DeFrantz Ready to Break Barriers

Anita DeFrantz, the senior U.S. delegate to the International Olympic Committee and the first female vice president in IOC history, will announce Sunday that she will be a candidate to succeed Juan Antonio Samaranch as IOC president.

DeFrantz, 48, brings to the race a background that sets her apart from the other presumed candidates. A lawyer, since 1987 she has been president of the financially successful Amateur Athletic Foundation in Los Angeles. She is an Olympic medalist. She is female. Her family is of African, native American and European descent. And she is unabashedly American.

The issue now is simple: Is the IOC--which in its 107 years has been headed by men, all of them white, all but one European--ready for that kind of package in its top spot? The election is set for July 16 in Moscow.

“Certainly Juan Antonio Samaranch was exactly the right president to bring the IOC forward from a very precarious time,” DeFrantz said in an interview this week in her AAF office.

“My vision is one of inclusion,” she added. “We have unity. Now we need inclusion.”

Olympic insiders say DeFrantz’s candidacy is to be taken seriously. But most also say that Dick Pound of Canada and Jacques Rogge of Belgium have emerged as the front-runners. Neither man has yet formally announced his candidacy. South Korea’s Kim Un Yong also may enter. Hungary’s Pal Schmitt was the first into the race.

DeFrantz plans to let it be known she’s definitively in the race after a day trip Sunday to Ile de Goree--a volcanic rock that commands Dakar’s harbor and long served as an outpost for slave trading. The IOC has come to Dakar for a meeting this week of its ruling Executive Board.

It’s not clear whether any of DeFrantz’s forebears passed through Ile de Goree, but she said, “I believe that when I stand there, I will be completing some sort of circle.

“I come there willingly, to stand at a point where my ancestors stood unwillingly. And I stand with people whose ancestors possibly could have been those who caused the pain to my ancestors. And it is the Olympic movement that has brought us together.”

Born in Philadelphia, DeFrantz graduated from Connecticut College in 1974. Two years later, while a law student at the University of Pennsylvania, she won a bronze medal in rowing at the Montreal Games.

In 1977 she graduated from law school and was admitted to the Pennsylvania bar. She went to work for the Juvenile Law Center of Philadelphia as a staff attorney while training for the 1980 Olympics.

Then, a political episode changed her life.

In January 1980, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. In response, President Jimmy Carter ordered a U.S. boycott of that summer’s Moscow Olympics.

DeFrantz emerged as a leader among athletes and others opposed to the boycott. She served as the named plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit that alleged America’s athletes deserved to go to the Games. A federal judge turned her--and them--down.

Nonetheless, DeFrantz said, she “took enormous risks . . . because of something I believed in,” meaning the Olympic movement.

“The decision to stand up against essentially the most powerful man on the face of the earth--how would I know what the outcome of that would be? But I believed so much in what the Olympic Games were about, having lived in an Olympic village and taken part [in the Games].”

Galvanized by the experience, DeFrantz moved to Los Angeles. In 1984 she played a key role in operating the athletes’ village at the L.A. Games.

Two years after that, at 34, she was named to the IOC.

In 1987 she became AAF president. The foundation, which was formed with a portion of the $232.5-million profit from the L.A. Games, awards grants to further youth sports. With businessman and attorney John Argue serving as a key investment advisor, the foundation has given out nearly $100 million over the years--even as it has grown its own portfolio by another $100 million.

“I understand running an organization that is successful and bringing it even more success,” DeFrantz said. “It’s a skill.”

In 1988, at the Seoul Games, DeFrantz took the step--unusual for a relatively new member of the IOC--of speaking out in the midst of a controversy, and of doing so in forceful language. When Ben Johnson was disqualified on doping charges after winning the men’s 100-meter dash, DeFrantz said of another Olympian that he was a “coward” for taking performance-enhancing drugs.

“So I stood strong for athletes who compete with integrity,” she says now.

In 1992, DeFrantz joined the IOC’s policy-making Executive Board. In 1997 she became the IOC’s first female vice president. There are four vice presidents at any given time, each of whom serves a four-year term that culminates with a year as the IOC’s first--or ranking--vice president. DeFrantz will be first vice president until the July elections.

Samaranch has been studiously neutral about his successor.

“My position as president of the International Olympic Committee is very delicate,” he said in a telephone interview. “I think there will be four or five candidates. If Anita is a candidate, she is one more. She has all the [qualifications] to be a good candidate.”

The next president will inherit a movement that now generates nearly $1 billion a year and celebrated a triumph last year at the Sydney Olympics--but that must now turn to Salt Lake City next February and in 2004 to Athens. Preparations for both have been rocky.

Despite assurances from the Greek government and the Athens 2004 organizing committee, it is far from clear that there exists in Greece the political will and logistical skill to stage an undertaking as mammoth as the Games.

On Thursday, the Greek government abruptly scrapped plans to build a seaside multisport complex it had planned for the 2004 Games, saying it would move the Olympic venues to other locations. Last November, in approving the seaside complex as part of the overall plan for 2004, the IOC warned Athens organizers that construction deadlines were very tight and they could ill afford additional postponements.

If preparations there continue to drag, the new president may face a tough decision about Athens weeks or even days into office: go or no-go?

DeFrantz declined to answer the question, saying instead, “I believe it will be moving forward with great speed.” She did, however, add that she now views preparations in Athens as “a major priority.”

Salt Lake, of course, is the site of the worst corruption crisis in IOC history, the bidding scandal for the 2002 Games that erupted in late 1998. Tom Welch and Dave Johnson, who led the Salt Lake bid, will go to trial later this year in Utah on federal fraud and other charges.

DeFrantz has been asked repeatedly by skeptics whether someone with her seniority and status on the Olympic stage really was kept out of the loop in Salt Lake. Consistently she has delivered the same answer: “I lead my life with integrity.”

Last week, she again delivered those words, then added, “I believe in the fundamental principles of the Olympic movement, and those are based on respect and integrity.

“When you compete, you accept the rules of the competition. I had no idea that Salt Lake was so far afield of the rules of competition. I had made it clear to them that they needed to play by the rules.”

DeFrantz said she does not expect to be called as a witness at the trial.

Amid her colleagues on the IOC, emotions about the scandal and the court case are still so high--as is concern, whether legitimate or not, over the possibility of members being served with subpoenas by U.S. prosecutors--that the IOC is planning no Executive Board meetings in the U.S. all this year, even though the Salt Lake Games begin next Feb. 8.

A wider anti-American sentiment within the IOC is so strong that the board has not held a meeting in the U.S. since the close of the Atlanta Games in 1996. Other IOC committees and individual members have, however, appeared in the States.

Meantime, seven of the IOC’s 10 leading sponsors are U.S. corporations. And NBC is the IOC’s single most important financial contributor, with a $3.5-billion investment in U.S. television rights to the Games through 2008.

“People may or may not be mad at America,” DeFrantz said. “The question is, will they support me as a candidate?”

With her theme of inclusion, DeFrantz can be expected to court the IOC’s female members and those from developing nations--as well as the traditional power brokers in the personality-driven IOC.

As an Olympic athlete, she also can be expected to reach out to the increasing numbers of athlete members within the IOC. She stumbled at a meeting in December in Switzerland when she delivered an “orientation” to about a dozen new athlete members that included a pop quiz on IOC history and protocol, a test that several found pedantic. She has since said she meant no offense.

The IOC has about 125 members. It’s not yet clear how many will be in Moscow to vote. Most observers expect it will take at least 50, perhaps 60, votes to win.

“I respect each and every one of my colleagues,” DeFrantz said. “It’s important for me to do my best to speak to each of my colleagues. I don’t know if I’ll make it but I’ll do my best.”