Do the Math: Americans Caught in Double Bind

Most of the back-patting by the International Olympic Committee should have stopped by now.

Hooray for them. The IOC has elected a new president. His name is Jacques Rogge. He is from Belgium. He is a doctor. He was an Olympic yachtsman. He has not, that anyone knows, committed a crime, offered bribes, taken bribes. He is, of course, white and male and European. He is practically a saint.

And he had some interesting words for the United States.

“The USOC is the strongest and most rich Olympic committee in the world,” Rogge had said before his election. “Something the USOC should work on is playing a bigger role in the Olympic movement.”

Huh?

We have a suggestion for Mr. Rogge.

Check the ledger book for the IOC.

The U.S. gives the IOC more money than any other nation. Without U.S. television networks, which continue to be willing to spend billions for the broadcast rights, even though the Olympic Games have been tarnished by scandals both drug-related and IOC-related, for the last decade, there would be no Olympics.

Without the U.S. bucks, all those IOC representatives (of the 122, four come from the U.S. by the way) wouldn’t be staying in hotel suites and wouldn’t have been trolling for gifts the last 20 years while they were “evaluating” potential Olympic locations.

The U.S. had a candidate who ran hard for the IOC presidency. Her name is Anita DeFrantz. She is African American and a woman and way too naive. DeFrantz, who is from Los Angeles, believed she had a chance to win. She did everything she thought was right. She tried to become one of the European boys. She praised them and the IOC. She walked a tightrope over the bribery scandals associated with the Salt Lake City Games and several IOC members.

But DeFrantz, possibly the best representative for a country Rogge says must be more involved, couldn’t have been more humiliated. She received nine votes and was first of the five candidates eliminated. There are 35 international governing bodies for Olympic sports--28 summer, seven winter. U.S. citizens are presidents of two of them, softball and archery.

Somebody named Abdoulaye Seye-Moreau runs the international basketball federation out of Switzerland. Come on. Not to be insular, but basketball is an American sport, played best by Americans. You want us involved, Mr. Rogge? Time to elect some Americans to head sports we understand.

It’s funny. When the U.S. pushes its agenda too hard, we are not worldly enough--way too self-centered and self-righteous for European tastes. So our media get criticized for concentrating too much on U.S. athletes during the Olympics. But the Australian media concentrated on Australian athletes during the Sydney Games. The Japanese media concentrated on Japanese athletes during the Nagano Games.

You think NBC spends those billions to televise curling or biathlon? Not unless the U.S. is going to get a medal. And no one was more critical of the tawdry Atlanta Games than the U.S. media. And the U.S. media sure didn’t bury the Salt Lake City bribery scandal.

Right now the U.S.--with its four members--has one fewer IOC slot than Italy. Belgium, with two, can claim one more IOC president in the organization’s 105-year history than the U.S.

And Rogge says it’s our fault.

Here’s another suggestion for Rogge.

Come to the United States.

Look around.

Watch.

What we have here in the U.S. is a whole lot of athletes playing lots of sports.

What we don’t have is a whole lot of people who yearn to live in Switzerland or who are eager to refer to Mr. Rogge as “His Excellency.”

It’s de rigueur to refer to the IOC president as “His Excellency.”

We had a big revolution to get rid of royalty. We don’t want to become royalty.

The IOC hierarchy complains because not enough USOC officials travel to every big IOC shindig. So the outgoing IOC president, Juan Antonio Samaranch, accuses the U.S. of “withdrawing” from the world stage.

Withdrawing?

We had the Atlanta Olympics. We’re having the Salt Lake City Olympics. Why?

Because we do them well, the faults of Atlanta notwithstanding. The IOC members like to come to Olympics where the hotels are nice, the roads are finished, where the local organizing committee doesn’t have to be browbeaten into building the venues, where the phones work, the air-conditioning works.

And our money is good enough. The IOC is willing to keep taking that.

But if any of our citizens want to be elected to the IOC, we are expected to grovel. We are supposed to hang around, hats in our hands. Our government was urged not to complain about the prospect of a Beijing Olympics because it would be seen as bullying.

It’s OK, though, for China to bully dissidents. China at one point suggested beach volleyball be located in the same site Chinese tanks ran over Chinese students, and China gets votes. The U.S. doesn’t send enough people to fawn over “His Excellency,” and the U.S. gets a lecture.

The IOC has become the United Nations. If we try to participate in the American way, by speaking bluntly and asking for a return on our investment, we’re bullies.

If the U.S. doesn’t send the money, if the check isn’t always in the mail, if the USOC isn’t deferential enough to “His Excellency,” then the U.S. is insular and withdrawn.

That doesn’t seem very sporting, Your Excellency.

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Diane Pucin can be reached at diane.pucin@latimes.com.