Samaranch Leaves Lasting Legacy

Life has come full circle for Juan Antonio Samaranch.

In Moscow in 1980, as a little-known Spanish diplomat, he was elected the seventh president of the International Olympic Committee, taking the most powerful job in global sports.

Twenty-one years later, now a well-known world figure, Samaranch has returned to Moscow to finish a term marked by unprecedented growth but also by the Olympics’ biggest corruption scandal.

Committee members will choose his successor in a secret ballot on Monday, the anniversary of his election and one day before his 81st birthday.

The last few months have been full of farewell ceremonies and accolades from Olympic bodies around the world. Samaranch jokingly describes these events as “funeral services.” The other day, he compared his final executive board dinner with “The Last Supper.”

While his closest friends say Samaranch is extremely emotional and sentimental, outwardly he remains cool and philosophical.

“I’m feeling OK,” he said. “Life is life. There is a beginning and an end. This is the end of my presidency. I’ve known for a long time that this day was coming.”

Samaranch retires as the second-longest serving president in the 107-year history of the IOC. Only Pierre de Coubertin, the French baron who founded the modern Olympics, was in office longer, serving for 29 years (1896-1925). American Avery Brundage served for 20 years (1952-72).

Samaranch will be the last IOC leader to stay in office for so long. Under new rules, the maximum term for the president is 12 years (one eight-year mandate, plus the possibility of an additional four-year term).

“After de Coubertin, there is no question that Samaranch stands head and shoulders above the other presidents in terms of his impact, not only on the Olympic Games but the place of the Olympic movement in the world,” Olympic historian John MacAloon said.

Canadian lawyer Dick Pound, a candidate for the IOC presidency, said Samaranch was one of three “great or defining presidents.”

“De Coubertin to get it going, Brundage to hold it together through a very difficult period, and Samaranch to bring it from the kitchen table to the world stage,” Pound said.

The Samaranch era has been perhaps the most eventful in IOC history, spanning political boycotts, the end of amateurism and the advent of professionalism, the explosion of commercialization, unprecedented growth and popularity of the games, the scourge of doping, and the Salt Lake City scandal.

“You have to compare what is the Olympics today with what was the Olympics 20 years ago--that is my legacy,” Samaranch said. “It is much more important. Also, all our sources of finances are coming from private sources, not a single dollar from the government. That means we can assure our independence and autonomy.

“And the most important thing--it is easy to say but not to get--is the unity with the national Olympic committees and mainly with the international federations.”

When Samaranch came to power in 1980, the IOC was virtually bankrupt and the Olympics were battered by boycotts, terrorism and financial troubles.

Today, the IOC’s coffers are bulging from billions of dollars in commercial revenues, the boycott era is over, and the games are firmly established as the world’s favorite sports festival.

“He took a very badly fragmented, disorganized and impecunious organization and built it into a universal, united and financially and politically independent organization that has credibility, not only in the world of sport, but also in political circles,” Pound said. “That’s an enormous achievement to accomplish in 20 years.”

Samaranch’s presidency has also been clouded by controversy. He has been hounded by critics who say the games are over-commercialized and riddled with performance-enhancing drugs, and that he perpetuated the IOC image of a private club for a pampered elite.

British author Andrew Jennings, one of Samaranch’s most virulent critics, wrote this week that “corruption became the lubrication of his Olympic industry” and that he “fleeced sport of its moral and monetary value.”

Samaranch’s reputation was scarred most of all by the Salt Lake City scandal, which led to the unprecedented purge of 10 IOC members who benefited from more than $1 million in cash, gifts, scholarships and other favors doled out during the Utah capital’s winning bid for the 2002 Winter Games.

“What I regret, really regret, is what happened in Salt Lake City,” he said.

“It obviously was a terrible blow to the organization, a terrible blow to him,” MacAloon said. “He helped select many of the members who were found guilty of bribe-taking. ... It will be a lasting footnote to his presidency.”

Samaranch used the crisis to push through a package of reforms designed to make the IOC more modern, open and democratic--including a ban on member visits to bid cities.

“We used this crisis to change the structure of the IOC,” he said. “Maybe without this crisis, this would not have been possible.”

In December 1999, Samaranch became the first IOC president to testify in Congress, enduring three hours of grilling on Capitol Hill from lawmakers skeptical of the reforms.

Last year’s Sydney Olympics, described by Samaranch as the best ever, seemed to take the heat off the IOC and restore faith in the games.

“We showed the world that the Olympic movement after the crisis is even stronger and with even more prestige than before,” he said.

Pound said the scandal should not tarnish Samaranch’s legacy.

“Once the corner is turned, the progress and the accomplishments in historical terms will supplant the fact that he was on watch when the Salt Lake problem arose,” he said.

Samaranch’s past was also a target for critics. Jennings and others denounced him for serving the Franco dictatorship in the 1960s and 1970s.

Samaranch angrily defended himself, saying it was up to Spaniards, not foreign journalists, to judge his record. He said he had only a modest role as director general of sports and parliamentary leader of the Falangist movement.

“Maybe some critics pushed me to be president for 21 years,” Samaranch said. “I have to thank the critics. Maybe without the critics, I had to leave the IOC before.”

Looking back, Samaranch acknowledges he could have retired earlier.

He considered stepping down after the 1992 Olympics in his home city of Barcelona and again after the centennial games in Atlanta in 1996. But each time, encouraged by his supporters, he chose to continue. Twice, he had the age limit changed to allow him to stay on.

The elder Samaranch will not disappear from the Olympic scene. He will be honorary life president of the IOC and chairman of the board of the Olympic museum in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Samaranch will spend most of his time in Barcelona, where he remains an executive with the Caixa savings bank. He’ll work on his extensive Olympic stamp collection and sit down to write his memoirs.

“I have no regrets,” Samaranch said. “I’ve enjoyed very much what I did. Now, I am thinking in a few more days I will not be the president.”