Elections Boost Presence of U.S. in IOC

In voting that boosted U.S. influence on the International Olympic Committee, Jim Easton of Van Nuys was elected to a four-year slot as IOC vice president and Sandra Baldwin of Phoenix, president of the U.S. Olympic Committee, was made an IOC member.

Baldwin, who since taking over in December 2000, as president of the USOC, has made goodwill and international relations a priority, received 69 “yes” votes, 25 “no.” She needed 48 to become a member.

She said afterward that she was “happy and pleased,” and hopes “to use the [IOC] position to continue to build good relations with the Olympic family around the world.”

In the contested vice presidential race, Easton, head of the international archery federation, defeated Paul Henderson of Canada, president of international sailing federation, 52-32. The election means the U.S. will enjoy, as it traditionally has, a slot on the IOC’s policy-making Executive Board.

Also elected to the 15-member board were Lebanon’s Toni Khoury and Tommy Sithole of Zimbabwe. Khoury now receives a full four-year term; he had initially been elected last July to fill the vacancy on the board that was created when Belgium’s Jacques Rogge was elected IOC president.

The elections Wednesday increased the IOC membership rolls by 10, to 131. Also elected was the president of Belgium’s national Olympic committee, Francois Narman. Others made members include two extraordinarily young Arab royals--Sheikh Tamin Bin Hamad Bin Khalifa al-Thani of Qatar and Prince Nawaf Fahd Abdul Aziz of Saudi Arabia. The Saudi prince was born in 1978, the Qatari sheikh in 1980.

*

The World Anti-Doping Agency is due Friday to provide an update on results collected from the 3,500 out-of-competition tests it has conducted over the past year. The opening ceremony is that night, and the timing of the WADA announcement has prompted unease in some quarters that doping-related issues might overshadow the pageantry.

“We are aware of some of the problems [that may arise],” IOC Director General Francois Carrard said.

Chairman Dick Pound, a Canadian IOC member, told the IOC’s general assembly earlier this week that 24 tests have returned “elevated” results. He cautioned that “elevated” does not necessarily mean “positive,” and that there are any number of innocent reasons why a result might come back “elevated.”

*

Latvian bobsledder Sandis Prusis is back in the Olympics despite a decree by the IOC that he should be banned because of a positive drug test.

Prusis tested positive for nandrolone Nov. 9 after a practice run at the Olympic track in Park City and was suspended from the Olympics. However, he appealed to the international bobsled federation, which accepted his contention he had inadvertently ingested the banned substance in a food supplement and made his suspension retroactive.

The IOC tried to ban him, but the International Court for the Arbitration of Sport said the IOC’s charter forbids the organization from overruling the federations that govern various sports.

“We were aware that there was a risk [in banning Prusis]. We took it,” Carrard said. “This step is very useful because although the case of Prusis individually is solved, the message that is sent to the international federation is very strong.... We need to amend the charter.”

*

Four-time Olympian Nina Kemppel is looking forward to participating in the first mass-start cross-country ski race Saturday at Soldier Hollow.

Kemppel will compete in the women’s 15-kilometer race, which used to send skiers out onto the course at intervals.

“It’s much more fun for us,” she said. “It’s like a track race, only we have sharp instruments in our hands.... We are notoriously worse than the men. We’re much more catty.”

Kemppel, the first female cross-country skier to qualify for four U.S. Olympic teams, joked that she has learned to sharpen her elbows to avoid getting knocked off the pace.

“After about 5K, people get tired enough to stop fighting with each other and start skiing,” she said. “It is nasty. There was one World Cup race, where I stepped on a Russian woman’s ski and she didn’t like that very much. I don’t know Russian curses but all of a sudden she took her pole and stabbed me right in the backside. We were wearing white, and there was a lot of blood.

“It’s like rush-hour traffic. You have tolerance to some point and then it just snaps. It’s road rage.”

*

The International Ski Federation suspended Russian cross-country skier Natalia Baranova-Masolkina for failing an out-of-competition drug test Jan. 18 in Austria.