Analysis : Berlioux Lost Control When Samaranch Was Named IOC President

Monique Berlioux, whose resignation as executive director of the International Olympic Committee reportedly was requested Sunday, has for some time not had the power over IOC affairs that she once did.

The turning point for the 60-year-old French woman came in 1980 with the election of Spain’s Juan Antonio Samaranch as IOC president. When Samaranch decided to move to the IOC headquarters city of Lausanne, Switzerland, and take up permanent residence, the days when Berlioux ran the show were over.

Before Samaranch’s election, during the eight-year presidency of Ireland’s Lord Killanin, Berlioux was the organization’s most authoritative figure. This was evident in the summer of 1978, when she was the first to signal that the IOC was ready to yield to Los Angeles in contract talks for the staging of the 1984 Olympics and would accept the L.A. Games being run by a private committee. Even though Killanin called a news conference in London to deny the report, Berlioux reiterated it was true, which it was.

The IOC was an all-male organization in those days, and Berlioux’s power annoyed many of its members. Berlioux tactfully denied it, but she occupied a headquarters that was geographically separated from the members, scattered most of the time worldwide, and she controlled almost all the communications that went in and out of the IOC building. Indeed, L.A. negotiators had frequently found they could contact Killanin only through her. When she and Killanin differed, it was often she who prevailed.

Another trademark of Berlioux’s leadership was that she seldom, if ever, hired anyone for her staff, which has grown from four to about 50 persons during her tenure, who could likely replace her.

Before Killanin, Berlioux served the autocratic IOC president, Avery Brundage, as press director, beginning in 1967, and as executive director, beginning in 1971. At that time, Brundage was in his 80s and not often present in Lausanne.

Berlioux’s power was reportedly most sharply curtailed in the summer of 1983, after she was quoted as saying that Samaranch feared the Soviet Union would boycott the L.A. Games. Whether it was coincidence or not, Samaranch was arriving that very night in Moscow, and he was furious that press reports attributed to her had appeared in the West at a moment he felt was calculated to embarrass him.

It mattered little to Samaranch that Berlioux had spoken the truth. He said later that he never would have expressed his fears publicly, and it was not Berlioux’s place to do so.

Even before the 1983 incident, L.A. Olympic President Peter Ueberroth was finding that Samaranch wanted to communicate with him directly rather than through Berlioux.

Charlotte Hyde, the L.A. Olympic Committee liaison Ueberroth had assigned with Berlioux, recalled recently that when Ueberroth began to comply with Samaranch’s wishes, speaking to him almost every day in the two years leading up to the Games, Berlioux became “very, very emotional about it.”

In the last two years, Berlioux’s power has been restricted to representing the IOC at television contract negotiations, making the arrangements for IOC meetings and editing IOC publications. For a person once called the soul of the world Olympic movement, she found it frustrating. She began occasionally talking of retirement and of writing her memoirs, despite a contract that would carry her through the 1988 Seoul Games.

Berlioux is known throughout the Olympic world for her strong, stubborn, even contentious personality, a trademark since youth, when, as a teen-ager in Nazi-occupied France, she insisted on wearing a yellow Star of David despite the fact she was not Jewish.

At the age of 12, she won her first French national swimming championship, in the 100-meter backstroke, and by the time she quit competitive swimming 15 years later, she had won more than 40 national titles. She competed for France in the 1948 Olympics in London, but failed to make the finals, after having had her appendix removed just three weeks before.

A journalist, she also served as deputy French information minister in the regime of President Charles de Gaulle.