One Tough Grandmother

Marty Mankamyer, a 68-year-old grandmother of seven and self-described “soccer mom,” was elected president of the U.S. Olympic Committee on Thursday, a development that backers insisted would bode well for the USOC but others bemoaned as prime evidence of a systemic malaise plaguing the most important national Olympic committee in the world.

Mankamyer, a real estate broker in Colorado Springs, Colo., was elected with a majority of ballots returned by the USOC’s 123-member board of directors. Hers was the only name on the ballot. Under the USOC’s rules for this election, she had earned the right to be the sole candidate submitted for ratification, having earlier bested USOC Vice President Paul George and former USOC treasurer Larry Hough.

Mankamyer is filling the remainder of the term vacated by Sandra Baldwin and will serve through 2004. Baldwin, a Phoenix real estate executive, resigned May 24 after acknowledging discrepancies in her official USOC biography. Mankamyer, who had been USOC secretary and acting president since Baldwin’s resignation, has pledged not to serve as president beyond 2004.

Insiders have long regarded Mankamyer as a shrewd political infighter who is unfazed by challenges and knows well the USOC’s bureaucracy, factions and history. She has risen from a hardscrabble upbringing and domestic abuse, and played a key role in securing a spot for women’s soccer in the Olympic Games.

For many observers of the Olympic scene, however, her election crystallizes an issue that some frame this way: Is a 68-year-old grandmother truly the best this country could tab for the top job with the world’s top Olympic committee? This, after all, is the same organization that a generation ago boasted as leaders the likes of the legendary Col. F. Don Miller, who served as USOC executive director for 12 years, and William E. Simon, whose USOC presidency followed his service as secretary of the treasury in the Nixon and Ford administrations. Simon oversaw the L.A. Games.

“I think Sandy Baldwin followed by Marty Mankamyer tells you how pathetic the USOC is,” said a leading American sports official who has long been close to the Olympic movement. “That it can’t get anybody of real stature or real accomplishment to be president just reflects the excessive influence of the grass-roots organizations on the process. There’s no understanding of professionalism or of today’s international sports world.”

Mankamyer takes such remarks in stride. Earlier this week, she was asked, “Are you truly the best choice in the whole country for this position?” She replied, “The answer is, my peers believe in me. They know I know the issues. That I’m tough. That I’m relentless. I am unafraid to face the tough issues. I am as hard as nails. I may not look it. But, oh my gosh, you don’t want to tangle with me.”

Mankamyer assumes the presidency as the USOC confronts a series of formidable hurdles.

Perhaps most important, it is struggling to define its central mission.

Is it to produce Olympic medal winners?

Or is the USOC akin to a public trust, charged with producing medal winners as an adjunct to promoting the idealism and values of the Olympic movement?

At the same time, there is renewed tension between the professional staff, many based at the USOC’s campus in Colorado Springs, and the volunteer corps that makes up the board of directors and sustains the Olympic enterprise in the far corners of the United States.

The USOC’s chief executive officer, Lloyd Ward, while acknowledging the import of the medal-winning mission, has pushed the power of the staff at the expense of the volunteers--even as, for most of the last year, he has been flying around the country, promoting a campaign that he says is aimed at winning the “hearts and minds” of ordinary Americans.

Ward’s future at the USOC is by no means assured.

His campaign has not been warmly embraced in all quarters, particularly as the agencies that run Olympic sports--called national governing bodies--cast about for funds to help support would-be Olympic athletes. The Athens Summer Games begin two years from this week.

For the first time in years, the USOC is facing tremendous financial uncertainty. Its annual budget runs to nearly $125 million, and its revenues have steadily risen over the last two decades through marketing connected to a string of Olympics staged in the United States--Lake Placid (Winter, 1980), Los Angeles (Summer, 1984), Atlanta (Summer, 1996) and Salt Lake City (Winter, 2002).

The earliest the Games can return to the United States will be 2012, and although four U.S. cities are vying for those Summer Games, the odds of the European-dominated International Olympic Committee returning to the U.S. in 2012 appear long. The IOC will award the 2012 Games in 2005.

Moreover, Mankamyer has, she admits, limited international stature and little knowledge of the IOC’s complex politics.

Dale Neuberger, president of USA Swimming, said, “Over the last several weeks, as people have had a chance to know Marty better, she has impressed even some of her critics with the depth of her knowledge of the Olympic movement and her commitment to the success of the USOC.

“She is very bright. She is very articulate. And I think that she brings a certain freshness to this effort by firmly placing the USOC first, above personal ambitions.”

Added Michael Lenard, a Los Angeles businessman and 1984 Olympian who ran unsuccessfully for the USOC presidency in 1996, “For those who do not know Marty, they will find her to be a strong and principled team player. She will neither cut sleazy political deals nor feather her own ego nest.”

Mankamyer grew up in Farmington, N.M. She attended the University of New Mexico for two years, then transferred to UCLA, then withdrew to get married.

Her first marriage ended in divorce. She remarried.

Living in Colorado, she endured, she said, bouts of domestic violence. Once after a fight with her then-husband, she said, she was left in a field north of Denver, her white clothes stained with blood and dirt. She still bears on her right shin the scar--167 stitches--from another incident during which, she said, she was thrown through a patio door.

“As I said, I’ve been there. You can’t scare me,” Mankamyer said.

After splitting from her second husband, Mankamyer said, she worked two jobs to support herself and her children--a day job as a secretary and a night job, 6 p.m. to 2 a.m., at a bar in Westminster, Colo.

Eventually, she turned to real estate. She also met her third husband, Jack Mankamyer. They have been married 25 years. Their blended family totals seven children, ages 24 to 41, and seven grandchildren.

“Did I say how proud I am of my kids?” she asked. “Because I think that’s the testimony to whether you’ve been a success in life.”

Mankamyer enjoys riding horses. As a young woman, she said, she used to race stock cars at a track near Denver, and she’s more than comfortable around a shooting range. Jack Mankamyer once gave her a 12-gauge shotgun as an anniversary gift.

“I like guns,” she said with a laugh.

Her sports experience began as a soccer mom carpooling to practice and games. Rising through the sport’s bureaucracy, she was elected chairman of the U.S. Youth Soccer Assn. in 1984. That position made her a vice president of U.S. Soccer.

She became a member of the USOC board of directors in 1990, served on the USOC’s policy-making executive committee from 1992-96 and in 2000 was elected secretary. She served as assistant chef de mission for the U.S. team at the Sydney Games two years ago.

She expressed confidence and a let’s-get-to-it spirit as she took over the presidency.

“I don’t have a weak spot,” she said, “unless it’s my image, that I look like a grandmother.”

But she also said of that image, with a knowing laugh, “It has gotten me a lot of places because the facade is so beautiful.”