ANALYSIS : Helmick Saw Options Limited Near the End

With Robert Helmick’s announcement that he has resigned as one of two U.S. representatives on the International Olympic Committee, the three-member panel appointed by the IOC two months ago to investigate conflict-of-interest charges against him disbanded Wednesday without disclosing its findings or its conclusions.

Even Olympic insiders were reluctant to speculate about the contents of the report that the panel had been scheduled to deliver to the IOC’s executive board this week in Lausanne, Switzerland.

But one highly placed source, who did not want to be identified, said he gathered from a discussion with a panel member that the recommendations would have included more than a slap on the wrist for Helmick, a lawyer from Des Moines, Iowa.

Whether that means he would have been expelled, a first for a member in the 97-year history of the IOC, perhaps will never be known. But at the very least, he probably would have been removed from the IOC’s inner circle, the 12-member executive board, and also from the prestigious program commission, which recommends the sports that will be contested in the Olympic Games.

As Anita DeFrantz, the remaining U.S. member of the IOC, said: “The only hope was that Bob could have worked out a deal to go to a corner and lay low for a few years.”

But for an extremely prideful man such as Helmick, that would have been as humiliating as expulsion. After spending the last 22 of his 54 years as a sports administrator at the national and international levels, he could not accept being in the army without his stripes. In the end, he chose the only option he believed was available to him.

Helmick’s decision to resign, IOC executive board member Kevan Gosper of Australia said, was “an elegant outcome for a very complex and difficult event.”

DeFrantz said it was “the decent thing to do.”

Until recently, Helmick had anticipated a more triumphant ending to this unseemly episode. Less than a month after charges first appeared in the press in early September that he had business dealings with groups that either had or were seeking relationships with the U.S. Olympic Committee and the IOC, dealings that earned $325,000 for him and the two law firms he has represented in recent years, Helmick resigned as president of the USOC. But he believed that a special counsel appointed by the USOC would exonerate him, enabling him to maintain his positions within the IOC.

Instead, the special counsel, Arnold Burns, a former U.S. deputy attorney general, was brutally frank in his criticism of Helmick, finding that he had “repeatedly violated” conflict-of-interest rules and used “USOC authority and influence for his own private benefit.”

After reading the 59-page report, Helmick claimed that he was completely exonerated.

Helmick might not be expert at spin control, but he has never been reluctant to dive in. After contents of a letter he wrote to the Pan American Sports Organization, criticizing its drug-testing procedures at last summer’s Pan American Games, became public, Helmick told reporters that the letter was intended as a compliment to PASO.

That sort of double-talk was one reason he was unpopular with some IOC members. They believed he would not speak without first sticking up his finger to see which way the wind was blowing. Others found him standoffish. Others thought he was too ambitious, the irony being that those who believed that generally distrusted each other for the same reason. And not without justification.

Only four years after his election to the 92-member IOC, Helmick became a member of the executive board in 1989. But that might have had more to do with IOC President Juan Antonio Samaranch’s desire to have a U.S. representative on the board than it did with the committee’s regard for Helmick. Several members asked the popular and respected DeFrantz to become a candidate, but she deferred to Helmick, who was senior to her on the IOC by less than a year.

“It seemed so important to Bob,” she said Wednesday from her office at the Amateur Athletic Foundation in Los Angeles. “I said, ‘Fine. I’ve got time.’ ”

Her time might be now, although she said she has not considered campaigning for a position on the executive board. It is possible that Helmick’s place on the executive board will not be filled until the regularly scheduled election in 1993.

Before then, perhaps at its session before the 1992 Olympic Games at Barcelona, Spain, the IOC is expected to elect another U.S. representative to replace Helmick. Likely candidates are USOC President William Hybl of Colorado Springs, Colo.; International Archery Federation President Jim Easton of Los Angeles, International Softball Federation President Don Porter of Oklahoma City, former United Nations ambassador Andrew Young of Atlanta and hurdler Edwin Moses of Newport Beach.

DeFrantz said she was still too stunned by Helmick’s resignation to give much thought to the future. Although she and Helmick often were on opposite sides of issues, she praised him as an effective and energetic advocate for the U.S. Olympic Committee at the international level.

“This is sad, very sad because he worked hard,” she said. “He deserved better than this, but unfortunately, he wrote the script.”