Helmick Expected to Be Named USOC President

Robert Helmick, president of the International Swimming Federation, is virtually certain to be named president of the U.S. Olympic Committee, officials said Friday. He would succeed the late John B. Kelly, who died of a heart attack March 2.

Helmick, 48, a Des Moines, Iowa, attorney, was elected the organization’s first vice president under Kelly in February, and he had been expected to move up to the presidency in 1989.

Under the new plan, he will serve concurrently as USOC president and swimming federation chairman through the 1988 Seoul Games. Originally, his heavy international schedule created doubt that he would be named to succeed Kelly. Under USOC rules, the first vice president does not automatically move up to the presidency.

The USOC administrative committee has sent out mailgrams to all 85 executive board members, asking them to approve Helmick and the emergency procedure being used to appoint him without a formal meeting.

Only one name is on the ballot, no opposition has surfaced, and the first returns from the mailgram are all for Helmick, said USOC’s executive director, retired Air Force Lt. Gen. George Miller, Friday. An aide said that plans have already been made to formally announce Helmick’s selection next Friday morning at USOC headquarters in Colorado Springs, Colo.

Helmick, contacted at his offices in Des Moines, said it would be presumptuous for him to comment. He said he will make a statement next Friday.

The new president, unlike any recent president of the USOC, will come to the job having already achieved considerable international prominence.

He is known in Olympic circles as a loyalist to the movement, having been one of the most forceful opponents within the the USOC to former President Carter’s boycott of the 1980 Moscow Games.

Helmick accused the Carter Administration of having putting pressure on the USOC by having White House aides seek to get contributors to withdraw their gifts unless the USOC approved the boycott. The charge was later confirmed by Carter aides.

Eventually, over Helmick’s objections, the USOC did vote to endorse the boycott and keep the U.S. Olympic team away from Moscow.

In his capacity at that time as a vice president of the swimming federation, Helmick attended the Moscow Games and officiated at the swimming competition.

Helmick also was one of five USOC members who served from 1979 through 1984 on the executive board of the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee. In 1978-79, he was president of the Amateur Athletic Union.

Helmick, a water polo player in many international competitions but not the Olympics, graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Drake University in 1957 and was subsequently first in his class at the Drake Law School, where he edited the law review. He is a partner of the Des Moines law firm of Belin, Harris, Helmick, Heartney & Tesdell, where he specializes in finance and securities.

In another development, USOC aides disclosed that the 57-year-old Kelly, on two occasions in the days before his fatal heart attack while jogging, had suffered from chest pains, but doctors could find nothing wrong. One of the occasions was in Los Angeles Feb. 11, when Kelly attended a Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee executive board meeting.