Truth Is, Change Minimal for IOC

The Generalissimo did not fall on his sword, nor did he remove one of his $1,000 gift Browning firearms from its handsome display case and demand mass resignations at gunpoint.

The 2002 Winter Olympics will not be moving to Calgary, Innsbruck, Ostersund, Helsinki, Duluth, Point Barrow or an ice floe off the north coast of Greenland.

International Olympic Committee headquarters did not rattle off its foundation, crumble into chunks of imported marble and sink slowly to the bottom of Lake Geneva.

With the exception of the bank accounts and future vacation plans of a handful of Scarlet-Lettered IOC members--you can call them scapegoats--status remained more or less quo within the IOC as its much-trumpeted “cleaning house” in the wake of the Salt Lake City bribery scandal amounted to little more than a lick and a promise.

“More than a jab, less than a knockout punch,” was a phrase IOC Vice President Dick Pound used late Sunday night. He was referring to the damage that has been inflicted upon the Olympic movement by the scandal, but he just as easily could have been talking about course correction mapped out by the organization’s executive board.

Three resignations of IOC members in hand.

Six IOC members “excluded” until the IOC formally votes on their fates in mid-March.

Three IOC members still being investigated.

One IOC member warned not to accept any more $5,000 checks from the Salt Lake Organizing Committee for the purpose of procuring a “Mobile Olympic Academy”--a.k.a. a nifty Jeep Cherokee with Olympic rings plastered on the side.

Revisions in the Olympic bid process--a ban on visits to bid cities, the appointment of a 15-person panel to pick the host city instead of 114 voting members--but only on a trial basis, only after more than half the IOC agree to vote to give up their primary reason for existence.

If the IOC conducted the Olympics in the same manner it wraps up in-house investigations, the 2000 Sydney Summer Games--yes, those are staying in Sydney too--would be two weeks worth of swimming and track prelims, followed by the dramatic presentation of . . . the bronze medal.

(Gold and silver medalists possibly to be determined at later date, pending a two-thirds majority vote on the floor of the IOC.)

That isn’t what the IOC spinmeisters would have you believe, of course. “Radical change” was the buzz term making the rounds after Sunday’s news conference inside Juan Antonio Samaranch’s beloved Olympic Museum, an exhibit the IOC president never could have fathomed when he cut the ribbon on this gilded monument to Olympic glory. For 75 anxiety-ridden minutes, it was some sight: Samaranch, mere feet away from his prized postage-stamp collection, twisting and squirming in the head chair as he dodged questions about his taking responsibility for the scandal that occurred under his watch--in other words, resigning.

“I have been elected by the IOC members, and today I have the full support of the executive board,” Samaranch replied, volunteering that “I have received many letters and phone calls that support me in this difficult moment.”

Samaranch dug his spurs in long ago. Short of a mass bailout by Coca-Cola, John Hancock, McDonald’s and every other heavyweight on the Olympic sponsor roster, Samaranch isn’t going anywhere until the last nanosecond of the last hour of his current term as president, taking him to 2001.

He isn’t going anywhere for a host of reasons, but consider these three the most salient:

1) It’s a good gig, as the general public has begun to realize during the last two months.

2) Samaranch is convinced no one amid the current membership is capable of adequately replacing him, certainly not in this time of crisis, which helps explain why Samaranch, now 78, twice lobbied for--and won--increases in the IOC mandatory retirement age, from 72 to 75 to 80.

3) Samaranch, by his own admission, has appointed 80% of the current IOC membership. Sunday, he made what appeared to be a remarkable concession when he said he would ask the IOC for a vote of confidence at its next meeting March 17-18--but who among that 80% is likely to sit on his or her hands with His Excellency scanning the room if and when such a vote is called?

In fact, there is considerable speculation that Samaranch handed the whistle to longtime first lieutenant Marc Hodler and instructed him to break a few window panes at the last IOC meeting in December, that he wanted the bribery allegations out in the open as tool to help him craft his final legacy: The Man Who Reformed the IOC.

“He’s the man with the experience through difficult situations, with the political background . . . to drive through the expulsions, to drive through the reforms, to drive through whatever other changes need to be made,” Michael Payne, the IOC’s marketing director, said Sunday.

“In the back of his mind, he was always thinking whether in his final year he could drive through some of the changes necessary for reform. Obviously in his last term, he’s in a position where he doesn’t have to worry about [protecting] his political power base in order to drive it through.”

Pound said Samaranch “has been trying to find a way to change the process. But he has never been able to find the key to persuade the two-thirds of the members to do it . . .

“Without having a smoking gun to bring them and focus their attention, his judgment was that it was not possible to bring this about. Now we have it. Now I think no matter where you are in the world, as an IOC member, you cannot help but be aware of the amount of heat and concern this has generated.”

Of course, it was suggested to Pound, that if Samaranch had been running a corporation instead of the guardianship of “amateur sport,” he’d be cleaning out his desk today.

Pound didn’t disagree.

“The corporate model is to say, ‘We’ve had a crisis, we’re going to change our direction, the way we do that is call the CEO up and we behead him,’ ” Pound said. “That’s corporate life in America. Ours is not quite that model.”

No, the IOC is a model unto itself, where radical change is defined as: Interesting thought, that--let’s table it for six weeks and book another reservation for March at the Lausanne Palace and Spa.

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* SIX OUSTED

IOC ‘excludes’ members and says it will reform selection process. A1