Beijing Decision Throws Legacy Into Uncertainty

MOSCOW —  It ends where it began. Twenty-one years after Juan Antonio Samaranch was elected president of the International Olympic Committee before the ill-starred 1980 Summer Games, his reign was to conclude by noon today Moscow time (1 a.m. PDT) with the vote for his successor.

It would have been a far more glorious occasion if Samaranch had stepped down at the end of his second term in 1993. That is hardly a controversial opinion. He offered it himself in an interview with The Times published last year.

He by then had been president for 13 years, a longer tenure than all but three predecessors. He had the summer before presided over a highly acclaimed Olympics in his hometown of Barcelona. South Africa had been welcomed back into the fold there with the end of apartheid, which Nelson Mandela said was hastened in part by the IOC’s uncompromising stance against it. For the first time in two decades, no significant sporting nation had boycotted the Summer Games. The world was feeling good again about the movement. Samaranch deserved the credit.

Today, entering the post-Samaranch era, the IOC is even more confident than it was then, taking on the most daunting of sociopolitical challenges by selecting Beijing to organize the 2008 Summer Games. The hope among IOC members who voted here Friday is that the Chinese government will respond by democratizing.

But it is possible that the IOC is experiencing a false sense of security.

Preparation for the Summer Games scheduled for 2004 in Athens is stuck in a political quagmire in Greece. Beijing, while perhaps a noble choice, presented an inferior technical bid to Toronto and Paris. That, combined with the Chinese government’s fragile relationship with much of the rest of the world, is bound to lead to seven years of anxiety.

Also, there is an upcoming federal trial in Salt Lake City that promises to shine unwelcome light on IOC corruption in association with the decision to put the 2002 Winter Games there. The IOC claims it since has reformed but does not trust its members enough to allow them to visit future bid cities. The new president will be severely challenged. The old president has had his legacy tarnished.

Not that you would know it from attending the IOC’s 112th session here.

Members came not only to elect a Summer Olympic host city and a president but to celebrate Samaranch.

Posters of him in a traditional Russian fur hat hang throughout the World Trade Center, site of the session, and the official hotels. Icons lining the walls leading to the hall where IOC members meet depict him during various times of his presidency, including one in which he donned a flak jacket and helmet to board a military plane during hostilities in 1994 in Sarajevo. Two flattering biographies have been circulated to the media.

Indeed, there is much to celebrate. He was without question the most enlightened president the IOC has had since its founder, Baron Pierre de Coubertin of France.

His diplomatic skill was evident from the moment he emerged from his role as a deputy for sports in General Francisco Franco’s fascist regime to become an ambassador to the communist Soviet Union in the democratic government of King Juan Carlos.

Otherwise, little was known about Samaranch outside the IOC when he, sponsored by Avery Brundage and Adidas power broker Horst Dassler, was overwhelmingly elected president. A member since 1956, his official role in roller hockey serving as an entree, he was known as an intelligent and diligent problem solver but not as dynamic.

That quickly changed after he became president.

Where do you start with his accomplishments?

With the end of the hypocritical age of amateurism, turning the Olympics into a competition for the world’s best athletes?

With the increased role for women, doubling their participation in the sports to 42% of the total number of competitors and ushering in the first female members of the IOC?

With using Peter Ueberroth’s sponsorship model from the 1984 Summer Games to transform the IOC from near bankruptcy into a $10-billion operation, freeing the organization from dependence on government subsidies. That also has enabled the IOC to resist temptation to place the Games on pay television.

At an IOC session in Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1986, Samaranch proposed scheduling future Summer and Winter Games in different years, both to assist national Olympic committees--two massive efforts in the same year were difficult financially and organizationally--and to give winter athletes more distinction. Longtime Olympic followers, based on past experiences with the glacierlike movement, said it would be years before the proposal was adopted. It was done by the end of the week.

In Samaranch’s early years as president, he put the modern in the Modern Games.

But most of his notable achievements occurred before 1993.

Since, he has been running victory laps--desiring to stay on for the 1994 Centennial Congress in Paris and the 1996 Centennial Games in Atlanta, then for the Games of the Millennium in Sydney in 2000.

His vigorous support of Beijing’s bid was based on a desire to change the world, which could be interpreted as admirable, but he placed the best interests of the athletes and the Games themselves behind that. His dream of winning a Nobel Peace Prize has hardly been veiled. Some would say he has delusions of grandeur.

In that vein, he has fostered a sense within the IOC that the office of president is so large that no one else can occupy it. That is not true. There are several capable leaders, some of whom even ran for president.

I’d like to think they would have been vigilant and averted the scandal that still taints the IOC. Samaranch should have done that. Yet, even during the height of it in 1999, he had members convinced that only he could lead them to reform. They gave him a near-unanimous vote of confidence.

He rewarded that confidence recently by nominating his son, Juanito, for IOC membership, as if he were a king with divine right. Warned by colleagues that his action, which was to be voted on today, would damage his and the IOC’s reputations, Samaranch said, “I don’t care.”

That was an unfortunate response because I believe he cares deeply about the Olympic movement. If history is fair, it will recognize that and the remarkable accomplishments of his first two terms. We will not know until after Beijing 2008 how the rest of it should read.

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Randy Harvey can be reached at [email protected]