Where I Stand — Mike O’Callaghan: IOC does more of nothing

Thursday, March 25, 1999 | 11:53 a.m.

THE INTERNATIONAL OLYMPIC Committee royalty, led by king Juan Antonio Samaranch, gathered in Lausanne, Switzerland last week to clean up their own mess. So what did they do? They expelled the delegates of six weak countries and the king continued to reign. The delegates of Western Samoa, Ecuador, Sudan, Republic of Congo, Mali and Chile were shown the door. Then bravely the IOC created an ethics committee to study the mess all of them have known existed for at least two decades.

The time for a study is long past due and punishing a few weak members does little to assure the world of the purity of the Olympic flame. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., has a suggestion that would really cleanse the entire operation. McCain is considering a law that would remove the IOC's tax-exempt status. This, for example, would increase the cost of John Hancock Mutual Life Insurance Co.'s sponsorship by 40 percent. Maybe this doesn't bother the IOC which had a bank balance of $207 million at the end of 1998.

John Hancock President David D'Allesandro is far from pleased with the tiny steps taken at the Lausanne meeting. When discussing Samaranch, D'Alessandro told the New York Times he should have been much stronger and demanded, not studied, needed reforms. He called the entire affair a "potentially enterprise-killing scandal." He added, "I see this as a continuation of the nobility attitude: 'Please media, please sponsors, leave us alone and we will go off and study so we can come back with the least that we can get away with.' It is a very weak leadership position to appoint a study group when everybody knows what you have to do. The sponsors shouldn't be saying all is well. We have no idea whether there is going to be true reform."

Evidently, D'Alessandro hasn't forgotten Samaranch's famous statement that "IOC members ought to have rather better gifts than other people." This must have been on the John Hancock executive's mind when telling USA Today, "They have different rules for IOC members than they do for professional or Olympic athletes. An athlete isn't supposed to accept gifts without knowing their source. They can't have a trace of drugs in their system. But it's OK for these guys to have more than a trace of money in their bank account from suspect sources. They really do have to be judged by a harsher standard. They'd be much better off taking a harder line."

Now it's evident that most of the world has been awakened to the facts written by author Andrew Jennings in his "The New Lord of the Rings." The remaining problem is the inability or reluctance of IOC members to take strong action to right their wrongs. Not only do they, by a vote of 86-2, want to keep Samaranch as their king, but give some indication that when he retires they may bring a real king with the name of Don aboard to hold the Olympic torch.

In Lausanne, IOC vice president Dick Pound is reported running around clucking like a hen about the positive steps being taken. His statements take me back to a paragraph in Jennings' book where he told of the time Atlanta's budget for the Olympic's appeared very slim. Pound remarked, "We will never again award the Games in (the) future to a city which has no significant public sector commitment." He was talking about the need of many more large corporate sponsors.

Pound's comments fly in the face of the founder of modern-day Olympics, Baron Pierre de Coubertin. It was Coubertin who 93 years ago called for the purifying of the Games. It was, according to Jennings, in 1906 that Coubertin wrote, "It involves too many activities unrelated to sport, too many marginal ambitions. People help in the hope of a ribbon or a distinction, they use it for their own personal, political or other advantage."

That was more than nine decades ago and the entire situation has had all of those years to get mired deeper in the mud. The solution won't be found by kicking six small-time operators out of the royal family and studying the mess all of the family helped create. The solution is the removal of Samaranch and all of the people he has made members of the family he believes deserve "rather better gifts than other people."