IOC Members Treated Royally : King, Queen, Princess Make Pitches to Be Olympic Hosts

In the Palais de Beaulieu’s Grand Hall, where the 13 cities that were bidding for the 1992 Winter and Summer Olympics had elaborate exhibitions, the star attraction this week was Gina Lollobrigida.

She was here to try to charm members of the International Olympic Committee into awarding the Winter Games to Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy. She is not believed to be an expert on luge conditions in Cortina, but apparently that was OK, since no one bothered to ask.

A day later, it was France’s prime minister, Jacques Chirac. He spoke to the IOC on behalf of Albertville’s successful candidacy for the Winter Games, then put on his Mayor of Paris chapeau and appealed on behalf of that city’s unsuccessful summer bid.

Chirac and his city had considerable competition. The Netherlands’ Queen Beatrice supported Amsterdam. Gina Lollobrigida she’s not, but she’s the best queen the Dutch have.

Spain trumped the queen with its king, Juan Carlos I, who campaigned (successfully) for Barcelona. Outranked by both the king and the queen was Great Britain’s Princess Anne, who was stumping for Birmingham, England.

Indeed, IOC members received royal treatment all week at their 91st session from the seven winter and six summer candidates.

Five years ago at Baden Baden, West Germany, the IOC had only two cities bidding for the 1988 Summer Games and three for the 1988 Winter Games. Three years before that, the only candidate for the 1984 Summer Games was Los Angeles.

Why were cities suddenly burning with Olympic fever?

“The L.A. bug, surely,” editorialized a French magazine, Continental Sports.

They caught it from Peter Ueberroth, the president of the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee, which proved that 16 days of glory can also result in $237 million of profit.

Since then, one of Ueberroth’s most ardent admirers has been Spain’s Juan Antonio Samaranch, the IOC’s progressive president.

But Samaranch is just one of the IOC’s members, 86 of whom were here this week. One of those absent, Sudan’s Abdel Gadir, is a political prisoner in his country, but that’s another story.

Each country that has been host to an Olympics has two IOC members. When one of the United States’ members, Douglas Roby, retired in 1985, Samaranch presented Ueberroth’s name to the IOC as his choice for the successor.

The membership refused to even consider Ueberroth, electing Robert Helmick, president of the United States Olympic Committee.

Earlier this year, the other U.S. representative, Julian Roosevelt, died, leaving another opening for IOC members to fill at this session.

Again, Samaranch pressed for Ueberroth.

Again, the IOC chose someone else, Anita DeFrantz, 34, a Los Angeles attorney and 1976 Olympic bronze medalist in rowing. She will be the fifth woman IOC member.

The criticism of Ueberroth from IOC members after the Los Angeles Games was contradictory. All applauded him because of the financial success but faulted him for excessive commercialism, apparently ignoring the connection between the financial success and the commercialism.

One theory is that Ueberroth made enemies by not treating IOC members in the manner to which they had become accustomed at previous Olympics.

A little more than two years later, some IOC members are saying that Ueberroth received too much credit for the revival of the Olympic movement, particularly in the American press, and point out that four of the six cities that campaigned here for the 1992 Summer Games had submitted their bids before 1984.

But their resentment of Ueberroth is believed to have more to do with his book, “Made In America,” which was published last year.

“Would you vote for a man who has insulted you, spit in your face?” asked one person close to several IOC members.

The insult? Ueberroth wrote that officials from Seoul, South Korea, bribed IOC members with redeemable first-class airline tickets to win the bid against Nagoya, Japan, for the 1988 Summer Olympics.

The South Koreans, naturally, were offended. They say their gift to IOC members wasn’t bribery but public relations.

Equally offended were IOC members, although it’s not clear whether they were more upset because of the charge that they were bought or by the implication that they were bought so cheaply.

Considering the blood lines of some of the members, it’s probably the former.

Recently elected was Prince Albert of Monaco, the youngest member at 28. The oldest, by the way, is Bulgaria’s Vladimir Stoytchev, who is 94.

Besides Albert, there are two other princes on the IOC and one princess. There also is a count, a lord, a grand duke, a rajah and a knight.

There also are two sheiks, one of them Kuwait’s Fahad Al-Ahmad Al-Sabah. In his IOC biography, he lists his career as “member of the ruling family.”

Nice work, if you can get it.