U.S. Olympic relations rocky -- again
Posted: Monday March 15, 1999 05:37 PM
LAUSANNE, Switzerland (AP) -- The United States made the Olympics rich, and now the United States insists the Olympics make sweeping changes.
As they prepared Monday for a watershed assembly to deal with the corruption and fallout of Salt Lake City's winning bid for the 2002 Winter Games, IOC officials chafed under strong criticism.
Friction between the International Olympic Committee and its most powerful member nation is nothing new. The last two decades have been filled with clashes, from the White House-led boycott of the 1980 Moscow Games to the trashing of dorm rooms by U.S. hockey players in the 1998 Nagano Games.
But three months of finger pointing primarily by U.S. interests and a relatively light rebuke for the U.S. Olympic Committee for its role in a scandal in its own backyard has the IOC fed up.
President Juan Antonio Samaranch has told friends and colleagues he is angered by the American onslaught. The IOC's latest internal investigation resulted in a sixth member being expelled, a raft of warnings to others and a slap at the USOC for a lack of oversight in Salt Lake's bid.
And senior IOC officials have been outspoken in recent days about what they see as American interference in the international committee's affairs, especially in a scathing report by former U.S. Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell.
"We respect the Mitchell commission's work, but we are not prepared to shape our reforms to such statements or comply with the wishes of the international press," executive board member Kevan Gosper of Australia said.
The financial success of the 1984 Los Angeles Games helped save the Olympics and make them a billion-dollar business. Now the flip side of that success, the accountability and responsibility of staging the world's biggest and most influential sports event, is being felt, and that, too, is born in the USA.
Sponsors with US$50 million contracts, most of them American based, have led the call for radical changes.
U.S. newspapers and broadcast networks have criticized the IOC and Samaranch for leading the Olympics down a gift-lined path.
And even the USOC, the IOC's branch office in the United States, has turned to the attack. It's independent ethics panel placed most of the blame for the scandal on the IOC, and last week USOC president Bill Hybl said he hoped that "the IOC will match our commitment and action when it votes on reforms."
Samaranch is incensed by the American line.
According to colleagues of the IOC leader who spoke on the condition of anonymity, Samaranch told friends that the United States had caused trouble throughout his more than 18 years in power.
He cited the Moscow boycott, the conflict-of-interest scandal involving former IOC member and USOC president Robert Helmick and the fact that Salt Lake produced the biggest corruption case yet, the sources said.
The IOC also remains troubled by the 1996 Atlanta Games, where a bombing in Centennial Olympic Park killed one person.
In addition, U.S. drug policy director Barry McCaffrey was among the most outspoken critics of the IOC at an international drug summit last month, saying the Salt Lake scandal had compromised the committee's leadership in the doping fight.
Meanwhile, the USOC's leadership has taken shots at Samaranch.
In addition to Hybl's statement, executive director Dick Schultz said he was uncertain the IOC was prepared to make the changes it should.
Other IOC officials have been upset by the lack of heat directed at the USOC for the Salt Lake scandal. One high-ranking member said the USOC should change its initials to TNOC, for "Teflon National Olympic committee. Nothing sticks."
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