Jacques Rogge in charge
COPENHAGEN — When his obituary is written, and please allow me to assert at the outset and in all seriousness that the wish here is that it is a good many years from now, this is what it’s going to say:
“Jacques Rogge, the Belgian surgeon turned International Olympic Committee president who in 2008 presided over the Summer Olympics in Beijing and the next year saw his IOC opt to take the Games for the first time to Brazil …”
That’s the Rogge legacy, in its two parts:
– The IOC extending the power of the Olympic brand to emerging world powers in Asia and South America.
– And, as the vote Friday here in Copenhagen that awarded the 2016 Games to Rio de Janeiro made clear, it’s now emphatically his IOC.
The presentations Friday marked with apparent finality the end of the Samaranch years. Juan Antonio Samaranch, the IOC president from 1980 to 2001, is 89. He is still very much alive. But as Samaranch acknowledged from the lectern, his request that the delegates consider Madrid for 2016 – a considerable number of IOC delegates owe their membership to him – will all but surely be seen as the final time he exerts such influence.
Samaranch’s plea got Madrid into the final round.
Where Rio dominated, 66-32.
The way the IOC had signaled to the members would be the decisive way to go.
All of this offers considerable insight into the way the IOC works now even as it underscores, at the end of his first term on the job, how Rogge has become the boss — just as Samaranch was, albeit in a far different style.
In his first few years in the job, Rogge presided over an IOC that pulled in various directions. Now it moves the way he signals. It’s by no means a dictatorship; he promotes democratic debate. But Rogge stands firmly in the lead.
Rogge will be elected later this week to another four years in office. This next term will bring major issues to address, perhaps none more vexing than the IOC’s complex relationship with the U.S. Olympic Committee.
IOC frustration over various revenue-sharing disputes with the USOC, re-ignited this summer by the botched launch of a proposed USOC television network, produced the 2016 vote’s stunning surprise — Chicago’s first-round exit with but 18 votes. Tokyo, the other 2016 candidate, went out in the second round.
Now that the 2016 election is over, Rogge must finesse a significant test later this week, at the end of the IOC’s history-making assembly here — whether golf and rugby will be admitted to the 2016 program, or not.
The IOC’s policy-making executive board picked those two from among seven sports — baseball and softball did not make the cut — in August. Some members now say the session, as the all-delegates assembly of more than 100 is called in IOC jargon, ought to have the power to make such decisions, not the 15-member board; it remains unclear how such push-back against the board’s August action might play out.
If the membership declines to include golf and rugby, that will mark a setback indeed for the IOC president.
But that’s comparatively small stuff for the history books.
Because the election of Rio assures the Rogge legacy.
To be abundantly clear: Rogge does not vote in bid city elections. He did not formally exert influence over the 2016 race, or any other bid contest, since taking over from Samaranch eight years ago.
But the IOC had pointed, and with indisputable clarity to those in the know, members and others, to Rio as the preferred destination.
How?
In 2008, a preliminary 2016 report ranked Rio narrowly behind Doha, Qatar, site of the 2006 Asian Games. Doha, though, was cut from the race on the grounds that its proposed dates for the Summer Games, in October, wouldn’t work; Rio was passed through.
In that 2008 assessment, the IOC also noted significant concerns about crime in and around Rio, among other matters.
Contrast that with an IOC report produced after visits to the four cities this spring; it was made public Sept. 2. The IOC evaluation touched on concerns over crime, along with transport and hotel issues. But the report said Rio would be eminently capable of delivering the 2016 Games — just as Chicago, Madrid and Tokyo would be so capable.
That changed everything.
Why?
Because, as Sebastian Coe, the leader of London’s winning 2012 Summer Games bid, now overseeing the London 2012 organizing committee, has memorably said, there are only two questions that confront any Olympic bid: How, and why.
For most of the 2016 contest, Chicago, Madrid and Tokyo were simply offering how.
Rio was the sole entrant consistently and powerfully offering why, a first Games on the South American continent — and as of Sept. 2 the IOC was saying Rio had the how, too.
That came through extensive preparation for the IOC Rio visit, a series of exercises that might now offer assurance to skeptics wondering about Rio’s ability to exert the discipline that doubtlessly will be needed to deliver on the $11.1 billion capital investment program projected in its bid.
The Rio team was put through not one but two complete dress rehearsals, according to Michael Payne, a former IOC marketing director who served as strategic adviser to the campaign.
When the visit itself wrapped up, and Rio had clearly passed, it was no longer presumptuous to believe Rio could win. Indeed, by the time of the vote, according to a Rio calculation locked in a safe here and revealed Saturday, the day after the vote, Rio expected to meet and then defeat Madrid in the final round, and in that final round to rack up a commanding 68 votes.
Off by only two — at 66.
As for Chicago, some had suggested in the days before balloting that it could count on 30, maybe even more, votes in the first round, notorious for volatile balloting.
Moreover, Chicago seemingly had buzz in the lobby of the IOC hotel amid its late-arriving version of why — the notion that a Chicago Games would mark a renewed American reach-out to the world, a theme President Obama emphasized in his appearance Friday before the IOC, a first for a U.S. leader.
The Obama visit, for its part, underscored the complexities of Rogge’s job — and, perhaps, the limits of what an IOC president can effect.
By the time Obama announced he was coming to Copenhagen, it was more than apparent to Rio’s bid team, and thus to other IOC insiders, that Rio was likely to prevail.
Should Rogge tell the president of the United States not to bother? But would such a thing be presumptuous — after all, who tells the president of the United States, “No, don’t,” if he decides on a particular course of action?
That said, if Rogge knew the American president would be on hand, isn’t it incumbent on the IOC president to then ensure that Chicago wouldn’t be humbled with precisely the sort of first-round exit it ultimately endured?
Because now the tricky part for Rogge, and for the IOC, is that they don’t know what they don’t know about the American response to such humiliation.
No one knows.
Some first-round votes were cast for Tokyo to save face for the Japanese bid. Some went to Madrid after the Samaranch appeal. Some may have been cast in spite in response to security concerns relating to Obama’s visit; the wake-up call at the Marriott Friday morning came at 6, the IOC members due to report to a bus by 7:15, deemed too early by grumblers.
The IOC votes by secret ballot so the precise reasons, and the vote swings they yielded in the first round, may forever remain unknown. Clearly, though, the result was an embarrassment for the United States, for the president and, moreover, for a husband who flew overnight in part to support his wife, First Lady Michelle Obama. She undertook a leading role in the Chicago effort in Copenhagen.
Barack and Michelle Obama played it with class and grace upon their return Friday to Washington.
Uncertain is whether the president’s proxies, allies and supporters in Chicago and in Congress, will also play it with such style.
Unclear, too, is whether the first-round results will compel yet further regime change at the USOC – with a number of IOC members suggesting here Saturday in the wake of the 18-vote fiasco that of course Stephanie Streeter, the acting chief executive, and Larry Probst, the chairman of the USOC board, ought to proffer their resignations.
If the USOC wanted to play it smart, here’s the framework of an action plan:
Get ahead of Congress, which chartered the USOC in 1978 and maintains oversight over it, by commissioning a blue-ribbon panel. The agenda: Explain why New York’s 2005 bid for 2012 produced 19 first-round votes and then 16 and a second-round exit, and then Chicago’s 2009 bid yielded 18 and the boot in round one. Combined, the two bids cost roughly $100 million. Meanwhile, there are few if any Americans working their way up the ladders of international sports organizations, the relationship-building key to wielding influence later. Something’s clearly not working. What?
If and when Streeter or Probst leave of their own accord or are forced out, be ready to replace them – with people who come from a sports background and know how to move in international circles. The start of a list: Harvey Schiller, the international baseball federation president; Michael Lenard, a former USOC vice president who now helps administer an international sports tribunal; Bill Martin, who once served as interim USOC president and remains the University of Michigan athletic director; television executive Dennis Swanson; USA Gymnastics head Steve Penny; Doug Arnot, a senior Chicago 2016 bid official; businessman Larry Hough, a former USOC treasurer and Olympic medalist in rowing; USA Biathlon executive director Max Cobb.
And this: After this session in Copenhagen runs its course, senior USOC leadership — whoever they may be — ought to pay a visit to IOC headquarters in Lausanne, Switzerland, and approach Rogge with the following message:
“Mr. President, we recognize that we have some issues. Let’s work them out. Can you help us get there together?”
For starters, you know what that would acknowledge? The truth: Rogge is in charge.