One Thing Is Certain: Nebiolo Left His Mark

The last time I interviewed Primo Nebiolo, the powerful president of the International Amateur Athletic Federation, I asked him if he was dying. The question wasn’t as impertinent as it sounds because the British press for weeks had been reporting on his imminent demise, which, they alleged, would result from a losing battle with prostate cancer. His response to them was to ban British newspapers from IAAF headquarters in Monte Carlo.

To me, he laughed and said, “Unfortunately, I am no longer a young man, but I do not have cancer and I am not dying, no matter how much my good friends in the British press might like it to be so.”

That was in August, in Seville, Spain, during track and field’s World Championships, the last over which he would preside. On Sunday, Nebiolo, 76, died at a Rome hospital, reportedly after suffering a heart attack at his home.

Although it was apparent that his health was failing, it remained important for him to be seen as robust and vigorous, and, to that end, IAAF spokesman Giorgio Reineri said that Nebiolo refused a stretcher and walked under his own power to the ambulance that carried him to the hospital.

It’s also likely that he was in denial. An IAAF source said last summer that Nebiolo was diagnosed with the cancer eight years ago and refused until recently to seek treatment.

Even with death at his doorstep, he probably believed he could make a deal with it. If that involved demands and threats--the words “extortion” and “bribery” also have been used in association with his negotiating style--well, he was about as subtle as another Italian, Machiavelli.

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Nebiolo wasn’t often defeated. For that matter, he wasn’t often opposed. He became IAAF president in 1981 and was elected by acclamation in August to his sixth term. No one ever ran against him. He has been president of the International University Sport Federation, which oversees the World University Games, since 1961. He has been president of the Assn. of Summer Olympic Federations since 1983, the year he founded it.

Through those positions, he became the most powerful man in international sports other than International Olympic Committee President Juan Antonio Samaranch.

He referred to himself merely as “the god of athletics,” a quote he later denied but, nevertheless, one that didn’t exaggerate his importance to track and field by much.

During his reign over the IAAF, he expanded the budget from $50,000 to more than $50 million through sponsorships and television rights fees, created a $23-million foundation and transformed the outdoor World Championships into one of the most important events in international sports.

Most important, he supervised the transition of the sport from amateur to professional. When he became president, track and field athletes could be banned for receiving more than $100.

“Either you love him or you hate him,” Richard Pound, an IOC vice-president from Canada, once said. “I think he has a hunger for some personal recognition. I also think he has done a number of good things for track and field.”

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Nebiolo was a long jumper at the club level in his hometown of Turin who later became president of the club. He rose from that to the presidency of the Italian Track and Field Federation, and one of his proudest moments occurred in 1987, when one of his Italian long jumpers won the bronze medal in the World Championships in Rome.

The Italians officiating the long jump competition, however, were later discovered to have recorded a longer jump for Giovanni Evangelisti than he had jumped. Nebiolo was not implicated in the ensuing scandal but was voted out two years later as president of the Italian federation.

His ambition was not even detoured. He subsequently earned a coveted seat on the IOC. There is a story connected with that too.

In 1985, when countries were allowed to have no more than two IOC representatives, an Italian member accused Nebiolo of offering him a bribe to resign. Nebiolo denied it, but, after 1987, it’s not likely his candidacy would have been embraced by the Italians, anyway.

He went over their heads. When Samaranch, the IOC president from Spain, moved to admit South Africa back into the movement in time for the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona, Nebiolo said that he wasn’t convinced that apartheid was dead in track and field and refused to open the sport to South Africans.

But after Samaranch offered Nebiolo a special seat on the IOC--”a pope choosing his cardinals,” Nebiolo called it--he was suddenly more enlightened about the treatment of South African track and field athletes and recognized them in time for the Olympics.

“Primo never gave something without getting something,” an IAAF official said.

When Seoul Olympic officials requested a change in the track and field schedule to accommodate NBC in 1988, Nebiolo agreed--for $20 million. That became the seed money for the IAAF Foundation, which has been used for the upkeep of the IAAF’s plush offices in Monte Carlo and lavish parties but also to train Third World athletes.

I have one recollection in particular of how Nebiolo operated.

During an IAAF Council meeting in Barcelona in 1989, he asked the 129 delegates to strip sprinter Ben Johnson of his records after admissions of steroid use dating to 1983.

Several hours of contentious debate later, Nebiolo suggested it was time for lunch, called for a vote on whether they should break, and, when that passed unanimously, he declared that--voila!--the Johnson measure had passed without dissent. The stunned delegates thought they were voting on lunch.

“He conducted like Toscanini,” Frank Greenberg, a U.S. delegate, said.

Nebiolo was a tough guy, who joined the partisans after leaving the Italian army during World War II and escaped from a German prison camp. He could be tender too, referring to athletes as “my children.” Butch Reynolds won a $27.3-million judgment--later overturned--against the IAAF in a drug case, but Nebiolo insisted on being the one to award him his medal during the 1993 World Championships and kissed him on both cheeks.

You didn’t have to like Nebiolo or admire him. Sometimes, even his praise for himself was faint, such as the time he said, “I’m not such a bad guy. I’m not the child of Mussolini or the nephew of Hitler.”

But he will be missed in track and field. Wherever he is today, I’ll bet he’s already angling for the presidency.

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Randy Harvey can be reached at his e-mail address: randy.harvey@latimes.com