Rogge Represents Predictable Pick

The International Olympic Committee calls its special sessions extraordinary. So, technically, the 112th session that ended Monday did not qualify for such distinction. Trust me, though, this session was extraordinary almost to the end.

It would have been interesting enough merely because of the site, the so-called New Moscow with its new joie de vivre (not to mention a McDonald’s on every corner), but the historic vote last Friday to award the 2008 Summer Games to Beijing stretched the session far beyond interesting.

Then, on Monday, perhaps feeling a little nervous out on a geopolitical limb, the IOC returned to its roots, electing a western European male as its president.

That is not to suggest that Belgium’s Jacques Rogge is ordinary. He is clearly not. But his election signifies that the old boys’ club is alive and kicking. Of the IOC’s eight presidents, seven have been from Europe and all have been men.

You’d think the IOC members could have looked outside their windows at the Mezhdunarodnaya Hotel and recognized that change is good.

If Neil Armstrong returned to the moon and found it colonized, it would not be any more startling than the change in Moscow in the last decade.

My family and I are staying at one of the city’s three Marriott hotels. We ate Sunday night at TGI Friday’s. We could have gone down the block for a latte at the Coffee Bean if it hadn’t been late. There were still a lot of people on the streets, though, unlike the pre-Yeltsin days when Moscow turned into a ghost town before sundown.

When I walked out of the hotel Monday morning, I saw a sign in the lobby giving directions to the Freedom of the Press symposium. They are learning how that works here. One writer last week in the English-language Moscow Times called President Vladimir Putin a creep.

The police still occasionally overreact, as in their arrests of the Tibetans who protested Beijing’s bid. But the government is trying to show its fun side too. At a farewell banquet Sunday night for retiring IOC president Juan Antonio Samaranch, the interior ministry’s choir sang “My Way.” Who knew the interior ministry had a choir?

There was one winner Monday in Rogge, who won the presidency in an overwhelming second-ballot victory, and there were four losers. Three took it hard.

None took it harder than Anita DeFrantz of Los Angeles.

“I just don’t know why I can’t quit crying,” she said a full hour after the vote outside a conference hall in the House of Unions where Samaranch’s election had been announced 21 years ago to the day. “IOC members aren’t supposed to do this.”

So she’s human. She had just been humiliated by an organization she had served as a first vice president until her term ended Monday. She was eliminated on the first ballot, receiving only nine of the 107 votes cast.

DeFrantz, a member of the executive board since 1992, has made some mistakes. Not as many as the man who finished as runner-up, Kim Un Yong of South Korea, but some. No one, except for DeFrantz, believed she had a chance to win. Still, you would think she would have earned more than nine votes.

One IOC member, who didn’t want to be identified, said Monday that DeFrantz didn’t have enough stature. It sounded like something a man who doesn’t want to elect a woman leader would say.

I asked DeFrantz if she thought she had been a victim of sexism.

“Yeah,” she said. “I have the same credentials or better than any of the candidates.”

Later, Donna de Varona, the gold-medal swimmer in 1960 who has been active since in women’s and Olympic sports, said: “All you have to do is look up there on the stage and see for yourself.”

All but 13 IOC members are men.

“A picture speaks a thousand words,” she said.

There was another factor in DeFrantz’s poor showing. She said some members had told her they would have voted for her on the first ballot if they hadn’t been morally committed to thwarting Kim.

He ran a strong campaign, even though it was only two years ago that he received a severe warning from the IOC for favors allegedly received by his son and daughter from the Salt Lake City bid committee.

Some members wanted him expelled. Others wanted him to run for president. He was so angry at one IOC official during an extraordinary session to discuss reform two years ago that Kim, 68 at the time, assumed a martial arts stance--he is president of the international taekwondo federation--in a move that the official considered threatening. He scurried from the room.

Kim again was brought before the ethics commission Monday on another matter, of which he was cleared.

Nevertheless, he finished second with 23 of 110 votes on the second ballot. (Rogge received 59). Canadian Dick Pound, who negotiated sponsorship and television contracts that have turned the IOC into a $10-billion enterprise, received 22.

Pound probably would have received more support if he didn’t have such an acerbic wit. Upon learning that the Seychelles Islands were boycotting the 1992 Summer Games, he said, “The Seychelles? They’re only a country at low tide.”

None of this should reflect on Rogge, a three-time Olympian in yachting who, by all accounts, is an intelligent and capable leader with high ethical standards. An orthopedic surgeon from Ghent who has seen the damage done to athletes’ bodies by steroids, he calls himself the Ayatollah in the war against drugs.

He was Samaranch’s candidate. The only scandal involving Rogge, 59, occurred last year when he was shown in a documentary taking a cell-phone call from Samaranch while operating on a knee. Rogge explained later that he was in the mopping up stage and that the patient was not in jeopardy.

Critics say he is overly ambitious. A mere three years after he was elected to the IOC in 1994, he put himself up for election to the executive board. The senior member from Belgium, Prince Alexandre de Merode, in a typically Belgian French vs. Flemish row, blocked Rogge by running for vice president.

(Although he is a prince, rumor has it that De Merode didn’t get accepted to medical school in Belgium. Not true. But he has been practicing medicine for some time as the IOC’s medical commission chairman. He’s the one who lost test results of several athletes fingered for steroid use in the Los Angeles Games in 1984. He said the maid in his room at the Biltmore inadvertently threw them out. I hate when that happens.)

Rogge vaulted over De Merode and everyone else while serving as chairman of the IOC’s coordination commission for the spectacularly successful Sydney Games. He did so well that the IOC gave him a real challenge, the same job for the 2004 Athens Games. Now, because his term runs for eight years, he has Beijing on his watch.

A majority of IOC members believe they can change the treacherous government in China by having awarded the Games to Beijing. At least, that’s what I’ve heard from them about a thousand times since Friday. For their next rendition, “All We Are Saying Is, Give Peace a Chance.”

A dose of reality appeared in Monday’s Moscow Times, in which an editorial said that the 1980 Games in Moscow did zilch to impact the Soviet government. All it did, the editorial said, was give Russians a taste for Coca-Cola. The Chinese already have Coca-Cola.

Rogge has his work cut out for him. At least he has a medical degree.

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Randy Harvey can be reached at randy.harvey@latimes.com.

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