A Missing Link in the Olympics : Administration: When Helmick resigned, the U.S. was left on the outside looking in at the executive board of the IOC.

No one has filled the leadership vacuum left when Robert Helmick resigned his positions with the U.S. and International Olympic committees last year, leading to a decline in the United States’ influence in the Olympic movement.

As a result of Helmick’s fall, stemming from conflict-of-interest charges, the United States, often referred to by IOC President Juan Antonio Samaranch as the organization’s most important member, has gone almost a year with only one IOC member and with no members of the inner circle, the executive board.

Amid speculation that the U.S. member, Anita DeFrantz of Los Angeles, will not be successful in her bid to join the executive board and that the selection of a second U.S. representative to the IOC could be postponed for more than a year, the United States’ position may not improve after today’s IOC elections.

“I think both of those positions are important to us, particularly the one on the executive board,” USOC Executive Director Harvey Schiller said Wednesday. “If we don’t get one or both, it’s something we’re going to have to sit down with the IOC and talk about.

“We’ve got the Atlanta Games coming up in 1996; Salt Lake City is a strong contender for the Winter Games in 2002; and there continues to be significant involvement in the movement from American corporations and television. I think we should have a direct line of communication to the IOC.”

Helmick, a Des Moines, Iowa, lawyer who became USOC president in 1985, filled that role after his election in 1989 to the IOC’s 11-member executive board, which is responsible for the organization’s agenda.

Since Helmick’s resignation last year, the U.S. Olympic Committee has communicated with the IOC through a group that includes DeFrantz, Schiller, President William Hybl, Deputy Secretary General John Krimsky and International Relations Director Alfred La Mont. But the signals occasionally have been unclear, or even mixed, and Schiller said he believes the system might prove ineffective.

DeFrantz still appears the person most likely to fill the void, but her anticipated appointment to the IOC’s executive board could be delayed by at least a year if she is not elected today to fill one of the three vacancies, two full four-year terms and one to complete the final year of Helmick’s term.

Her chances were damaged Tuesday when other IOC members from the Americas decided, 10-4, to vote as a block for Canadian Richard Pound.

As for the selection of a second U.S. representative to the 93-member IOC, the situation was so muddled that it appeared possible that the organization would postpone action until its next session in September, 1993, at Monte Carlo.

One source close to the situation said that he believes the IOC will vote today in favor of Hybl, a businessman from Colorado Springs, Colo., who replaced Helmick last year as the USOC’s president.

He said that Hybl, a former state legislator who has maintained ties with the Bush Administration, impressed Samaranch with his efforts to persuade the U.S. government to support the IOC’s position on whether Yugoslav athletes should be allowed to participate in the Summer Olympics.

But he added that officials from the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games (ACOG) might be successful in their efforts to have the decision delayed, in hopes that they can further advance the prospects of their candidate, ACOG President William Porer Payne.

Another source said that Schiller has been quietly campaigning on his own behalf, but he vigorously denied that.

Of those three, only Hybl was on the USOC’s list of preferred candidates that was forwarded to Samaranch. Others were Michael Lenard of Los Angeles, a USOC vice president; Bob Smith of Greenville, Ill., the international baseball federation’s president, and Ross Wales of Cincinnati, the international swimming federation’s secretary.

Samaranch wanted a longer list, which, the source said, the USOC unofficially provided for him this week by adding the names of Schiller, Payne and Andrew Young of Atlanta, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.