Senate Panel Schedules Hearing About USOC

The Senate Commerce Committee on Thursday ordered a hearing next week into the turmoil sparked by a recent U.S. Olympic Committee ethics inquiry that has rocked USOC leadership.

The panel, chaired by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) -- who emerged as the leading congressional critic of the Olympics four years ago, at the height of the movement’s worst corruption scandal -- set the hearing for Tuesday. The witness list had not been finalized as of late Thursday.

“He wants to discuss the recent [ethics-related] allegations, basically, and look at the management of the organization and the leadership of the organization,” committee spokeswoman Pia Pialorsi said. A source said more hearings may follow, and that the tone of Tuesday’s session is not likely to be positive for the USOC.

The announcement of a full-scale hearing offers a clear sign of the gravity of the crisis in which the USOC finds itself ensnared.

In recent days, the USOC has been consumed by an extraordinary sequence of events: a demand by several vice presidents and other officers that Marty Mankamyer, the president, resign; her vow to stay on; the resignations of five USOC officials, including the ethics officer and three members of the ethics oversight committee; and a call by a leading Olympic sponsor, John Hancock Financial Services, for a full-scale audit by Feb. 15 of USOC revenues and expenses amid concerns that the tumult will hurt New York’s chances to win the 2012 Summer Games.

All of that has taken place in the wake of a conflict-of-interest inquiry involving Chief Executive Lloyd Ward; it centered on Ward’s direction last year to USOC staff to make introductions in the Dominican Republic, site of the 2003 Pan American Games, on behalf of a company with ties to Ward’s brother and a childhood friend. Ward has said he has no financial ties to the company, Detroit-based Energy Management Technologies. A USOC ethics board report recommended no disciplinary action against Ward, and the executive committee on Monday took none.

Meantime, the U.S. Justice Department is apparently investigating allegations a bribe was offered to win a deal for EMT. A federal prosecutor and U.S. law enforcement agent on Wednesday spent 3 1/2 hours interviewing Lowell Fernandez, the Games’ project manager, at the U.S. Embassy in Santo Domingo, the Dominican capital. Fernandez has declined comment.

The string of events culminating in the call Tuesday for Mankamyer’s resignation, which prompted the setting of a Feb. 8 meeting in Chicago to debate her fate, offers evidence of the political priorities that often dominate the organization.

That date is the one-year anniversary of the opening ceremony of the Salt Lake Games, and organizers in Utah have for weeks been planning a Feb. 7-9 celebration featuring U.S. medalists and the premiere of filmmaker Bud Greenspan’s movie about the 2002 Games.

Caroline Shaw, spokeswoman for the Salt Lake Organizing Committee, said Thursday that organizers are “extremely disappointed.” She added, “We’ve gone to great lengths to pay tribute to the power of Olympians, including U.S. athletes. Instead of reading about the great legacy of the Games, the focus will be back on the suits at the USOC.”

Congress gave the USOC authority for Olympic sports in 1978 through the Amateur Sports Act. For many years, however, Congress took limited interest in the administration of the Olympic movement. Only since 1999, and the eruption of the Salt Lake scandal, has attention renewed. The commerce committee has Senate jurisdiction over the sports act.

Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), architect of the 1978 law who only a few days ago had asked for a meeting with USOC officials, sits on the commerce committee. Another senator, Republican Ben Nighthorse Campbell of Colorado, a 1964 U.S. Olympian in judo, has also played a key role in reviewing the station of the movement in American life; the USOC is based in Colorado Springs. He had joined in Stevens’ call for a meeting, the two senators calling the wave of news reports about the USOC “troubling.”

Four years ago, at the height of the Salt Lake scandal, the subject of a commerce committee hearing was the International Olympic Committee and a culture of gift-giving and entitlement that had come to pervade the process by which the IOC selected cities to stage the Games.

In a give-and-take that has since become legendary around the world in Olympic circles, three times McCain asked the senior IOC member in the United States, Anita DeFrantz, how much money the IOC spent on direct support of athletes. She finally said she did not know. Her office said late Thursday she has been invited to testify again next week.

In December 1999, then-IOC president Juan Antonio Samaranch testified in Washington before a House Commerce Committee panel, saying in the aftermath of the resignations or expulsions of 10 IOC members and the enactment of a 50-point reform plan that it had “cleaned the house.”

Ward did not respond to a request Thursday for comment.

Mankamyer, asked what she expected to be told at the hearing, said, “That we are a national treasure, and as such our affairs belong to the entire country, and so we must be very careful to care for this treasure in a manner which is expected.”