IOC Race Even Stumps Insiders

Juan Antonio Samaranch steps down Monday as president of the International Olympic Committee, and late Saturday the five would-be successors posed for the most awkward of staged photos.

From left to right, Kim Un Yong of South Korea, Jacques Rogge of Belgium, Anita DeFrantz of Los Angeles, Pal Schmitt of Hungary and Dick Pound of Canada joined hands--as if they were teammates in a U.S.-style football huddle--and smiled for the cameras.

The light moment belied a ferocious campaign being waged behind the scenes. The race is aswirl with rumors, plots, disinformation, misinformation, fictions, wishful thinking and intrigue. Not even the most plugged-in of Olympic insiders can predict with confidence who is going to win.

The IOC has 122 members. There’s so much smoke, literally and figuratively, floating about the cavernous lobby of the upscale Mezhdunarodnaya Hotel that Israeli IOC member Alex Gilady said it seems as if “there are 360 members right now.”

The election comes three days after the IOC voted to award the 2008 Summer Games to Beijing. That vote sends the Games to the world’s most populous nation for the first time; opponents, citing human-rights issues and other concerns, had hoped the IOC would choose Paris or Toronto. In a letter Saturday to Samaranch, Chinese President Jiang Zemin said China would go “all out” to “carry forward the Olympic spirit.”

The IOC presidential vote, German member Thomas Bach said, “is perhaps even more important in the long term” than going to Beijing for the Games.

The winner becomes the most powerful person in world sports. Kim, Pound and Rogge are the strongest candidates.

Voting is due to take place shortly after 11 a.m. Monday in Moscow, just after midnight tonight in Los Angeles.

“If past and present Olympic athletes voted on who would be the next president of the IOC, Anita DeFrantz would win by a landslide,” said Brad Alan Lewis, a gold medalist at the 1984 Los Angeles Games in the rowing event called double sculls.

DeFrantz, the first female vice president in IOC history, apparently has not, however, generated wide support. Some have tried to convince her to withdraw. She says she’s in all the way, and went off to sleep early today quoting from “Still I Rise,” an evocative Maya Angelou piece about prevailing over obstacles. “I just love this poem,” DeFrantz said.

The victor will hold office for eight years, perhaps 12. Samaranch has served 21 years. A key factor in the race is what he wants, and whether he still exerts enough influence to get his way.

As he did with the 2008 Games selection, Samaranch has officially taken a position of neutrality. But he had long hoped Beijing would get the Games. And many IOC members have said for weeks that they believe Samaranch favors Rogge.

But there are signs Samaranch has been trying hard here to straddle the fence. By Monday’s vote, for instance, Samaranch will have met at least twice here with Kim.

The IOC has always been dominated by European sensibilities, and if tradition and history are any guide, Rogge will win. Raw numbers alone also favor Rogge. Of the 122 members, 57 are European.

Rogge, 59, an orthopedic surgeon, is a three-time Olympic sailor. Sophisticated and diplomatic, he played a leading role in coordinating organization of the successful Sydney Games last September; he also is the IOC’s main liaison to the 2004 Summer Games in Athens, where preparations have been plagued by delays.

Pound, also 59, is a Montreal tax lawyer and Olympic swimmer (Rome, 1960). Friends, foes and Olympic scholars alike inevitably remark upon his incredible intelligence and sharp wit. An IOC member since 1978, he has negotiated the blockbuster TV contracts and overseen the marketing efforts that have turned the IOC into a billion-dollar entity.

Some members said they believe Pound’s candidacy has been building momentum in Moscow. “If I’m on my feet in the final round, I think I’m OK,” Pound said. The candidate with the lowest vote total is eliminated in each round; of course no one knows how many rounds the voting will go, and Pound said about getting to that final round, “That’s the rub.”

At Saturday’s session, Pound, outlining IOC marketing efforts, pointedly noted the economic slowdown in the United States and elsewhere, and said, “We are now in a time of great uncertainty.”

He said later that if not elected, he would have to consider resigning as marketing coordinator. “Under our system, it would be a vote of no confidence, and I’d have to let the new president choose his own people,” he said.

Kim, meantime, is often said to control enough votes either to win outright or to determine who will.

Kim helped organize the Seoul Olympics in 1988 and heads the World Taekwondo Federation. He is also an elected member of South Korea’s parliament as well as a close advisor to South Korean President Kim Dae Jung.

Kim received a “most serious” warning for nepotism in connection with the Salt Lake City corruption scandal. But U.S. Olympic Committee President Sandra Baldwin has said the USOC would have no problem working with Kim should he win.

In response to the scandal, the IOC enacted a series of reforms in late 1999. One was a ban on visits by members to cities bidding for the Games. Kim calls for the reinstatement of such visits, albeit under IOC control. In what may have been another signal, Samaranch, who has been adamant in his opposition to the visits, said Saturday during the IOC meetings that the ruling Executive Board ought to study the issue.

Kim is 70. His detractors say he’s too old. His supporters note that his age might actually be seen as a benefit in the eyes of younger IOC members who might already be weighing a presidential run in 2009.

That’s because under the 1999 reforms, Kim will most likely serve one eight-year term; he will be 78 in 2009 and must retire from active IOC membership at 80. Rogge and Pound are 59, and each conceivably could be elected to an initial eight-year term, followed by a second term of four years, as called for under the new IOC rules.

Beijing’s victory set off a flurry of speculation among some members that the European-dominated IOC would not elect a Korean to its top job.

That’s one school of thought, Kim said.

Another is that Samaranch presided over the Games in his own hometown, Barcelona, in 1992--so, he said, it’s no big deal to have an Asian president and an Asian city.

Late Saturday, he said of his fellow IOC members: “Do they want to stay a private club? Or do they want to look to the future and be universal? This is not the European Olympic committee. This is the International Olympic Committee.”

In a confidential July 4 letter Kim sent to members, a copy of which was obtained from sources by The Times, he also says he has the “necessary qualities” to “negotiate any political issue with which we may be confronted, in particular with China and the United States.”

That letter was sent out well before the vote that gave Beijing the 2008 Games. In the hotel lobby, an influential IOC member said late Saturday, “When I got here, I knew it was Beijing 100%. But the presidency--I don’t know.

“The person who lobbies ‘til 2 in the morning Monday morning--he has the best chance.”

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IOC PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION

* What: The International Olympic Committee will elect its eighth president Monday.

* Where: At the 112th IOC session in Moscow.

* Candidates: Anita DeFrantz, Kim Un Yong, Dick Pound, Jacques Rogge, Pal Schmitt.

* Term of office: Eight years.