Longtime IOC Director General Carrard Resigns

Francois Carrard, a Swiss lawyer who for the past 13 years has held the top staff position at the International Olympic Committee, is resigning his post to take an advisory position, the IOC announced Wednesday.

Since 1989, Carrard has served as the IOC’s director general, overseeing a staff that numbers in the hundreds, reporting directly to and working in concert with the IOC president, first Juan Antonio Samaranch of Spain, and since July 2001, Jacques Rogge of Belgium.

The job is part-time, though Carrard frequently spent much of his week on IOC business.

As part of a restructuring of the IOC’s administration, Rogge sought a full-time director general.

Carrard, who has a multitude of business and other interests, was offered the job but decided, he said Wednesday, to decline. He will instead serve Rogge as a senior advisor. His replacement as director general was not announced.

Olympic insiders stressed that Carrard was not pushed out, and Carrard said in a telephone interview, “I did make a choice and I’m very happy with it.”

Last week, the IOC announced the forthcoming departure of Francoise Zweifel, another mainstay in the IOC administration from the Samaranch years.

Since 1998, Zweifel has been director of the Olympic Museum, located near IOC headquarters in Lausanne, Switzerland; from 1985 to 2002, she was the IOC’s secretary general, overseeing the logistics of IOC headquarters as well as its many meetings worldwide. She had begun her IOC career in 1982.

Carrard, 65, is a senior partner in a 16-lawyer Lausanne law firm and chairman of several companies. He is also chairman of the world-famous jazz festival held each summer in Montreux, Switzerland.

For years, and particularly during the Salt Lake City corruption scandal that erupted in 1998, Carrard served as the IOC’s most visible spokesman, equally adept -- and often wry -- in French and English.

Carrard began his association with the IOC in 1979, hired as outside counsel by then-president Lord Killanin of Ireland. In 1989, Samaranch asked him to assume the director general’s role.

It is unclear whether the director general’s job will be filled by an internal candidate, or whether the IOC will conduct a global search. Carrard said he intends to stay on the job until a successor takes over or “as long as necessary.”