Looking Out for No. 1—And TrackFirst of Two Parts |
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At IAAF headquarters in Monaco, Nebiolo greets visitors in the royal splendor of his office.
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Imperious in style, vainglorious in nature, alternately combative, pompous, vindictive and charmingly self-deprecating, the 73-year-old Italian retired construction magnate is a backroom dealmaker who since 1981 has treated the 206-nation IAAF as a personal power base and fief. Nebiolo's expansive, alphabet tentacles now reach from the IAAF to the inner sanctum of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to the International University Sports Federation (FISU) to the Association of Summer Olympic International Federations (ASOIF) and to the International Athletic Foundation (IAF), a nest egg of more than $20 million in a private bank in Monte Carlo that has all the outward trappings of a slush fund.
Nebiolo regularly talks by phone to IOC president Juan Antonio Samaranch, trying to devise ways to procure larger and larger shares of the Olympic pie for his assorted affiliations. One of his more recent schemes—nixed by Samaranch—was to sell sponsorship of the bibs worn by track and field athletes at the Atlanta Olympics to Coca-Cola for $20 million, a sum that would have been split 5050 between Nebiolo's IAAF and Samaranch's IOC. Undeterred, Nebiolo continued to negotiate on behalf of ASOIF, the organization founded at his insistence in 1983 and of which he is president, for a share of the IOC's TOP (The Olympic Partnership) sponsorship money. Finally, in March, Samaranch agreed to fork over $32 million that was to be divided among the 25 summer Olympic federations, with the lion's share—$6.5 million—going to the IAAF.
Nebiolo is, by any measure, one of the most active and influential men in the world of sport—the third point of the so-called Latin pyramid that includes Spain's Samaranch and Brazil's Joáo Havelange, the head of FIFA, the governing body of world soccer. Nebiolo is also one of the most criticized and feared. "Letting Nebiolo into the IOC in 1992 was like letting the fox in among the chickens," says one powerful IOC member, requesting anonymity. "Nobody understands why Samaranch puts up with him, unless it's on the theory that it's better to have your enemies inside your tent than outside."
Nebiolo did the honors after Linford Christie won the gold in the 100 meters in Barcelona.
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Other sports administrators may be more erudite, more genteel, certainly more principled; they might outreason him, outdebate him and stake claim to a higher moral ground. But at the end of the day, do not bet that they'll have outflanked Nebiolo in his insatiable reach for the power to run international sport. "Primo looks after two things," says another IOC member. "Number one: himself. Number two: track and field. And he's done a terrific job. He's increased the interest in track and field all over the world, particularly in Europe, and has made the sport extremely rich."
Since Nebiolo took over as IAAF chief 15 years ago, the organization's annual revenues have grown from some $250,000 to $50 million. The IAAF's current television contract with the European Broadcasting Union, a six-year deal that runs through 2000, is worth approximately $100 million. Before he took control there were no sanctioned appearance fees for athletes, no authorized bonuses for world records, no biennial Track and Field World Championships, no Indoor World Championships, no Cross Country World Championships, no Marathon World Cup and no Grand Prix circuit. He has already given indications that his IAAF will begin paying medalists prize money at the World Championships in 1997—at the '95 championships each winner received a Mercedes—which some IOC members are fearful is the first step toward paying cash to medalists at the Olympic Games.
Nebiolo has skillfully overseen the transition of track and field from an amateur to a professional sport. Venerable athletes like 32-year-old pole vaulter Sergei Bubka and 35-year-old sprinterlong jumper Carl Lewis have kept competing because they can make a generous living at track and field. Just by showing up at a meet, Lewis can command $100,000. "You can't say [Nebiolo] didn't have the courage to change," says Luciano Barra, the Sports Director of the Italian Olympic Committee and Nebiolo's assistant at the IAAF from 1981 to '89. "In 1982, one year after he was elected, all the amateur regulations were changed. Today it may look foolish, but at that time an athlete could be suspended for life if he received more than $100. Nebiolo spent one year lobbying the Eastern European countries, especially the Soviet Union [to vote for appearance fees]. You can criticize him for his style, but sometimes it's important to reach something, not how you reach it."
A packet of ballots from Rome put Joyner-Kersee over the top for 1994 Athlete of the Year.
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But as track and field's fortunes grew throughout the '80s, so did the excesses of Nebiolo's lifestyle and the dictatorial nature of his leadership. (Though he now denies it, Nebiolo was once quoted as calling himself "the god of athletics.") Before the 1988 Seoul Olympics, Nebiolo craftily negotiated a reported
$20 million payment from the South Korean Olympic Organizing Committee in exchange for agreeing to schedule changes in the track and field finals to accommodate NBC, the U.S. television rights holder. He used that money to set up the International Athletic Foundation, which he now employs in any way he wishes for the general betterment of track and field. For example, Nebiolo says, he uses part of the interest to help track programs in Third World nations. There is no public accounting of the expenditures, and Nebiolo will neither divulge the foundation's worth today, nor confirm that the seed money came from the South Koreans. "These are rumors," he says coyly. "Life is good because everyone is able to express their opinion."
However, he does say that each year the IAAF touches only the interest generated by the foundation—still a fair chunk of change. The extravagant IAAF annual awards dinner, a $500,000 gala held in Monte Carlo, is financed by the foundation. So were the lavish festivities, estimated to have cost $2 million, that Nebiolo threw in his hometown of Turin following the Grand Prix finals there in 1992. Two years later Nebiolo also used foundation money to finance the move of the IAAF offices from their modest location in the Knightsbridge section of London to Monte Carlo, where the IAAF now operates out of two elaborately furnished villas.
The villas were leased to the IAAF by Monaco's Prince Rainier rent-free for 30 years after the IAAF footed the bill for renovations. The renovations, of course, were paid for by the foundation. The IAAF also keeps a 3,600-square-foot office in Rome that rents for $400,000 a year. Are such lavish quarters appropriate for the international headquarters of track and field? "This building is not important for me; it is important for our [track and field] family," Nebiolo says, pointing out that his position is an unpaid one. "We shouldn't be concerned if we are criticized. We should be lauded. We haven't spent one dollar of federation money, and we have built a house for our family. So we think gratitude is in order."
Nebiolo's expensive taste is legendary. When he travels, which is more than 200 days a year, he usually brings along his wife, Giovanna, plus a press attaché and his personal assistant. The entourage nearly always flies first class or by private jet, is met by limousine and is taken, often by police escort, to the most luxurious hotel in the city.
Asked about Nebiolo's penchant for extravagance, Bob Fasulo, an American who has been Nebiolo's personal assistant since 1992, says, "I wouldn't say he has a great love of limousines as much as he's trying to look presidential." Those around Nebiolo generally refer to him as The President, as in: The President can see you next Thursday. "He probably has an ego metabolism that takes more feeding than others," LeRoy Walker, president of the U.S. Olympic Committee, once said. But if Nebiolo likes to carry himself like a head of state, he prefers to govern athletics in the manner of a despot.
Consider, for example, Nebiolo's handling of an incident involving Nicola Maggio, a fellow Italian and a racewalk judge, at the 1993 World Championships in Stuttgart. While not as celebrated as the cheating by long jump judges who blatantly mismeasured a leap by Giovanni Evangelisti of Italy, thus guaranteeing him a bronze medal at the 1987 World Championships in Rome (Part II, in tomorrow's SI Olympic Daily), the Maggio case similarly points out Nebiolo's disregard for scandalous behavior—particularly when the fate of a countryman is at stake.
At his estate in Rome, with Giovanna, Nebiolo has a pet project other than track and field.
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In the final minutes of the men's 20-kilometer walk in Rome, Maggio violated several judging procedures and disqualified Mexico's Daniel García, who was in second place at the time. That allowed an Italian walker, Giovanni De Benedictis, to win the silver medal. The Race Walking Commission, chaired by Bob Bowman of the U.S., subsequently recommended that Maggio be suspended. "We felt in our hearts [Maggio] had probably cheated, but we had no real proof," said one commission member.
But Nebiolo not only rebuffed the commission, saying that only the IAAF executive council—which he controls—could suspend a judge, but he also assigned Maggio to serve as a judge at the World Junior Track and Field Championships. When the commission didn't back down and insisted on a hearing, Nebiolo, according to a source, told Bowman, "Why do you want to destroy yourself?" Nebiolo chaired the hearing. "Primo made his presentation, and that was that," says the source. Maggio was exonerated.
In the summer of '94, when 1,500-meter record holder Nourredine Morceli of Algeria was quoted in the French newspaper
L'Equipe saying Nebiolo had taken care of him financially at the World Championships in Stuttgart, Nebiolo was outraged. "For the next seven days my time was spent inducing Morceli [through IAAF contacts who were close to the runner] to say he was misquoted and had nothing but respect for Nebiolo," says Chris Winner, who spent 15 months as the IAAF's director of media and public relations before resigning in July 1995. Morceli said he was misquoted. "The inside of the IAAF is like a police state without the torture," Winner says. "People are told what to do, and they do it. Nebiolo frightens people. It makes your stomach freeze when he decides to attack."
According to Winner, the IAAF routinely provided complimentary travel and hotel rooms to German, Italian and Spanish journalists as an incentive to cover IAAF meetings and say favorable things about Nebiolo. "I'd get calls from Nebiolo's office in Rome telling me to take care of a certain journalist and his wife with plane fare and accommodations for a week somewhere or another," Winner says. Another part of his job, Winner says, was to inflate the numbers of athletes at Grand Prix events as well as the attendance figures and the numbers of countries participating and watching on television. "If there were going to be 100 athletes, we'd triple it," Winner says. "If 12 nations were seeing it live and 35 on tape delay, all of a sudden it would be 100 countries and 200 million people. There was a desperate effort to impress the U.S. television networks."
Winner also says that the elections of the annual IAAF Male and Female Athletes of the Year were occasionally rigged at Nebiolo's whims. "After the ballots had been counted in 1994, Nebiolo called my office to find out who'd won," he says. "I told him Morceli had won among the men, barely beating out [British hurdler] Colin Jackson. He asked about the women, and I said that Sally Gunnell, the British hurdler, had easily won for the second year in a row over [U.S. heptathlete] Jackie Joyner-Kersee. 'Are you sure?' he asked. 'How can this be? Maybe some of the ballots haven't come in yet. You never know.' I later got a call from one of his assistants saying not to make any announcements. Then I got a packet from Rome that contained 23 ballots, all with Jackie Joyner-Kersee's name on them. It was just enough to put her over the top. When the announcement was finally made, Gunnell had been dropped all the way to fifth. Colin Jackson was dropped to fourth. It was all based on who could be at the awards dinner. It was a shameful episode. I was privy to fraud and didn't do anything about it."
Fasulo declares these numerous accounts by Winner as "laughable."
Nebiolo's power within the IAAF is virtually unchecked by the organization's 26-member executive council. "If Primo wants something done, it's pretty tough to stop him," admits Ollan Cassell, head of USA Track and a vice president on the executive council. "If you challenge him, there's going to be a lot of challenges back your way."
Nebiolo personally selects the site of the biennial World Championships (the executive council rubber-stamps his recommendation), and the power to award a city this competition, second only to the Olympics in prestige, obviously gives him tremendous bargaining leverage, which he uses to personal advantage. "It is true he likes the World Championships to go to a country where he has a very good relationship with the president in power," says one former associate. "He loves to be received like a king. Also, the World University Games are awarded to universities that are eager to bestow a degree upon him. He has a page of these things. It's silly."
Burt Flickinger, who was head of the organizing committee that brought the World University Games to Buffalo in 1993, recalls that "after we'd been awarded the Games, [Nebiolo] asked me if I had any connections with local colleges, saying that he'd like to get a degree." Flickinger was on the board of Canisius College, which subsequently was pleased to honor Nebiolo with a doctorate of humane letters, honoris causa.
Those who know him chuckle at such examples of Nebiolo's self-exaltation. "Primo is the only man I have ever met who cannot be insulted," says one fellow IOC member, who, like so many of the people who work with Nebiolo, does not wish to be identified. "He has a skin like an elephant. If someone said to me, 'You are an idiot,' I would think about it. If you say to Primo Nebiolo, 'You are an idiot,' Primo wouldn't even care."
To Nebiolo, who can speak five languages (Italian, French, English, Spanish and Portuguese), words are best used to convey leverage. Leverage is power. Money is power. Primo Nebiolo is, above all else, a man who understands power: how to get it and how to keep it. "He's a total control guy and very paranoid," says one IAAF committee member who is close to Nebiolo. "He's convinced everyone is against him. Even the people who are subservient to him, he'll eventually come down on. I'm not sure he's got a friend in the world."
Heinz Kluetmeier
Andy Hayt
Lane Stewart
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SI Olympic Dailies
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