It’s Not Business as Usual, as CEO Resigns at USOC

In a bombshell that vividly highlights the turmoil enveloping Olympic sports in the United States, Norman P. Blake Jr., the new corporate-style CEO of the U.S. Olympic Committee, said Wednesday he is resigning amid criticism of his plans to dramatically reshape its bureaucracy, business and culture.

Blake, 58, took the top job at the USOC in February after earning a reputation in the corporate arena as a turn-around king. He said Wednesday he cannot fully carry out his plans to remake the USOC because of a lack of organizational support.

“I don’t spend a lot of time kissing butt,” he said in an interview with The Times. “I’m an upfront guy. Very direct. I always try to be honest and ethical and very forceful in my opinion. I’m aggressive. I think some people say, ‘That’s not our culture.’ ”

His announcement shines a spotlight on the battle for direction of the USOC’s destiny that has been raging virtually since the day he took over--a contest with enormous implications for funding and other support of Olympic sports. The outcome is far from certain.

Meantime, the start of the Salt Lake City Winter Games of 2002 is 15 months away. Given the considerable anti-American sentiment within the International Olympic Committee sparked by the Salt Lake corruption scandal, those Games could be the last on American soil for years to come.

In Salt Lake City, the two top officials of the winning bid, Tom Welch and Dave Johnson, have been indicted on fraud and other charges. A federal court trial may be ongoing when the Games begin. The court process promises to unearth more dirty Olympic laundry.

At the recently concluded Sydney Games, the anti-U.S. sentiment helped feed charges by senior IOC leadership that U.S. Olympic officials have covered up positive drug tests involving American athletes. U.S. officials denied those charges.

This summer, the former head of the USOC’s anti-doping program, Dr. Wade Exum, filed a lawsuit alleging that the USOC deliberately encouraged the doping of athletes. USOC management has denied that as well.

Finally, there’s the bottom line. U.S. athletes won 101 medals at the Atlanta Games in 1996. Though that performance was in part attributable to a home-field advantage, the challenge at any Olympics is to better the result from the previous Games.

In Sydney, the American team produced some stirring success stories--such as heavyweight Greco-Roman wrestler Rulon Gardner, who defeated Russian Alexander Karelin to win gold. The U.S. also again dominated the overall medal count--but with 97 medals. More than a third, 33, were won in swimming.

“Even though we’re struggling, we’re trying to have change,” Bill Hybl, the USOC’s chairman, said Wednesday. “It would be easier for an organization to say, ‘No, no. No change.’ But this organization is committed to being better.

“Is it going to be easy? No.”

The turbulence is all the more problematic because, as IOC President Juan Antonio Samaranch has said repeatedly with characteristic understatement, the United States is “a very important country in the Olympic movement.”

A U.S. television network, NBC, is the movement’s single-biggest financial underwriter. It is paying $3.5 billion to televise the Games from 2000 through 2008.

Nine of the 11 IOC’s primary corporate sponsors are American.

The USOC, based in Colorado Springs, Colo., holds such leverage that it--and it alone of the 199 nations in the Olympic movement--gets a special cut of the NBC money, currently 10% of the amount the network pays for each Games. In all, the Sydney Games yielded $70.5 million for the USOC.

The USOC’s current annualized budget is about $110 million.

With its top officials recognizing that it had long ago outgrown its traditional volunteer-driven approach--the USOC commissioned a consultant’s report that said it needed more of a business-style culture and business-savvy leadership.

Blake was recruited and given a three-year contract to be the USOC’s first CEO--with day-to-day control and authority previously shared by the president and executive director.

He arrived after guiding Promus Hotel Corp. to a lucrative merger with Hilton Hotels and after leading U.S. Fidelity & Guaranty, an insurance and financial company, from the brink of bankruptcy to a $250-million profit in 1998.

He promptly fired about 40 employees from the 500-member staff and reduced the number of working committees and task forces from about four dozen to four.

Most controversially, he put together a blueprint to tie USOC funding to various sports to medal counts.

This summer, the USOC’s policy-making Executive Committee endorsed his program.

But, Blake said Wednesday, there remained resistance from those opposed to imposing the sort of plan familiar in the for-profit business world on a nonprofit organization.

Sandy Baldwin, a USOC vice president, stressing Wednesday that she believes Blake is a “fine executive,” put it this way:

“The USOC is not a thoroughbred race horse. We can’t make it into one. Instead it’s a beautiful camel. Our job is to groom it, to keep it moving forward. A good CEO has to make sure it keeps moving forward and doesn’t sprout a third hump.”

Added a former athlete familiar with events who spoke on condition of anonymity: “It has little to do with the substance of what he is trying to do. It has more to do with Norm Blake not wanting to be accountable to anybody and wanting everybody to be accountable to him.

“No company, not-for-profit or profit, works that way with its CEO.”

Blake said a secret source--so secret Blake himself doesn’t even know who it is--has been regularly sending him e-mails reliably detailing such dissatisfaction in the ranks. Others also made plain their concerns in meetings and phone calls, he said.

What pushed him to announce his intent to resign, he said, is an election scheduled for Dec. 3 in Washington at which the USOC is due to select many new officers.

The election, he said, was fast becoming a referendum on him and his style. “This place is a rumor mill of the first order,” he said.

By signaling his intent to step down, he said, he hoped the focus will move away from him so the USOC can “reclaim its future--not make me the reason why they shouldn’t continue with the change process.”

He said he will remain in place until a successor is picked and trained. A search committee has been formed, led by USOC Vice President Herman Frazier.

There’s no timeline for replacing Blake, and he said he will stay as long as “the organization feels I bring value in the transition process,” but at any rate not past the end of the Salt Lake Games.

He said he is confident his departure will not significantly affect the planning for those Games. Similarly, Caroline Shaw, a spokeswoman for the Salt Lake Organizing Committee, said, “With 15 months to go, we do not believe changes within the USOC will have any negative impact on our Games.”

Blake said: “It became apparent to me as we went through this election process, where there’s a lot of reflection about whether this is the change we really bargained for or we really want--do we really want the change?

“Do we really want to go through this much pain for the gain? And I think, appropriately, people are trying to reexamine, is this really what we wanted?”

“I think I have done a successful job of making sure that everybody was disaffected in one form or another in that change process--all with the intention of trying to do what’s right for our athletes and for our organization.”