Swansong for Samaranch and his tarnished IOC at Sydney

Swansong for Samaranch and his tarnished IOC at Sydney
AGENCE FRANCE PRESSE

PARIS, AUGUST 28: The importance is not to win but to line your pocket.

That would seem a more fitting motto for the International Olympic Committee (IOC) at the turn of the Millennium as it prepares to stage the Sydney Games, the first since institutional sleaze was exposed in the Salt Lake City scandal.

The governing body founded by French aristocrat Baron Pierre de Coubertin with the noblest of ideals had become a den of corruption. De Coubertin must have turned in his grave. Action was needed and six members of the IOC quit while others jumped after being implicated in the ``gifts for votes'' scandal that helped the American city win the 2002 Winter Games.

A root and branch reform of the movement was also begun.

But Juan Antonio Samaranch, the Spanish diplomat who had presided over the IOC's transformation from bastion of amateur values to corporate giant and then to a byword for sleaze, remains in the presidency until next year.

It is all a far cry from the organisation's beginnings at the Sorbonne University in Paris in 1894.

With Athens chosen to stage the inaugural modern Games two years later de Coubertin proposed a Greek Demetrius Vikelas as the first president.

The other 12 members were drawn from all corners of the globe. As well as two Britons and two Frenchmen (including de Coubertin) there were a Russian, a Uruguayan, a Bohemian, a Swede, a New Zealander, an American, an Italian and a Hungarian.

After Athens, de Coubertin assumed control until 1925 and stituted many reforms. In 1921, for the 1924 Games in Paris, a winter week was proposed to be held in Chamonix. That evolved into what is now the Winter Games.

The following year the body moved its headquarters from Paris to its present base in Lausanne, Switzerland.

When de Coubertin stepped down in 1925 he handed over the baton to Belgian aristocrat Henri de Baillet-Latour, who held office until 1942 and upheld the Olympic ideal although the one blemish on his presidency was the 1936 Berlin Games.

The IOC failed to prevent Adolf Hitler's Nazi regime from turning the supposedly international pageant into a propaganda vehicle.

Baillet-Latour's death in 1942 while still in office was a tragic affair. He died of a coronary on learning of his son's death in a plane crash in England.

Next in charge was Sweden's Sigfrid Edstrom who ruled until 1952. With Sweden neutral in World War II, Edstrom was the ideal choice and stood down after the successful Helsinki Games in Finland.

His American replacement Avery Brundage was a giant figure. The stonemason's son was an unashamed advocate of amateurism.

But Brundage had some difficult issues to deal with and he insisted on strict punishment for the Black Power protest by American sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos in 1968.

In 1972 though far worse was to come as Brundage prepared leave his post with the murder of 11 Israelis -- 18 died in all -- by pro-Palestinian terrorists in Munich. Brundage struck the right tone this time as he said: ``The Games must go on.''

Next in the hotseat was Ireland's Lord (Michael) Killanin who like Brundage found himself projected into the unwanted role of world statesman.

Killanin had had a varied career as a distinguished journalist and a film producer. At the IOC he was a reformer who recognised that the amateur fundamentalism espoused by Brundage was no longer realistic and he began the move towards professionalism. He also initiated moves to open the doors of the world's most exclusive gentlemen's club to women.

These reforms would be put into practice by his successor Samaranch but it is the Cold War that provided Killanin with his stiffest test.

He had already had to deal with the boycott by the black African nations of the Montreal Games in 1976 before the United States led a boycott of the Moscow Games in 1980 because of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

Killanin was welcomed in the White House by President Jimmy Carter and in the Kremlin by Leonid Brezhnev but could not prevent the boycott and after Samaranch took the helm.

Samaranch accelerated Killanin's reforms and the Los Angeles Games in 1984 was the first truly corporate pageant.

The pinnacle of Samaranch's reign was in 1992 when he took the game to his homeland for the first time, in Barcelona, the capital of his native Catalunya. Four years later the much-criticised Atlanta Games -- bloated, ultra-corporate and mismanaged -- were a step backwards. But worse was to come when the corruption that had infected the movement was exposed to the world.

The task of Samaranch's successor, elected in July next year, will be to ensure the Games move forward but also back to its former idealism.