WORLD SPORTS SCENE / RANDY HARVEY : IOC Takes Straight and Arrow in Easton

On the wall outside U.S. Olympic Committee Executive Director Harvey Schiller’s office in Colorado Springs, Colo., is a display of arrows donated by Jim Easton, president of archery’s international federation.

When Easton was elected Monday in Paris as one of two International Olympic Committee members from the United States, it must have felt to Schiller as if one of those arrows had pierced his heart.

Several candidates had been mentioned for the position since Robert Helmick resigned in 1991, but no one pursued it as aggressively as Schiller.

The IOC is often suspicious of those with so much ambition, wondering whether they are more interested in promoting themselves than the Olympic movement. As one member said, when a campaign is perceived as one, it is doomed to failure.

But even if there is no reason to suspect that Schiller’s motives were anything but the purest, he was never considered a serious candidate because of his philosophical and personal differences with the senior member of the IOC from the United States, Anita DeFrantz.

DeFrantz has been an IOC member for eight years and gained admission into the inner circle, the executive board, two years ago. If she was not comfortable with Schiller as a potential member, then neither was IOC President Juan Antonio Samaranch.

Schiller underestimated DeFrantz’s influence. Even though she, as an IOC member, sits on the USOC’s executive committee, she sometimes is treated as an outsider there. Now that Schiller is leaving on Oct. 1 to become president of TBS Sports, perhaps there will be an improvement in the relationship between the USOC and DeFrantz.

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There is little question that DeFrantz can work with Easton. Both are from Los Angeles, both were officials with the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee and both are actively involved in the Amateur Athletic Foundation, DeFrantz as president and Easton as a member of the board of directors.

Easton’s election also helps fulfill Samaranch’s goal of giving international sports federations more representation within the IOC.

But Samaranch is relaxing on his promise to do the same for women. All of the 12 new members named Monday are men.

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If the IOC’s evaluation commission were asked to name its final four candidates for the 2002 Winter Olympics today instead of next January, insiders say that the survivors would be Salt Lake City, Oestersund, Sweden; Sion, Switzerland, and Graz, Austria. And if the final vote by the IOC were today instead of next June, they say that the clear winner would be Salt Lake City.

So, naturally, the most nervous of the nine bid committees formally presenting their candidacies before the start of last week’s IOC Congress in Paris was the one from Salt Lake City.

Members of that city’s committee are aware that at least three considerations--their second-place finish to Nagano, Japan, by only three votes in the bidding for 1998; their firm financial position and, with the recent start of construction on a bobsled and luge track and a speedskating oval, their November, 1995, target date for completion of all venues--have placed them in an unenviable position as the favorite.

The IOC tends to get bored with favorites.

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Salt Lake City also could be vulnerable if Quebec City, Canada, is among the four cities selected to appear before the IOC voters on June 16 in Budapest, Hungary.

Although many IOC members concede that Salt Lake City’s bid for 1998 was technically better than Nagano’s, they were reluctant to vote for another U.S. city so soon after awarding the 1996 Summer Olympics to Atlanta. They could decide in Budapest that 2002 would be a good time to return the Winter Games to North America--as long as it is not to a U.S. city.

Quebec City supporters already are aiming at Salt Lake City. Richard Pound, an IOC executive board member from Montreal, said last week that the Canadian Olympic Assn. did not designate Calgary as its official candidate because the world is not ready for another Winter Olympics in the Rocky Mountains so soon after the 1988 Games in that city. Salt Lake City, of course, is also located amid the Rockies.

Perhaps Pound was merely retaliating for recent remarks by the U.S. Olympic Committee’s interim executive director, John Krimsky, who said that Quebec City underestimated costs in announcing a proposed operating budget of $540 million. That is $260 million less than Salt Lake City’s forecast.

“Canada made that mistake in 1976 in Montreal,” Krimsky said, referring to the gigantic deficit left behind by the Summer Olympics. “The Olympic movement in North America and the world cannot afford another city to make that kind of mistake.”

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Why does any city want to stage the Winter Olympics?

Lillehammer, Norway, which took on that responsibility in February, reaped a $58-million surplus, 500 new jobs and such favorable publicity worldwide that it broke all of its tourism records this summer.

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Nagano officials thought they had gone above and beyond the call of duty by agreeing to accept curling and women’s ice hockey in their program, but Samaranch surprised them by asking if they believed snowboarding might be another valuable addition. They told him that they have never given the sport much thought but promised that they will now.