as having given the 1936 Games to Berlin during Adolf Hitler's Nazi Third Reich.
Then the Tibetans took another shot at the Beijing communist regime.
Gelek, who also serves as the Tibetan Dalai Lama's representative in Russia, said the spiritual leader had been grossly misquoted out of context to make it appear he was supporting China's bid for the Olympics.
He told the press that although the Dalai Lama had, indeed, said China deserved the Games because of its population, size and traditions, he had also said, but hadn't been quoted as saying:
"The present situation is that the human-rights situation in both China and Tibet is deteriorating day by day. It is not appropriate, not appropriate, to award the Olympic Games to Beijing at this time."
So much for accuracy in reporting in the leftist Western press.
As many as 4,000 police and security agents are standing by to maintain order as some 6,000 sporting officials and journalists descend on Moscow. Earlier, city police in riot gear had moved swiftly to break up an anti-Beijing demonstration.
They may well have yet another chance, as Tibetans have announced they intend to set up a protest outside the Hotel Mezhdunarodnaya on Friday when the IOC announces its selection.
All this press attention on the IOC's presence in Moscow for the announcement has served to whet the appetite of Muscovites for a return engagement of the Olympics in 2012 – the next in line of the quadrennial Games after 2008.
Moscow's Mayor Yury Luzhkov was bubbling with enthusiasm at the prospect as he escorted IOC officials around his city.
That would be the second Olympic Games for Moscow. They were held there in 1980, when Moscow was the capital of the communist Soviet Union. At the direction of then-President Jimmy Carter, athletes from the United States boycotted the Moscow Games.
President Bush has made no effort to prohibit or discourage American athletes from participating in the 2008 Games should Beijing receive the award.
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