Spain ’92 / A Medal Year : Profile : Lukewarm Thanks for IOC’s Samaranch : His support for the late Spanish dictator Franco still angers some Catalans. But he has also helped his native region.

When Juan Antonio Samaranch, the president of the International Olympic Committee, used his considerable influence to deliver the 1992 Summer Games to Barcelona, it was the most magnificent gift he had to offer Catalonia, the Spanish region of his upper-class birth, his carefree youth and his ascent to national and international prominence. Yet, his affection has been unrequited.

Not that the city and regional governments are unappreciative of his largess. They have used the Olympics as impetus for an $8-billion face lift, including construction of a new airport, hotels and sports facilities, modernization of infrastructure and conversion of a run-down warehouse district into a beachfront resort area.

All are designed to improve the lives of its citizens and to boost Barcelona into the ranks of London and Paris as a European tourist site.

Barcelona’s mayor, Pasqual Maragall, says the projects eventually would have been undertaken as part of a long-range revitalization plan, but he adds that they were realized much sooner because of the Olympics. For that, he acknowledges a debt of gratitude to the 72-year-old Samaranch.

The attitude of Catalans toward Samaranch, however, is ambivalent. While respectful of his accomplishments, they cannot forget that for more than 20 years he played an active and, by all indications, enthusiastic role in the fascist government of Gen. Francisco Franco. The Spanish magazine Solidaridad Nacional quoted him during that period as saying, “I am a Francoist 100%.”

Seventeen years after Franco’s death, memories of his totalitarian regime are still not far beneath the surface in Catalonia. Because it was the last region to hold out against his forces in the Spanish Civil War, Catalonia received especially harsh treatment from Franco. He executed thousands who opposed him and attempted to eradicate the Catalan culture.

Yet, Catalans have reached an accommodation with those who collaborated. Forget, no; forgive, yes. Thus, they were startled by the furor throughout much of Europe when Samaranch’s involvement in the Franco government was re-examined this year in “The Lords of the Rings,” a book by two British journalists.

“Even after he had risen to become an IOC vice president touring the world as a guardian of the Olympic ideal, Samaranch continued to lift his right arm in the fascist salute at political gatherings in Spain,” the authors wrote.

Outside Spain, the book represented the first blemish on Samaranch’s formerly impeccable image, and he has reacted by declining in-depth media interviews if he believes they will focus on the subject.

As for the responses from his friends, they usually are similar to that offered by Juan Jose Castillo, a columnist for a Barcelona sports newspaper, El Mundo Deportivo. “Look, Mr. Samaranch is a political realist,” he said. “I’m sure he said all those things about being loyal to Franco, but who wouldn’t? We all did. They were different times, and people acted differently then.”

Although many of today’s Catalan business and political leaders clearly prospered during Franco’s rule because they were at least outwardly supportive of him, that is not true of all. But even those who did not join Samaranch do not quarrel with Castillo’s description of him as a political realist. The Olympics chief is no hero to them, but neither do they consider him a fascist.

“Mr. Samaranch might be described as one of those who has no political loyalty,” said Lluis Puigari Munne, a former Catalan politician.

According to “The Sport of Power--The Life and Miracle of Juan Antonio Samaranch,” an unauthorized biography written by two Catalan journalists and published last year in Spain, Samaranch’s family, which made its money in the textile industry, was no different from most of the country’s upper class, whose conservative leanings eventually were transformed into support for Franco’s Nationalist forces in the Spanish Civil War.

Whether it was because of his family’s loyalties or because Samaranch could see momentum shifting toward the Nationalists, he deserted from Spain’s Republican army at 18 in 1938 and spent the rest of the war in Barcelona. He completed his military service after Franco came to power.

Upon returning to Barcelona in 1940, he joined his family’s business, became an attorney and plotted a career in politics. At such a young age, the path of least resistance for him was through sports. A former roller hockey goalie, he began coaching a local team and writing a column devoted to the sport in a Spanish newspaper, La Prensa, under the pen name “The Stick.”

His first attempt to enter real politics was thwarted in 1951, when Franco’s Falangist party failed to support his bid for Barcelona’s city council, reportedly because his free-spending, man-about-town lifestyle was inconsistent with the government’s conservative moral tone. But he settled down and won the party’s favor and the council seat in 1954. One year later, he got married and caught Franco’s eye as an enterprising vice president for the organizing committee of Barcelona’s successful Mediterranean Games.

That accelerated his rise within international sports and national politics. By 1974, he was a vice president of the IOC, president of the Spanish Olympic Committee and president of Catalonia’s Regional Council, which made him the region’s highest-ranking government official.

But with Spain’s turn toward democratization after Franco’s death in 1975, Samaranch’s political career within the country came to an abrupt halt. For the first time he became the target of criticism in the country’s press, and he much later admitted in an interview that he realized then that his “public life in Spain was finished . . . politically and socially.”

The mood in Spain, however, was one of reconciliation. The new government recognized Samaranch’s value because of his international contacts, and while it was apparent that he could not stay in Barcelona in any position of influence, he was offered ambassadorships to Austria and the Soviet Union.

He chose the Soviet Union because Moscow had been selected to stage the 1980 Summer Olympics. Samaranch was aware that a new president would be elected at the IOC session beforehand, and he recognized that he could strengthen his candidacy by becoming not only Spain’s representative in Moscow but also the IOC’s.

The Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan almost collided with his ambition when Spain joined the U.S.-led boycott of the Moscow Games. Fearing the decision would be held against him by IOC members, he persuaded Spain’s Olympic Committee to send athletes under the neutral IOC flag, then won permission to attach the committee’s symbol, including colors of the Spanish flag, to the IOC flag.

Spain’s government placed one other obstacle in his path by forbidding embassy staff members to attend the Games. But Samaranch overcame that order by taking an extended vacation. He left instructions to his staff members that they could not attend the Games, but he considered himself free to attend--as a representative not of Spain but of the IOC.

He was overwhelmingly elected the organization’s president, a position he has held for 12 years. His creativity did not stop there. He generally is lauded for preparing the IOC for the 21st Century by nudging it toward professionalism, not only on the playing field but in its business affairs. When he became president, the IOC had assets worth $2,008,185. Today, those assets have risen 50-fold to $105,045,685.

“I think there have been three great IOC presidents,” said Richard Pound, an IOC member from Canada. “There was Pierre de Coubertin, who founded the modern Olympics, and Avery Brundage, who held the whole thing together by the force of his personality. The third one is Samaranch, who has taken the movement forward.”