NO QUIT

Anita DeFrantz of Los Angeles, the senior U.S. delegate to the International Olympic Committee and the IOC’s first female vice president, is running for president on a campaign that she says represents change, more accountability, integrity, mutual respect and the pursuit of excellence.

She doesn’t stand even a remote chance of winning, according to more than a dozen IOC members and Olympic insiders.

Some, in fact, have counseled DeFrantz to bow out before the historic election July 16 in Moscow, at which the IOC will select a successor to Juan Antonio Samaranch. He has been IOC president since 1980.

Some of DeFrantz’s friends have also urged her to withdraw.

Undaunted by the prospect of what could be a humiliating loss for her personally and perhaps a stinging defeat in international sporting circles for the U.S., unfazed by the odds, she says she’s in the race to stay--and, she declares, to win.

“I represent change,” she says. “I represent the future. What our institution needs is more openness among our members and better communication with the world. I bring that.”

In its 107 years, the IOC has been headed by men, all of them white, all but one European. DeFrantz is female, African American and unabashedly American.

Four others are in the race to succeed Samaranch: Dick Pound of Canada, Kim Un Yong of South Korea, Jacques Rogge of Belgium and Pal Schmitt of Hungary. Pound, Kim and Rogge are widely believed to be the main contenders.

Rules of the IOC presidential election prohibit members from talking publicly about DeFrantz or the other candidates, but almost all are willing to speak anonymously.

“The biggest thud you’re going to hear is if she keeps up with this election fiasco,” said one member.

Such comments puzzle DeFrantz. Her election platform includes calls for inclusion, transparency and accountability. She says her first priority as president would be to ensure the “complete and unparalleled success” of the Salt Lake Winter Games in February.

She says the IOC must be “aggressive and active” in fighting athletes’ use of performance-enhancing substances. She has called for the IOC to engage in “a strategic planning process,” a familiar-enough task for any major American or European corporation or nonprofit foundation but one the IOC has not undertaken consistently.

Her mission statement says athletes and coaches are “expected to compete fairly and ethically,” and IOC members “must not expect any less of themselves.”

She is an Olympian--winner of a bronze medal in what she always calls the “noblest of sports,” rowing, at the Montreal Games in 1976--and an attorney.

Twice in her 15 years on the IOC, the U.S. has won the right to stage the Games, in Atlanta and in Salt Lake City. For the last year, she has been the IOC’s first vice president, second only to Samaranch.

In a lengthy interview in her office, she asked of her doubters and critics, “What are they afraid of?”

Sport Intern, a German newsletter devoted to Olympic politics, predicted recently that DeFrantz would get four to six votes on July 16. The IOC has 122 members.

The apparent resistance to her campaign illuminates two powerful currents at work within the IOC.

The first is how, even in the wake of the Salt Lake City corruption scandal of 1999, the IOC remains driven by personality politics.

DeFrantz, long the president of the Amateur Athletic Foundation, is a seasoned business executive with extensive experience in planning and implementing budgets in the millions. The AAF, launched with $93 million in profit from the 1984 Los Angeles Games, has pushed its investment portfolio past $200 million while giving away $100 million to athletes and youth sports programs in Southern California.

But she is also one of the more idealistic members of the IOC. She believes, deep down in her soul, in the mission of Olympism--to promote peace and understanding among the youth of the world through sports--and preaches it at every opportunity.

“I come from a family where we were told it was important to stand up for what you believe in,” she said. “I have consistently done so and will continue to do so.”

Some IOC members find her approach sanctimonious.

“She thinks she is the best of the lot,” one said.

When DeFrantz announced her presidential candidacy, she did so in the midst of an IOC trip in February to Senegal, on the western coast of Africa, that included an excursion to Ile de Goree. The island, a volcanic rock that commands Dakar’s harbor, long served as an outpost for slave trading. Tears welled in DeFrantz’s eyes as she signed a museum guest book.

Some IOC members, however, have suggested that DeFrantz was grandstanding.

“For them to say what I did was not genuine offends me,” she said. “Didn’t the other candidates announce on their home ground? And don’t they speak of their ancestry? Why is it when I do so, it’s taken so cynically?”

Also on that trip to Dakar, DeFrantz, filling in for an ailing Samaranch, was asked to deliver a brief speech in French, opening the IOC’s meetings. She stumbled over a string of salutations and had difficulty pronouncing the name of Senegal’s prime minister, Mustapha Niasse.

That gaffe quickly made the rounds in the IOC, and she says now, “I have been condemned for a paragraph I didn’t read well.”

DeFrantz has been an IOC member since 1986. The IOC operates in two languages, French and English, and in case of a dispute, French controls. The four other presidential candidates speak French, although Schmitt says he is “conversational,” not “fluent.”

Asked if someone who aspires to be IOC president ought to have become at ease in French at some point in the last 15 years, DeFrantz said she was committed to other Olympic and business projects: “I have chosen to use my time differently.”

The other of the two main issues confronting DeFrantz is that she is female, and American, at a time when the IOC has shown a disinclination to invite women in as new members and when being an American--in the wake of the Salt Lake scandal--does little to enhance one’s popularity.

Of the IOC’s 122 members, 13 are female. Since December 1999, when the IOC enacted a 50-point reform plan in response to the Salt Lake scandal, only one woman has been nominated to become an IOC member. Els Van Breda Vriesman of Holland, president of the international field hockey federation, will be considered for membership this month at the Moscow meeting, along with six others--among them Samaranch’s son, Juan Antonio Samaranch Jr.

In all, the IOC has considered 126 people for membership over the last two years. Only two have been female. One, Van Breda Vriesman, has made the cut.

Some IOC members wonder why DeFrantz has not been able to push the process further.

“If you wanted women in the movement and you’re the first vice president, there would be women in the movement,” one said.

DeFrantz said the problem is a structural one--a complicated issue owing to the way potential IOC members are now identified--and vowed, “Under my leadership, it would be different.”

As for being an American, DeFrantz says, “Is who I am a barrier to being elected? If it is, it’s only temporary. Because we cannot exist with that barrier.”

Anti-American sentiment within the IOC is so strong that its ruling Executive 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.

The IOC has stayed away even though seven of the IOC’s leading 10 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.

The Salt Lake City Games, however, will be the last Olympics in the U.S. until at least 2012. Beginning July 30, the scandal will be revisited at length when Tom Welch and Dave Johnson, who led Salt Lake’s successful campaign for the 2002 Olympics, go on trial in Utah on federal fraud charges. Prosecutors have subpoenaed DeFrantz to testify.

“I will testify truthfully and willingly,” she said.

DeFrantz has been asked many times by skeptics whether, as she maintains, she really was kept out of the loop in Salt Lake’s campaign for the 2002 Games. She consistently delivers the same reply: “I lead my life with integrity.”

She admits that “people have asked me” if she intends to drop out of the presidential race.

“Why?” she said. “I’ve never bowed out of a race. That’s what this is. There’s no reason for me to bow out. I have the skills. I have the ability. I have what it takes.

“What I need,” she said, “are the votes.”