IOC Scouting Trips Still Key to Reform

What undoubtedly has been the best perk of being a member of the International Olympic Committee?

The gold-medal answer: the free vacations to far-flung locales, where, over the last few years, IOC members have gotten to see the sights in the guise of checking out potential sites for the Games. And as a bonus, make new friends. Who, not infrequently, have come bearing gifts.

So, as a special reform committee Saturday approved more than four dozen recommendations aimed at reshaping the IOC, guess which proposal met with the sharpest resistance from the many IOC members in attendance?

“Please, sir,” Zimbabwe’s Tomas Sithole said to IOC President Juan Antonio Samaranch as the 82-member IOC 2000 reform commission considered a proposal to ban all visits, “let’s have a look at this again. Because it makes criminals of all of us.”

The reform panel, set up earlier this year in the wake of disclosures from Salt Lake City’s scandal-tainted bid for the 2002 Winter Games, opted Saturday to let the full IOC tackle the issue when all 103 members convene here Dec. 11-12.

That session could well produce a full-on fight. Because, as Saturday’s hearing revealed, the IOC is being buffeted by opposing currents as it struggles to recover from the Salt Lake scandal. It’s evident some members possess a zeal for genuine reform. But they’re being tested by pockets of powerful resistance to change.

The yen for reform was signaled Saturday in the 49 recommendations submitted by the IOC 2000 panel, including provisions relating to age limits, terms of office, make-up of the membership and financial accountability. Many require a two-thirds vote in December to take effect.

Samaranch pronounced after the final IOC 2000 report was in that “the health of the Olympic Games is . . . better than ever.”

Behind the scenes in recent weeks, Samaranch has pushed hard for change. He also has announced he will appear Dec. 15 before Congress--only a few days after the full IOC vote on reforms.

If the IOC fails in December to deliver, lawmakers have threatened to enact legislation to strip the IOC’s tax-exempt status in the United States and to cut off U.S. corporate support for the Olympics.

It remains to be seen, meantime, whether Samaranch will go to Washington in triumph or on the defensive. The issue of visits to bidding cities, for instance, is the very thing that set events in Salt Lake City in motion--yet it remains the one that provokes the strongest resistance to change.

Referring in Saturday’s debate to the Salt Lake scandal, Sheikh Ahmad Al-Fahad Al-Sabah of Kuwait, an IOC member since 1992, said: “We don’t have to kill everybody because of this mistake.”

Lambis W. Nikolaou of Greece, an IOC delegate for 13 years, added: “The people of Salt Lake City were the corrupters.”

Expressing a common sentiment, Mario Vazquez Rana of Mexico, the powerful president of the Assn. of National Olympic Committees and an IOC member since 1991, said visits were “necessary” for his “personal understanding.”

Those who favored a ban were equally passionate. IOC vice president R. Kevan Gosper of Australia said, “If I’m not able to go to a bidding city, I don’t suddenly feel I’m a criminal.”

And Anita DeFrantz of Los Angeles, also an IOC vice president, said, “To give people vacations is not a good way to spend our money.”

After the debate, DeFrantz was reminded that in 1991, while she was on her visit to Sydney, which mounted a winning bid for the 2000 Games, she said the Australian city “is a wonderful place for sports. Already I have played tennis, been windsurfing, rowing and I am going sailing this afternoon.”

She pondered that for a moment, then said about her Australian vacation: “It was wrong.”