PASSING THE TORCH

Here in the city where it all began, Juan Antonio Samaranch finally allowed himself a brief moment to look back on 21 years as president of the International Olympic Committee. No regrets, he said.

“I think the balance is not bad,” Samaranch said in an exclusive interview late Saturday with The Times in his hotel room--after a day like so many in his tenure, a day of private diplomacy and public ceremony. On this day he had met with former Russian President Boris Yeltsin, among others, and visited a tennis academy.

That night at the hotel, comfortable in a blue sweater, a stack of papers and newspaper clippings in neat piles at his desk, Samaranch smiled and said, “The IOC I am leaving my successor has nothing to do with the IOC I received in 1980,” when he was first elected president, here in Moscow.

Today the IOC begins a landmark series of meetings that includes the selection of the 2008 Olympics city and will conclude next Monday with the election of a new president. Samaranch’s time has come and, one week from now, will be gone.

The IOC, and the world, are not likely to see his sort again.

For years, Samaranch, now 80, has been the most influential figure in international sports, inspiring passion among supporters and detractors alike. He also has been a private leader and thus poorly understood, except by close friends and colleagues. They treasure his patience, gentle nature and quiet resilience.

John Lucas, a professor emeritus at Penn State who is an authority on the IOC, said of Samaranch: “For sure, one finds warts and also areas to be praised. But that is the nature of humanity and that is the nature of the world we live in. It is an imperfect world, of warts and unhealed wounds and also gentility and greatness.”

The IOC Samaranch took over in 1980 was a club made up primarily of white men from Europe. It faced grave financial pressure. The Games were also threatened by boycotts.

Now the IOC is a billion-dollar enterprise, its financial future seemingly secure with support from many of the world’s leading multinational corporations. The boycotts are over. There are more member countries in the IOC than in the United Nations.

Samaranch took an IOC that was “completely inept diplomatically” and “turned it into an organization that--despite its scandals--continues to have a cachet and a respect around the world,” said John MacAloon, an Olympics expert at the University of Chicago.

IOC members now include significant numbers of delegates from the Third World and some women, and female athletes have taken part in increasingly large numbers at the Games. Professionals take part now in the Games; the days of sham amateurism are done.

Meantime, the Sydney Games last September offered resounding proof--with the joint march in the opening ceremony of athletes from North and South Korea--of the potent symbolism the movement offers, and of Samaranch’s relentless promotion of Olympism as a means for bettering the world through sport.

“I call him the president of inclusion,” said Anita DeFrantz, the ranking U.S. member of the IOC and the first female vice president in IOC history. “He has included women. He has included athletes. He has included the national Olympic committees of the world. He has included sports.

“Through sheer willpower, he has created the Olympic movement as it exists now.”

Dick Ebersol, the chairman of NBC Sports, said: “In the world of international sport, particularly the Olympics, his passing from the scene after two decades has the importance of David Stern, Paul Tagliabue and Bud Selig all resigning on the same day,” a reference to the commissioners of the NBA, NFL and major league baseball.

NBC is the IOC’s single-largest financial underwriter, paying $3.5 billion to televise the Games in the United States through 2008. But it is the personal relationship with Samaranch that Ebersol says he values most.

At the 1992 Barcelona Summer Games, Samaranch and his wife, Bibis, insisted that Ebersol and his wife, actress Susan Saint James, and their kids--all five of them--and both sets of grandparents stay at the Samaranch summer home on Spain’s Costa Brava, a short drive from Barcelona.

While there, Saint James’ father fell ill and was rushed to a hospital in Barcelona. “Other than family,” Ebersol said, “the only consistent visitor he had, just after dawn every day, was Bibis, who had never met him before. Every single day. For 10 or 11 days.

“She had never met him before any of that. That, to me, is the mark of what the two of them are all about.”

Bibis Samaranch died last September, at the outset of the Sydney Games.

For all his good work, Samaranch’s legacy is all but sure to be clouded by the IOC’s seeming inability to end drug use by athletes and by the Salt Lake City corruption scandal, which erupted in late 1998 and which revealed widespread misconduct in the process by which the IOC awarded the Games.

The scandal led to the resignation or expulsion of 10 IOC members after it was revealed that the Salt Lake bid team showered more than $1 million in gifts, cash and other inducements on members or their relatives.

Tom Welch and Dave Johnson, the two bid leaders, go on trial July 30 in federal court in Salt Lake on fraud and other charges. Each denies wrongdoing.

Samaranch opted to use the scandal to effect a range of reforms, including a 50-point plan passed in December 1999, that included a ban on visits by IOC members to cities bidding for the Games.

Critics were not mollified. Not then. Not now.

Asserting that the IOC suffers from “institutional rot,” U.S. Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell (R-Colo.), a 1964 Olympian in judo, said of Samaranch’s impending retirement, “He should have done it years ago.”

Andrew Jennings, author of several books severely critical of the IOC in general and Samaranch in particular, said, “You cannot understand what has happened to the IOC since he took over unless you comprehend what it means that he is the creature of an authoritarian society.”

In his younger years in Spain, Samaranch served as a government official under Gen. Francisco Franco. In the 1970s, he became newly democratic Spain’s first ambassador to the Soviet Union. He insists that his time in Spain can only be truly appreciated and judged by Spaniards.

The enduring mystery is how a man of Samaranch’s sharply honed diplomatic and political skills could have allowed the situation that precipitated events in Salt Lake to fester for so long and then erupt.

He often says the IOC had no provable misconduct in the bidding process until the first allegations surfaced from Salt Lake. Others, noting that the extravagance that came to be associated with the process was well-known as far back as 1985, say it would have taken a team of accountants, lawyers and investigators little effort to unearth questionable practices long ago.

The answer may lie in the very skills and personality traits that enabled Samaranch to effect good work. He has consistently preferred a big-tent and big-picture approach--that is, identifying those who oppose him on a particular issue and, over time, bringing them into the so-called “Olympic Family” with the hope of moderating that opposition.

Jean-Claude Ganga of the Republic of Congo, for instance, was one of the leaders of the 1976 African boycott of the Montreal Summer Games. He became an IOC member. Later, he was revealed to have been the chief abuser of the Salt Lake largess. The indictment in the Welch and Johnson case says Ganga received $320,000 in cash and gratuities.

That Ganga could be so implicated bewilders Samaranch. He says now of the scandal, “I regret, I really regret, what happened in Salt Lake.”

Another example: Apparently intent on ending the Cold War-related boycotts that plagued the 1980 and 1984 Summer Games, Samaranch either did not know or did not want to know the extent of the institutionalized doping scheme that characterized the Olympic-sport system in the former East Germany. The IOC’s highest awards were even passed out to a number of East German authorities.

On this issue, Samaranch’s conduct marks “a degree of ignorance or cynicism, either of which should have disqualified him for leadership of the Olympic movement,” said John Hoberman, a University of Texas professor and expert on both Olympic history and the use of performance-enhancing substances by athletes.

Samaranch has said in several interviews over the past few years with The Times that he is in no position to judge his record as IOC president--that it is there for anyone to assess. On Saturday night, asked if he was feeling sentimental, he said, not really.

Always, he said, he will treasure two memories in particular from the Games. One, he said, is the Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean interpretation on ice at the Sarajevo Winter Games in 1984 of Ravel’s “Bolero”; their sensuous dance earned perfect marks.

The other is Czech distance running legend Emil Zatopek’s entrance into Olympic Stadium stadium as an obvious winner at the end of the marathon at the 1952 Summer Games in Helsinki, Finland. The crowd stood and roared, “Zatopek! Zatopek! Zatopek!” Samaranch, then a 32-year-old sportswriter for a Barcelona newspaper, said he realized then that the “Olympic spirit” was special.

His favorite Olympic moment from the past 21 years, he said, was when he opened the 1992 Summer Games in Barcelona, his hometown. “It was a dream in Barcelona for many, many years. Now it was a reality.”

He said he intends as ex-president of the IOC to live in Barcelona. He said he hopes to serve the IOC as president of the Olympic Museum foundation in Lausanne, Switzerland, “if the new president asks me.”

For the past 21 years, Samaranch has essentially lived in Lausanne, most of the time in a two-room suite at the Palace Hotel. Asked if he intends to keep the suite, he said it depends on whatever arrangement he is able to strike with the new president.

Five IOC members are in the running: DeFrantz of the U.S. as well as Dick Pound of Canada, Jacques Rogge of Belgium, Kim Un Yong of South Korea and Pal Schmitt of Hungary.

“He is such an enormous institutional resource that the cost of a hotel room is ludicrously cheap,” Pound said.

No matter what, Samaranch said, he is already at work on his memoirs. For years, he has scribbled diary-like daily notes and tucked them away in his green-walled office at IOC headquarters overlooking Lake Geneva.

Soon, it will be his no longer. He predicts the IOC will do fine with someone new. And, he reiterated, no regrets.

“The cemeteries are full of people who thought they were indispensable,” he said. “I will leave. And another president will come.”