Berlioux Reportedly Agrees to Retire From IOC

Monique Berlioux, director and chief executive officer of the International Olympic Committee, reached agreement with the IOC Executive Board Tuesday in East Berlin on the terms for her immediate retirement, senior IOC officials disclosed.

The Executive Board had asked for her retirement Sunday at the climax of several years of growing tension between Berlioux and IOC President Juan Antonio Samaranch.

Her $100,000-a-year contract would have remained in effect through the 1988 Winter Games at Calgary, Canada, and the Summer Games at Seoul, South Korea.

However, one IOC member, insisting on anonymity, said Berlioux agreed to terminate her 18-year association with the IOC at the end of the current IOC session here on Friday.

Other IOC sources said the committee offered her a settlement of around $500,000, but details of the agreement are still being worked out by lawyers of both sides. It was not clear whether the agreement would impose any conditions following her retirement concerning her possible memoirs or future employment.

Berlioux, addressing a news conference for the first time in three days, refused to answer questions about her personal status, but said she would make an announcement this morning.

At Tuesday’s session, Peter Ueberroth, president of the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee, presented his final official report on the Los Angeles Games, which concluded with a record overall profit of $215 million.

The minutely detailed report in two richly illustrated volumes weighed 37 pounds and cost $4.5 million to produce.

Each of the 89 members of the IOC was presented with one copy.

Ueberroth, now the Commissioner of Major League Baseball, told a news conference that the Los Angeles profit was being divided among the U.S. Olympic Committee, U.S. national sports federations and youth sports programs in Southern California, as laid down in the organizers’ contract with the IOC.

Ueberroth said he would have preferred to see some of this money go to national Olympic Committees and sports federations in the rest of the world, but his views were overruled.

“My personal position is well known,” he said. “I would distribute it (some of the surplus) in two ways: to sports and the youth in our own country, and it would be my personal wish to give back every penny to any National Olympic Committee that had entered the Games.

“I have said that many times. Because we did not expect a big surplus and when it came, because there were no difficulties, it would have been the proper thing to give back 100% of the costs to each national committee of what they paid to us.”

Romania’s decision to defy the Eastern Bloc boycott of the Los Angeles Games received public recognition at the Tuesday’s IOC session.

Romanian President Nicolae Ceausescu was awarded an Olympic Order in gold, while another Olympic order went to Haralambie Alexa, president of the Romanian national Olympic committee.

The Olympic order was awarded posthumously to John Kelly, who died from a heart attack earlier this year just six weeks after his election as president of the U.S. Olympic Committee.