Powerful Belgian Joins an IOC Race Without Rules

At 3 this afternoon, at the offices of the Belgian Olympic Committee in Brussels, orthopedic surgeon Jacques Rogge will step before a bank of microphones and kick into high gear the race for the most powerful position in world sports.

Rogge, one of the most influential members of the International Olympic Committee, will announce that he is leaping into the contest to succeed Juan Antonio Samaranch, the Spaniard who is retiring in July after 21 years as IOC president.

Two others have previously declared, Anita DeFrantz of Los Angeles and Hungarian diplomat Pal Schmitt. Two other powerful IOC members are expected to declare their intentions before the April 10 deadline, Kim Un Yong of South Korea and Canada’s Dick Pound.

Most Olympic insiders predict that Rogge, Kim or Pound will be the winner in an election to be held July 16 in Moscow.

Never, though, in the IOC’s 107-year history has there been an election like this one.

Never before has the IOC, which is essentially a private club, been such a big business. It now generates on the order of $1 billion annually in revenue, all to stage a biennial sports festival and to promote the notion, ridiculed by some as quaint or utopian, of world peace through sports and education.

Never before has the outside world paid such attention to the inner workings of the IOC--a result of the Salt Lake City corruption scandal, which prompted the resignation or expulsion of 10 IOC members and led the IOC in December 1999 to enact a 50-point reform plan. The two leaders of the Salt Lake bid, Tom Welch and Dave Johnson, face a federal trial in the coming months on fraud and other charges.

The election promises, as virtually everything in the 123-member IOC does, to revolve around personality politics.

“It has nothing to do with nationality, color, gender, whatever,” Rogge said. “It’s a purely individual approach. Do I like this woman or man? Do I trust him or her? That’s all.”

But it also provides a stage for robust discussion of the serious issues confronting the Olympic movement’s credibility as it moves into the 21st century, foremost among them how to effectively stop the use of performance-enhancing drugs by athletes.

“I think that for the first time in 21 years, this is a campaign that will depend on issues more than strictly personal relationships,” Pound predicts.

Perhaps most important, the election also crystallizes the work in progress that is now the IOC. The election highlights the strength of the IOC and the durability of Olympic ideals, proving that they--and it--were resilient enough not only to weather the scandal but to produce the Sydney Games last fall, which Samaranch called the best ever.

The election also highlights the IOC’s glaring institutional weaknesses, and the way in which it is trying to confront those vulnerabilities.

For instance, one of the 50 reforms limits the president’s term to eight years, renewable for a second term of four more years or a total of 12. Aside from that, however, the reforms say nothing about how the IOC ought to stage a presidential election.

There are, in essence, no rules.

“Frankly, we are still in the reform process,” said IOC Director General Francois Carrard, its senior administrator. “The principles have been approved. The actual implementation is beginning now. It so happens we have a presidential election.”

The IOC’s Ethics Commission--formed in the wake of the scandal--is due to meet in April at Lausanne, Switzerland, the IOC’s headquarters, to discuss the issue and, senior IOC officials hope, to promulgate election guidelines, Carrard said. But the commission is quasi-independent. Moreover, as Carrard concedes, “This is a first for us. It’s new territory.”

There are no rules in the movement’s governing document, the Olympic Charter, about how much money a candidate may raise or spend. Or whether it is appropriate to raise money from corporate interests or others who may have a stake in access to the next president. Or how much of one’s own money a candidate may spend.

DeFrantz, stressing that she has not begun fund-raising, says she may need $100,000--or more--to underwrite her campaign. The U.S. Olympic Committee is “very supportive” of DeFrantz’s candidacy, USOC Chair Sandra Baldwin said, and is “doing some things to help her financially.”

Kim, independently wealthy, said, “I normally spend as much as I need.”

Pound, a Montreal lawyer who over the years has negotiated many of the IOC’s blockbuster deals with sponsors and with U.S. broadcaster NBC, says it is clear--if he runs--that he could not accept a “single dollar of corporate funding,” to avoid even the appearance of a conflict of interest.

In this contest, there are no rules, as there would be in a U.S.-style election, requiring periodic financial reports for campaign expenditures. DeFrantz, for one, promises her campaign’s financial records will be “transparent,” or open.

There are no rules about the appropriateness of trips to all the far-flung locales in which IOC members live. DeFrantz says she needs to raise money to travel the world to meet with her colleagues. She says she hopes to meet with as many as possible by July 16.

There are no rules about the appropriateness of trips by IOC members to visit those who are running, or those who may just be considering running.

Five IOC members visited South Korea in February, for instance, to take in the Korean Winter Games. While there, they also could view the resort of Yongpyung, a potential bidder for the 2010 Winter Games, to be selected in 2003--meaning they had the chance to see Yongpyung before the formal bid process, when visits would be barred. And, of course, they had the opportunity to visit with Kim.

At the time, he was not yet a presidential candidate. For that matter, he still is not yet a candidate. But over the last several months he has told confidantes of his interest in the job and of his belief he is eminently qualified and shrewdly positioned.

As for the February trip, Kim said the Korean Olympic Committee’s annual budget allows for four VIPs to be invited to take in the Korean Winter or Summer Games. Three of the five on the February trip were KOC guests, he said. The other two paid for themselves, he said.

Critics, he said, “should not misunderstand or panic.” “It’s normal. This is human relations. You think anybody is bought off by one trip?”

As such sentiments reveal, it is by no means clear within the IOC that there should be rules for these, and other, situations--or that the rules can, or even ought to try to, cover every imaginable situation.

It is plain, however, that a strong current of resentment lingers about the 50-point plan.

The most closely watched of the reforms involved the ban on visits by IOC members to cities bidding to host the Games. Though it passed overwhelmingly, 89-10 with one abstention, Kim reflected the sentiment of many when he said: “How can you not visit Paris? This is a small world. You have to visit these places in many functions. We cannot go to New York City? These are not reforms.”

He added: “People talk about reform, reform. Reform is not just stopping the visits by IOC members to bidding cities. Or making stupid rules, like gifts should be less than $200. Reforms should be ongoing, to meet the challenges of the future: transparency, structure, finance, bookkeeping. Not just lip service.”

In connection with the Salt Lake scandal, Kim received a “most severe” warning from the IOC. His son, John Kim, was indicted in U.S. District Court on various charges but moved to Seoul and has yet to stand trial. The Kims have repeatedly denied any wrongdoing.

“That will be the material they use against me, of course,” the father said.

Kim’s strength, however, not only remains undiminished within the IOC but, because of strong anti-American sentiment within the IOC tied to the Salt Lake scandal, his standing may be even stronger now than two years ago.

Kim was instrumental in the success of the 1988 Seoul Games. For the last 15 years, he has led a Monte Carlo-based group called GAISF, an association of international sports federations. He is president of the World Taekwondo Federation and has long been active in the development of sports in Africa and Asia. And he has long had extensive political and diplomatic ties in the United States.

An item in Sport Intern, an Olympic newsletter published in Germany, reporting on a recent discussion between IOC members R. Kevan Gosper of Australia and Sheik Ahmad Al-Fahad Al-Sabah of Kuwait, said the sheik told Gosper: “If Kim Un Yong runs as a candidate, I will vote for Dr. Kim. If Dr. Kim does not run, I will ask him who I should vote for.”

The newsletter said the story might be true or might just be gossip but was so good it had to be printed. Gosper, in a phone interview, said it was silly.

Gosper is among those supporting Pound--who has been an IOC member since 1978 and has served since the 1980s as its marketing point man. Twice, Pound has been the IOC’s ranking vice president, and he has taken on a number of hard jobs, even if they were unlikely to win him friends. Pound led the IOC’s internal investigation into the scandal. He is the first head of the World Anti-Doping Agency.

Detractors of both Kim and Pound worry whether either man would be willing to move from Seoul or Montreal to Lausanne.

Both dismiss the issue as nonsense.

“You can’t move the United Nations to Rome,” Kim said.

“You move to where the job is,” Pound said.

If elected, Kim could only serve one eight-year term because of age limits imposed by the 1999 reforms. He is 70. But some see that as an advantage--reasoning that if the IOC is not ready to commit to Rogge, 58, or Pound, 59, for what would probably be 12 years in office, then Kim offers a seasoned alternative.

Rogge, meantime, is a formidable candidate for several reasons. Among them, he has a nimble intellect and a diplomatic nature. He served as the IOC’s point man in the lengthy run-up to the Sydney Olympics, tremendously impressing Michael Knight, the Australian minister who headed the committee that ran the Games.

“Jacques Rogge can be hard when he needs to but manages to do it without macho breast-beating or cheap shots,” Knight said.

Perhaps most important, Rogge is European and the IOC, based on the shores of Lake Geneva, has long been dominated by European sensibilities. Nearly half the IOC membership is from Europe--and, bottom line, any election is a numbers game. The winner will be the one who gets 50% plus 1, about 60 votes, depending on the number of members who show up in Moscow.

Clearly aiming to reach out beyond his natural base, Rogge downplays the European angle.

“A neutral factor,” he said.

Olympic insiders say it would be a mistake to assume that Europeans will vote as a bloc.

And Kim said: “I think the IOC leader should have a voice and support in all continents, not just one part in one continent. Don’t you think?”

So the politicking is on--in earnest as of this afternoon in Brussels.

“Listen, I’m going on my course,” Rogge said. “I don’t look at what the others are doing. It’s going to be a race. Someone will win. Four others will be left behind.”