WORLD SPORTS SCENE : USOC Chief: a Voice That’s Rarely Heard

The U.S. Olympic Committee’s president, LeRoy T. Walker, got his man when the executive committee elected Dick Schultz as executive director. But if the vote had gone otherwise, or, as appeared likely at one point, been postponed for another month, Walker would have had no one to blame but himself.

He almost sabotaged six months of work by the selection committee by insisting until the day of the June 23 vote that it keep its findings secret, even from the executive committee.

A number of executive committee members, expressing doubts not only about Schultz but the selection committee’s performance, complained that Walker did not return their phone calls. Two years into his four-year term, most media members are accustomed to such treatment, but apparently he thinks as little of the executive committee.

It was not until some search committee members broke the vow of silence in the week before the vote and called executive committee members to address their concerns that Schultz’s election was assured.

Walker will be recalled as a president who had many strong points, but communication will not be among them.

We attempted to ask him about that, but he did not return the call.

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Melvin Stewart recently lost a 200-meter butterfly race for the first time in seven years, but he was more upset about subsequently losing his world record in the event to Russian Denis Pankratov.

Admitting that he was suspicious, Stewart said that the time of 1 minute 55.22--almost half a second faster than his record--”is not a time that’s so fast you have to do drugs to do it. But the fact that he’s doing it at an odd time [of the year] makes me wonder.”

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The Santa Clara Invitational starting Friday has more internationally prominent swimmers, such as Russian sprinter Alexander Popov, but there also are some world-class competitors in the Janet Evans Invitational starting the day before at USC. One of them is Evans, who will compete Thursday in the 800-meter freestyle. She has not lost at that distance in nine years.

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Triple jumper Jonathan Edwards became Great Britain’s newest track and field star recently with three jumps, although wind-aided, farther than any other man has gone before, including the first longer than 60 feet. All the jumps happened on a Sunday, a day on which Edwards would not compete until 1993 because of his religious convictions.

Now, there is an expectation of him in the British media to become the first man to jump more than 60 feet legally. That, however, is not all that is expected.

In an article last week, London’s Daily Telegraph asked, “Will the man of God lead British athletics to a new, more palatable, promised land in a most unfashionable discipline?”

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Marie-Jose Perec, the Olympic 400-meter track and field champion who trains at Westwood, recently ran her first major 400-meter hurdles race in the European Cup. Not only did she win, she broke a 13-year-old French record with a time of 54.51, the fifth-fastest in the world this year. . . . Promoters in Great Britain are trying to arrange a match race between Olympic and world 100 champion Linford Christie and the fastest player from the recent rugby World Cup, New Zealand wing Jonah Lomu. First, Christie has a tentative date today at Paris with either Carl Lewis in the 100 or Michael Johnson in the 200. We say tentative because all tantalizing track matchups are that, until they actually occur.

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On complaints about her book, “Little Girls in Pretty Boxes,” Joan Ryan of the San Francisco Chronicle says: “I know that the gymnastics community is saying it’s a one-sided book. My answer is, it absolutely is a one-sided book. I didn’t need to tell anybody about Mary Lou Retton. That’s all we heard the last 11 years. These are the girls who tried to be Mary Lou Retton and didn’t make it.”

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Lance Armstrong, the strongest U.S. entrant in the Tour de France, thought the Olympic road course in Atlanta was too easy, until he rode it. “It’s a lot tougher than I thought,” he said. . . . The Association of Volleyball Professionals, including beach stars such as Karch Kiraly and Randy Stoklos, planned to continue its boycott of Olympic qualifying events through the July 14-16 tournament at Hermosa Beach but reluctantly retreated after Jerry Solomon joined the AVP as executive director. Solomon is Kiraly’s agent but is better known as Nancy Kerrigan’s agent and fiance.