Major Change for USOC Urged

A five-member panel appointed by a U.S. Senate committee on Thursday unanimously recommended “drastic,” “far-reaching” and “detailed” changes in the way the U.S. Olympic Committee is organized and managed, and urged that those changes be made quickly to keep the USOC on course for next year’s Athens Olympics.

The panel, appointed earlier this year by the Senate Commerce committee after USOC management turmoil exploded into a crisis that produced the resignations of several top officials, recommended that the USOC’s management be reworked to separate lines of authority between paid staff and volunteers. The plan called for trimming the 124-member board of directors to nine.

The staff, to be led by a chief executive, would run the show, reporting to a slimmed-down board of directors dominated by “independent” members of the “highest character and integrity,” and with “significant professional success and a commitment to public service.” The volunteers would be largely reduced to a debating society, and that at a once-a-year assembly.

Panel members were clear Thursday something dramatic needed to be done.

One member of the panel, NBC Sports Chairman Dick Ebersol, said that the USOC’s current structure had produced a parade of “boobs and incompetents” at the top, and “some of the worst picks in professional leadership I’ve ever seen.”

Unsettled is whether the plan will pass muster with the International Olympic Committee. After noting that the voting rights of U.S. IOC members would be limited under the Senate panel’s version of a new USOC board, the IOC said it was concerned that “good intentions for reform have led to unintended consequences that must be addressed due to their noncompliance with the Olympic Charter.” The IOC added, however, that it remained confident “these matters can be resolved.”

The Senate Commerce Committee is to hold another hearing Tuesday in Washington -- its third of the year on the USOC -- to consider the report and to begin amending the Amateur Sports Act, the 1978 law that gave the USOC responsibility for the country’s Olympic affairs. Restructuring of the USOC is “long overdue,” the report indicated. For instance, the USOC’s revenue for the four-year 1977-80 cycle, during which the Act was passed, was about $55 million. USOC revenue projections for the current four-year cycle, 2001-04, reach $488 million.

“Sports is big business,” the report said, “and consequently the USOC leadership must have financial and business experience and sophistication equal to its responsibilities.”

The co-chairs of the panel, Don Fehr, head of the Major League Baseball players’ union, and Roberta Cooper Ramo, former president of the American Bar Assn., urged Congress to move with unusual speed -- each saying that’s the only hope.

Fehr said Thursday, “In my talking to people over the last couple of months, and especially since [the resignations of the CEO, president and others] last winter, I’ve had a common theme repeated to me: As long as the USOC is in its current circumstance, who would want to be involved in it? It has to change to want to be involved in it.”

USOC officials have said that preparations for Athens have gone on unimpeded, but the report calls for the new management structure to be in place by Jan. 1.

“We unanimously believe that the situation has deteriorated to such a degree -- and the time to the 2004 Athens Olympics is so short -- that drastic measures to reform the USOC must be undertaken immediately,” the report said. A separate task force, an internal USOC commission, is due to issue its final report today. Unclear is whether Congress has any interest in the USOC’s internal work, though the reform panels have arrived at many of the same conclusions -- that the divide between volunteers and staff needs to be fixed, and that the USOC’s essential mission needs to be redefined.

The mission, both panels have indicated, needs to center on winning Olympic medals.

According to the report issued Thursday, the split between volunteers and staff has been largely responsible for an “overwhelming sense of disillusionment with the USOC.” The report also said that the USOC had in recent years been a “constant source of embarrassment to the American public and to the marvelous athletes it is obligated to serve.”

The division between staff and volunteers was also cited as a leading cause of what the report called “constant upheaval” in the USOC’s leadership. There have been three volunteer presidents in the last 13 months, it said, and four CEOs since the 2000 Sydney Games.

The report said the volunteer structure, a 124-member board of directors and a 23-member executive committee -- which oversees the paid staff at USOC headquarters in Colorado Springs, Colo. -- ought to go.

Replacing it would be a nine-member board of directors, five of whom would be “independent,” meaning, among other things, no ties to the USOC or various other Olympic agencies within two years. U.S. members of the IOC -- there are currently three -- and the speaker of the assembly would serve as ex officio board members, with limited voting rights.

Left untouched in Thursday’s report was the issue of doping.

John MacAloon, a professor at the University of Chicago who has long studied the Olympic movement, lauded the proposed structural reforms but said the failure to include mention of an issue as important as doping was “astonishing.”