Torch The System

A quick question from a scarred old Olympic reformer: Where were all these howls of indignation when we needed them? Can the world just now be learning that the International Olympic Committee is thick with rightists, royals and petty extortionists? Was it a secret that IOC president Juan Antonio Samaranch worked under Francisco Franco, or that Ugandan IOC member Maj. Gen. Francis Nyangweso—who accepted $35,000 for Ugandan sports from the Sydney organizing committee the night before that city was awarded the 2000 Games—was Idi Amin's military chief of staff?

Naturally we gag when Olympia's high priests trade their votes for auto parts or plastic surgery, but the modern Games have always been run by a club that included some Borgias and butchers. The Olympics' defining grace is that they also give us men and women engaging in the toughest competition on earth—humankind at its best and most selfless.

Until the 1980s, however, few athletes had any role in sports government. Now athletes serve on some national Olympic committees. Until the '80s, if you set a world record and owned up to receiving more reward than a red-eye plane ticket and three dollars a day, you kissed your Olympic eligibility goodbye. Today competing in an Olympic sport can be as lucrative as any other worthy profession. Such advances came during Samaranch's rule as a result of a reform movement of which I'm proud to have taken part. After finishing fourth in the '72 Olympic marathon, I served on the USOC's Athletes Advisory Council until 1980.

We reformers had the nerve to imagine making the IOC something better than a private club. But the IOC, with its full coffers and total sway over cities that hope to host the games, never felt any need to go democratic. So the best of our generation of reformers gave up our pipe dream and started climbing the ranks of officialdom. In 1986 my former AAC colleague Anita DeFrantz, an Olympic rower in '76 and '80, was lifted to the IOC empyrean itself.

"The IOC is not a corporation or a government," says DeFrantz, now an IOC vice president, "and never again can it be that old boys club we decried. No, we have to restructure it." Here's a start: IOC members should be elected by their national Olympic committees. They should serve eight-year terms, have to stand for reelection and be subject to impeachment.

If proud old Samaranch is to salvage his legacy, he should help reformers turn the IOC from a convention of untouchable courtesans into a democratic body answerable to the athletes, coaches and administrators who are the true Olympic movement.