Excerpt from today's Wall Street Journal
Road to the Olympics
New IOC, Old IOC, Same IOC
By FREDERICK
C. KLEIN
SYDNEY, Australia -- President Clinton had some
trouble with the word "is," but he's one up on Juan Antonio
Samaranch, the president of the International Olympic Committee. He has
difficulty with two words, "luxury" and
"reform."
The existence of Mr. Samaranch's first linguistic problem is evident from
a visit to the shining Regent Hotel in downtown Sydney, whose five-ring
display on its giant canopy marks it as the local IOC headquarters. In an
interview a couple of months ago, the 80-year-old former functionary of
Franco's Spain was asked if his penchant for luxurious travel would
continue at the Summer Olympics that begin in earnest here tomorrow. Oh
no, he said, he'd have "a bedroom and a living room" in a
"normal" hotel, and travel the town in a van, not a limo.
But the Regent, operated by the Four Seasons chain, is well above the
normal cut by any definition, and although the hotel wouldn't say where
the IOC chief is quartered on its premises, its rate card shows that the
kind of suites he's likely to occupy range from $1,500 to $2,400 a night.
And while he may or may not have a van, there is a yacht in Sydney Harbor
to ferry him to venues with nautical access.
That's mostly amusing, but the business about reform isn't. The IOC has
been wracked for the past 20 months by a wide-ranging payoffs scandal
that revealed its "gimme" culture and besmirched the events it
oversees. A few heads rolled as a result of the revelations, and some
rules were changed. But on the eve of the first Olympiad of the new
century, an air of business-as-usual prevails in the Games'
organization.
That situation begins with the makeup of the IOC itself. Nine of its 100
or so members resigned or were expelled in the aftermath of bribery
allegations involving the awarding of the last four Games, but at least
as many others implicated kept their posts. Similarly, while the IOC
opened its ranks beyond the aging oligarchs, European royals and sports
bosses Mr. Samaranch has assembled in his 20-year term, there was a
catch. For instance, its new age and term limits apply only to new
members, and the active athletes it added for the first time can serve
only one eight-year term, meaning they're unlikely to gain the seniority
to crash the circles.
Unchanged was the IOC's insular and self-perpetuating practice of
controlling its own rolls; the group's members are its representatives
in, not from, the countries where they live. A big difference.
That the IOC's imperiousness is intact came through in May, when the
torch for the Sydney Games was lit in Greece and the honor of being the
first Australian to run the flame was given to the 11-year-old daughter
of Kevan Gosper. He's the IOC vice president whose 1993 Utah ski vacation
figured into investigations surrounding gift-giving in the awarding of
the 2002 Winter Games to Salt Lake City.
The IOC, of course, always has been a law unto itself. The early
insistence upon athlete amateurism of its founder, the French baron
Pierre de Coubertin, reflected the aversion of 19th-century aristocrats
to competing with people who had to work for a living. It persisted well
beyond when under-the-table payments to Western athletes and the state
subsidies of the Communist countries made it laughably obsolete.
In matters of politics, the organization has played ball with anyone
who'll play ball with it. The 1936 Summer Games in Adolf Hitler's Germany
were the high point of international recognition for that regime, and the
IOC completed an Axis trifecta by giving the 1940 Summer Games to Tokyo
and the 1944 Winter ones to Cortina, Italy, before World War II scrubbed
them. It persisted with its sports-uber-alles philosophy through the 1980
boycott of the Moscow Games by the U.S. and its allies over the Soviet
Union's invasion of Afghanistan; the turnabout by the East Bloc during
the 1984 Games in Los Angeles; the murder of Israeli athletes at the 1972
Games in Munich.
The IOC determination to protect its image led to the see-no-evil policy
on performance-enhancing drug use that allowed Communist East Germany to
hide a 20-year gold rush behind a screen of drug-use denial, and to
widespread allegations that it buried positive tests recorded during the
past several Games. The continuation of that stance is seen in its
five-year snubbing of a promising test for the stamina-boosting drug
erythropoietin (EPO) developed by Allen Murray, a California biochemist
with no IOC links, and its hurry-up approval of two EPO tests that some
say won't stand up.
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For the remainder of the article see
http://interactive.wsj.com/ushome.html
Tony Craddock
