IOC Says It Won’t Rule on Pros for ’88 Games

The dispute over amateurs and professionals competing together in the Olympics will last through at least one more set of Games, the head of the International Olympic Committee said Thursday.

IOC President Juan Antonio Samaranch said that delays in dealing with the matter mean that no action will be taken on drastically revised athlete-eligibility rules, known as the athletes’ code, before the 1988 Winter Games at Calgary, Canada, and the Summer Games at Seoul, South Korea.

There is the possibility, Samaranch said, that eligibility problems in tennis and hockey will be resolved in time for the ’88 Games. But that would be far from the revolutionary change that some Olympic officials had been expecting as recently as this week.