Samaranch says he overhauled IOC

MADRID, Spain (AP) -- Juan Antonio Samaranch says that when he stepped down last year as president of the much-criticized International Olympic Committee, he'd overhauled it from top to bottom.

"When I left after some 21 years, there was almost nothing left to do," the 82-year-old Spaniard said Monday as he presented his book Olympic Memoirs.

"Thanks to the crisis, which was a little exaggerated, that we experienced in 1999 in Salt Lake City, we were able to carry out the most radical changes in the entire history of the IOC," Samaranch said.

His reputation was badly scarred by the Salt Lake City scandal, which led to an unprecedented purge of 10 IOC members who had benefited from more than US$1 million in cash, gifts, scholarships and other favors doled out while the Utah capital staged its ultimately winning bid to stage the 2002 Winter Games.

Samaranch said he based the 440-page book on a diary he "wrote by hand and in bad handwriting" over his 21 years as IOC president, during which he presided over 10 Olympics, from the 1980 summer games in Moscow to the 2000 summer games in Sydney.

Looking a little frail and constantly needing reporters' questions to be repeated, Samaranch said that in the book "I say much more than I conceal... I only omitted what might have upset some people."

A Barcelona-born former hockey player, Samaranch said two of his biggest achievements were "the unity achieved within the Olympic community" and the incorporation of women into the movement.

"Before they used to say the IOC was a group of aristocrats, barons and marquises. Today within the IOC we have another type of aristocracy which is that of the athletes," explaining that 30 athletes were now members of the committee.

Samaranch said the book was divided into three parts: his achievements as IOC president, the diary and a third section of anecdotes and letters from personalities in the sporting world.

At the presentation, he was flanked by Spanish Education Minister Pilar del Castillo, who heaped praise on him for "having transcended the world of sport in benefit of peace and the coexistence of people."

Asked if he agreed with Del Castillo's comparison of him to IOC founder Baron Pierre de Coubertin, Samaranch said: "maybe it's a little exaggerated ... Coubertin's times were totally different from the current ones. He was the founder while I perhaps have been the renovator."

In the book, Samaranch says that when he took over, "I saw what I suspected. The situation of the IOC was very precarious. Not just in financial terms and in its economic resources but principally because its image and prestige before the world [was] seriously damaged by the Moscow boycott and its political and diplomatic repercussions."

He was referring to the U.S. boycott of the 1980 games in Moscow to protest the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan the year before.

"I proposed five goals: reinforce the unity of the Olympic movement; go all out against doping; encourage a policy of nondiscrimination; open the Olympic Games to the best athletes, getting beyond the difference between amateurs and professionals and increasing the presence of women in the Olympic Movement," he wrote in the book.

Samaranch retired as the second-longest serving president in the 107-year history of the IOC. His era was probably the most eventful in the committee's history, spanning political boycotts, the end of amateurism, the advent of professionalism, and the unprecedented growth of the games.

But his presidency was also clouded by controversy, from the Salt Lake City scandal to criticism that the games are over-commercialized and riddled with performance-enhancing drugs.

 

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