Rogge Weighs In on IOC Outlook

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia — Progress in preparations for the 2004 Athens Olympics is “heartening,” plans for the 2006 Winter Games in Turin, Italy, are “quiet and normal,” and the 2008 Beijing Olympics offer the “prospect of a superb Games,” International Olympic Committee President Jacques Rogge said Monday.

In what amounted to a presidential sketch of the state of the Olympic movement, Rogge, speaking at the end of a week of meetings with the IOC executive board and the 199-member Assn. of National Olympic Committee, also said that the IOC is embarking upon a “period of consolidation” after 20 years of expansion fueled by skyrocketing sponsorship deals and television contracts. The IOC’s financial situation is solid but, he said, needs to be “stabilized” in case of some unforeseen crisis.

Rogge also urged the U.S. Olympic Committee not to work in haste in selecting a replacement for former president Sandra Baldwin, who resigned Friday after discrepancies were revealed in her academic record in her self-supplied USOC biography. Now that the Salt Lake City Olympics--the last in the United States for at least 10 years--are over, he said, “There’s no call for having someone elected this evening.”

Rogge’s remarks indicated clearly that, after nearly a year in office, he is comfortably in charge of the IOC--in particular, easily conversant with virtually every facet of the Olympic movement--and that the IOC, for the first time in years, has the luxury of trying to set its agenda, rather than reacting to scandal or crisis. Having weathered the Salt Lake City corruption scandal, and put in place a 50-point package of reforms--a plan that will be fine-tuned at an all-delegates meeting in November in Mexico City--the IOC now looks ahead with television and sponsor deals locked into place for years to come, many through 2008. The IOC’s single-largest financial underwriter, NBC, is paying $3.5 billion for the U.S. rights to the Games from 2000 through 2008.

The 2010 Winter Games represent the next television deal to be negotiated. If economic indicators pick up, Rogge said, the IOC might elect to commence negotiations for those Games as soon as this winter. Vancouver, Canada, and Salzburg, Austria, are considered the leading candidates among eight applicants.

On the other hand, if such indicators remain sluggish, and the IOC has taken keen note of the recently declared bankruptcy of Swiss-based sports marketing agency ISL, the IOC might wait to negotiate until 2005 or even 2006, after the Turin Winter Olympics, he said. At any rate, having taken stock of the IOC’s locked-in financial position, the time has come, Rogge said, to consolidate the IOC’s considerable gains rather than pursue expansion. The Olympic movement is now a $1-billion-a-year enterprise; 20 years ago, before Peter Ueberroth and the 1984 Los Angeles Games showed the IOC how to capitalize on sponsor and TV dollars, its financial position was precarious.

Rogge did not spell out in detail the contours of such “consolidation.” But he said the course was set last summer, shortly after he was elected to an eight-year term, succeeding Juan Antonio Samaranch of Spain, adding, “We were comforted [by our decision] or in a way proven to be right with the [terrorist attacks of] 11 September, which of course posed a threat to sports organizations.

“We were very glad to have good Games,” in Salt Lake City, “but consider a situation where 11 September would have been 29 January, a week before the Olympic Games. I’m not quite sure we would have had Olympic Games.”

Noted Rogge: “We want to make sure we have a safe financial situation that could absorb either an organizational problem or an economic crisis.” A moment later, he added that the IOC also wants to “dampen the economic cycle that goes up and down and absorb a shock that I hope will never happen.”

Perhaps the most significant threat to the credibility of the movement remains athletes’ use of performance-enhancing substances. The executive board imposed sanctions here on two Austrian cross-country skiers, their coach and chiropractor for blood-doping offenses during the Salt Lake Games.

The coach, Walter Mayer, and chiropractor, Volker Muller, were declared ineligible for the Olympics through the 2010 Games. “The fight against doping is one of our priorities,” IOC Director General Francois Carrard said. “2010 is certainly severe, but it’s a strong message.”

The athletes, Marc Mayer and Achim Walker, were disqualified from the 2002 Games. The Austrian Olympic Committee was also issued a “strong” warning. The two Austrian athletes bring to seven the number of doping cases from the Salt Lake Games. In Olympic Winter Games from Chamonix in 1924 through Nagano in 1998, there were a total of five doping cases.

“Is that a sign of more doping?” Rogge said. “No. It’s a sign we’re testing more and better.”

Some 1,980 athletes were tested in Salt Lake City; only 600 were tested in Nagano.