For two decades, Juan Antonio Samaranch was the strongman of the International Olympic Committee.Bob Martin
His, not Pierre de Coubertin's, was the true face of the modern Olympic Games, an old, unrepentant Spanish fascist who understood the art of consolidating power behind closed doors, who didn't see what he didn't want to see, and who had a remarkable gift for making a buck.
By the time Juan Antonio Samaranch completed his two decades as the unchallenged strongman of the Olympic "movement" in 2001, de Coubertin's quaint 19th-century ideals of pure amateurism, the transcendent value of competitive effort and the improvement of the whole person through sport had long been swamped by millionaire professional "dream teams," performance-enhancing drug and bribery scandals, and vast television and sponsorship riches, transforming the five rings into one of the most powerful brands on Earth.
Samaranch, the architect or facilitator of much of that, exited this mortal coil yesterday at age 89, and outside of the posh International Olympic Committee's headquarters on the shores of Lake Geneva, few will be able to follow the golden rule that it is best not to speak ill of the dead.
It wasn't just those old photographs that turned up, in which he could be seen enthusiastically offering the right-hand salute as a trusted lieutenant of the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco.
During his two decades as the unchallenged strongman of the IOC, Samaranch presided over and fostered - or, alternately, remained willfully oblivious to - a widespread, deeply-seeded culture of corruption, just as his most persistent critic, the English journalist Andrew Jennings, had long alleged. (For his troubles, Jennings at one point spent five days in a Lausanne jail for the crime of reporting - accurately - on Samaranch's fascist roots.)
For individual IOC members (sports bureaucrats, former athletes, minor European royalty and the like, unelected and unaccountable, while claiming the trappings of something akin to a world sports government), the bidding process through which the Summer and Winter Games were awarded became an opportunity to partake in a veritable smorgasbord of luxe travel, lavish hospitality and outright bribes, from plain old cash, to plastic surgery, to university tuition for their children, to hookers.
What had been a dirty little secret - though those who presided over Toronto's failed bids for the 1996 and 2008 Olympics certainly understood the game - was revealed to all when rogue IOC member Marc Hodler blew the whistle. A scandal erupted around the awarding of the games to Salt Lake City, finally forcing the resignation of ten IOC members in 1999, and it seemed for a moment that Samaranch's grip on power might be loosening.
But his mastery of the IOC's backroom politics, operating in an environment just slightly more transparent than the Vatican, was decisive in the end. When he asked for a show of confidence in the wake of the scandal, the IOC members (many of whom owed their place on the committee to Samaranch) voted 86-2 in support. He stayed on until voluntarily handing over the reins to his preferred successor, the reformist Jacques Rogge in 2001.
Even while scandals were raging, Samaranch did his best to represent the IOC as a global moral authority, advocating, for instance, that an Olympic truce be observed in all warring regions of the world while the Games were ongoing. But Samaranch was selective in playing the statesman. He stubbornly refused, for instance, to publicly acknowledge the eleven Israeli athletes and officials who were murdered at the 1972 Games in Munich, protesting that it would sully the pristine Olympic world with politics, before finally bowing to public pressure from their families in 2004.
The IOC during Samaranch's tenure also had to deal for the first time with the realities of systemic doping of athletes, most notably when 100-metre gold medalist Ben Johnson tested positive for steroids in 1988, and the practices of the former East Germany were revealed through a government inquiry. Critics would suggest that his IOC seemed strangely blind to mass cheating by high-profile Olympic stars. Conspiracy theorists would suggest much more than that.
According to longtime IOC vice-president Dick Pound, who went on to head the World Anti-Doping Agency, Samaranch just wasn't all that concerned about the subject. At one point, at a time when suspicions were running high, he went out on a limb and proclaimed China's athletes "very clean" immediately in advance of a series of positive tests.
Through it all, the Olympic brand that Samaranch did so much to build (with the notable help of Pound, who deftly handled the television rights and sponsor negotiations) remained remarkably resilient. Corporations and viewers were wooed back every two years by the Games' pomp and ceremony and iconography (much of which owed more to the Nazi Games of 1936 than it did to the Ancient Greeks), by the power of nationalist/tribal emotions, by the fresh-faced athletes, most of the them competing all but exclusively for the love of sport and country - standing in stark contrast to those in professional team sports.
Samaranch had inherited a faltering, nearly broke sports entertainment business when he succeeded Lord Killanin as IOC president in 1980. It had been riven by a series of geopolitically motivated boycotts - first the African nations walking out of Montreal in 1976, then the Western boycott of the Moscow Games of 1980, followed by the Soviet bloc's refusal to participate in the Los Angeles Olympics of 1984, and Cuba's absence from the Seoul Olympics in 1988 - and crippled by the skyrocketing costs of staging the Games. The 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal were a sinkhole of historic proportions, and the 1976 Winter Games, after first being awarded to Denver, were rejected by the voters in that city, and had to be hastily relocated to a previous host, Innsbruck. If countries became leery of the costs of staging the Games, if the political/propaganda gains were outweighed by the financial risks, the entire enterprise might collapse.
The successful and profitable 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles (despite the boycott) did much to alter the belief that the Games, as constituted, were unsustainable. In fact, under Samaranch, the number of events and the number of participating nations grew dramatically, along with the perceived value of staging the Olympics. By the time of his retirement (he was given the title of "honorary life president" by the IOC), cities were spending millions upon millions of dollars simply to compete for the chance to hold the Games - hence the opportunities for corruption - and television networks and sponsors were lining up for the chance to get a piece of the action.
Since taking over as IOC president, Rogge has done much to repudiate the worst excesses of the Samaranch era, eliminating more opportunities for corruption, achieving a greater degree of transparency, putting teeth into anti-doping efforts and toning down the trappings of imperial presidency. He has none of the embarrassing personal baggage, and is untainted by the scandals of the past.
But the movement he inherited, the sports/entertainment business he inherited, the grand show that moved Canadians to tears of patriotic joy in February - and that even in the teeth of an economic crisis generated enormous amounts of revenue - in every significant way bears the stamp of he who came before.
Samaranch departs, perhaps largely unloved outside of the IOC inner circle, but also unforgotten. He was the great Olympian of his age, for better and for worse.