Olympic Committee Head John Kelly Dies

John B. Kelly Jr., U.S. Olympic Committee president, Olympic rowing medalist and brother of the late Princess Grace of Monaco, died Saturday while jogging, police said. He was 57.

Police Lt. James Cahill said Kelly’s body was found at a Center City intersection. Identification was delayed because Kelly had nothing with him.

Bob Waters, an investigator at the Medical Examiner’s Office, said no cause of death would be released pending completion of toxicology tests.

Kelly, who won a bronze medal in the single sculls in the 1956 Olympics at Melbourne, Australia, was elected president of the USOC last month, a position he said in an interview that he had “looked forward to for a long time.”

Wanted to Contribute

“I got a lot out of sports, and I’d like to contribute something back,” said Kelly, a lifelong rower, swimmer and amateur sports enthusiast.

Kelly also competed in Olympic Games in 1948, 1952 and 1960. In 1947, he won the James E. Sullivan Award as the nation’s outstanding amateur athlete.

“Philadelphia has sustained a shocking loss,” Mayor W. Wilson Goode said Saturday night. “Jack Kelly epitomized everything good and positive about our city. He made us proud to be Philadelphians. He was indeed a good-will ambassador, spreading the word of Philadelphia throughout the world.

“His untimely death, coming so soon after assuming the highest office of the U.S. Olympic Committee, is even more shocking,” Goode said. “Our prayers are with his wife and family, and a part of Philadelphia died with him.”

‘A Physical Guy’

“I can’t believe it,” said former Mayor Frank Rizzo. “He’s such a physical guy. He took good care of himself. I saw him (jogging) several times myself as I was driving down East River Drive.”

Rizzo, noting that as a young policeman he worked in the area where the Kelly family lived, said the family name was synonymous with Philadelphia.

“To me he was a guy dedicated to our town,” said Francis Bagnell, a classmate of Kelly’s at the University of Pennsylvania, president of the Maxwell Football Club and member of the college football Hall of Fame. He said Kelly was “totally dedicated to rowing, totally dedicated to the U.S. Olympic movement.”

Loss to Sports

“I’m shocked,” said Don Miller, former executive director of the USOC, now president of the U.S. Olympic Foundation. “It’s a loss to amateur sports in our country.

The executive board of the USOC will have a special meeting at an undetermined date to elect a new president, said Bob Paul, a spokesman at the organization’s offices in Colorado Springs, Colo. He said there is no automatic succession from first vice president to president.

The USOC is an organization of the 38 national governing bodies of amateur sports.

Kelly is survived by his wife; two children; his mother and two sisters. Funeral arrangements were incomplete.