Rogge Wants to Show It’s Democracy First

The president of the International Olympic Committee, Jacques Rogge, an orthopedic surgeon from Belgium, is far more willing than his predecessor, Juan Antonio Samaranch of Spain, to oversee an IOC session peppered by dissent and round upon round of perplexing votes.

It’s called democracy, Rogge says, and so while others, reviewing an IOC session that saw baseball and softball axed from the Olympic Games after 2008 but no sports picked to replace either, wondered if the results showed a weakness in the presidency, Rogge said, hardly.

In a news conference and in an interview with The Times, he said the IOC’s historic 117th session should make plain to any doubters the IOC’s commitment to robust debate amid one of his clear mandates for the presidency -- to constrain, if bit by bit, the size and cost of the Games and to reiterate a focus on putting athletes, not IOC members, first.

He also said New York’s loss in the 2012 bid race, combined with the ousting of baseball and softball, ought not to be seen as a three-strike whammy directed by the IOC at U.S. interests, including the U.S. Olympic Committee.

“I don’t think this will have any bearing on our American friends -- not the USOC, not our broadcasters, not our sponsors, definitely not,” he said.

The IOC assembly, which wrapped up Saturday, underscored two themes that in recent years have marked IOC affairs:

While the United States still holds the key to the IOC’s financial success, politically the United States remains weak within the Olympic movement.

And Rogge is assuredly not Samaranch in style.

Under Rogge, now midway through an eight-year term, the IOC has moved deliberately to institutionalize its procedures -- a sharp turn from Samaranch, who typically relied to a large degree on personal loyalties to get things done.

So the move to cut the two sports was a victory for process, Rogge said. The last time the IOC cut a sport -- polo -- was in 1936.

And the fact that the IOC members voted on the issue of replacements, choosing from karate, squash, roller sports, rugby and golf -- a victory for process.

And so what if Rogge had played for the Belgian national rugby team and had told the members that the top golfers in the world stood ready to play in 2012? It mattered not that the members went for karate and squash. Process.

Rogge acknowledged that there were problems translating the votes into Arabic and other languages. And he said it was difficult to explain to members why there were so many rounds of voting to satisfy the legalisms in the Olympic charter.

First came an up-or-down vote on each of the 28 sports on the 2004 program; then elimination voting that pared five would-be Olympic sports to two, karate and squash; then separate votes on whether to admit karate or squash to the program.

To confuse matters even more, different votes carried different standards.

The up-or-down ballots required a simple majority. Get it, stay in the Olympics -- or get out.

The elimination voting, meanwhile, cut the lowest vote-getters, the voting carrying on until karate and squash got majorities.

The karate and squash ballots at the end, per the Olympic charter, required two-thirds approval of the assembly. Neither came close.

“The process is not so easy,” said IOC vice president Gunilla Lindberg of Sweden. “Perhaps we realize that now.”

Alain Danet, a longtime French sports official who since 2000 has been what the IOC calls an honor member, said, watching the voting unfold, speaking of Rogge, “It looks today as a difficult day for him.”

Nonetheless, Danet observed of Rogge, “He says, ‘No corruption.’ And he fights corruption. He is strong against doping. He said we should take a look at the program. We take a look at the program.”

At one point, Rogge called for a show of hands instead of the electronic ballot box the members had been using. The members hooted and booed, an act of defiance almost unheard of within the IOC.

“You should have been in the session in 1995 in Budapest when Samaranch wanted to extend the age limit,” to avoid mandatory retirement, Rogge recalled Saturday. “Compared to yesterday, that was a tornado.”

He said leadership means pushing in directions one believes in, but allowed at Saturday’s news conference, “I am not the final word in the IOC, definitely not.” In the same vein, he had closed the session a few minutes earlier by telling members, “We are a team and I a mere coordinator of a very good team.”

He also made plain that leadership sometimes means tough love, saying, “We try to have the best possible relationship with the United States, but I think the United States themselves ought to do some introspection.”

U.S. corporations, including NBC, which is paying more than $5 billion to televise the Games in the United States from 2000 through 2012, have long been the IOC’s financial underpinning.

But winning votes within the IOC was once again shown to be an American weakness.

On Wednesday, London won the 2012 race, defeating Paris in the final round. Madrid finished third, New York fourth. Moscow finished fifth.

Two days later, the IOC booted baseball and softball. Those two sports, as well as modern pentathlon, had been at risk since 2002, at a session in Mexico City; then the IOC opted to take no action against any of the three.

Rogge said at a news conference Saturday that baseball and softball should have “read the writing on the wall,” and done what it takes to convince members they were worthy of remaining on the program.

Gold medalists in baseball at the 2000 Games in Sydney, the U.S. team didn’t even qualify for the 2004 Athens Olympics. Why? Major leaguers don’t play in the Olympics, and Rogge said of the U.S. effort for 2004, “They did not field the best team.”

Those in the U.S. who would bemoan the loss of baseball in the Games ought to take a hard look at the television ratings, he said. The ratings for the 2000 Games baseball tournament, won by the Americans, were higher in Italy than in the United States, he said.

Doping issues that have swirled around Major League Baseball for the last two years have complicated the situation. But the essence, Rogge said, is that “as long as you don’t have the big players you will not be able to have any success.”

He added, “If we would have eliminated baseball with all the hotshots on board, then yes,” critics would have sounder reason to complain. “But that’s not the case.”

Softball’s problem, he said at the news conference, is that it lacks “universal appeal.”

Modern pentathlon survived Friday’s vote. How? There in the room on behalf of pentathlon were two influential members, Prince Albert of Monaco and Juan Antonio Samaranch Jr. of Spain, as well as the two top officers of the pentathlon federation.

Who was there from the United States on behalf of baseball? No one.

Who was there from the United States on behalf of softball? Just the federation president, Don Porter, and the secretary-general, Andy Loechner.

Traditionally, Americans have either not been willing to serve on the various committees and panels that serve as the feeders for influence within international sports, or -- because of chronic churn that until a couple years ago dogged the USOC -- they came and went, never staying long enough to develop the relationships that lead to voting alliances.

That has to change, U.S. IOC members acknowledged.

Jim Easton of Van Nuys, an IOC vice president, said, “We turn over so fast no one knows who’s there.”

Bob Ctvrtlik of Newport Beach added, “The Europeans are gang-tackling.”

Pal Schmitt of Hungary, a longtime IOC member, put it this way, referring to all the votes, the winners and the losers: “There is an American saying: In victory there is no argument. Being defeated there is no excuse.”