Samaranch remembered for helping Olympics grow

Most often, the Olympic community referred to the dapper little man who was International Olympic Committee president for 21 years as “your excellency” or “President Samaranch.”

Juan Antonio Samaranch wore slicked-back hair, impeccable business suits and an aristocratic mien. A former Spanish ambassador to Moscow, a former official under oppressive Spanish dictator Francisco Franco and a member of Franco’s fascist party, Samaranch appeared a stiff, bloodless executive, one of those weather-vane politicians going with the most beneficial winds.

Dick Pound, the veteran IOC member who served as Samaranch’s vice-president during the latter’s 1980-to-2000 reign and occasionally clashed with him, wryly offered that “sometimes,” Samaranch would allow himself to be addressed informally as “Juan Antonio.” Pound kidded, “It’s like Billy Bob.” Officials of the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics saw Samaranch, who died Wednesday at 89 in his native Barcelona, as “quiet and mousy” early in his tenure, and some within the Olympic family were struck by his apparent distance, often sitting in a remote corner of the room, eating alone at Olympic-related functions.

But, to the general observation that he appeared to lack a sense of humor, American IOC member Anita DeFrantz said, “Well, he elected me to the IOC.” As a woman and the first black American in an organization previously characterized by elitism, stuffiness and conservatism, DeFrantz embodied what Samaranch framed as a new Olympic direction: A hit TV show trading on the visibility of the superpowers while welcoming the Third World and other formerly disenfranchised regular folks.

However mysterious, even devious, Samaranch’s behind-the-scenes style could appear — only after he left the presidency did the IOC embark on a serious public-relations effort — the enormous power he wielded during his IOC reign ultimately solidified a legacy as possibly the most effective Olympic head since French baron Pierre de Coubertin, the man who created the Modern Games in 1896 and served as IOC chief for 29 years.

On Samaranch’s watch, women’s Olympic participation increased by almost 20 percent, Olympic policy-makers were convinced to accept professional athletes (most notably NBA players in 1992), post-apartheid South Africa was welcomed back into the Olympic movement and politically-inspired boycotts were ended. Over and over, he tamed, charmed or captured the great Olympic beasts that had threatened extinction through the 1970s and early ‘80s.

Though Pound, in his 2004 book, “Inside the Olympics,” wrote of Samaranch’s original reluctance to focus on an anti-doping effort, Samaranch declared himself on board after Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson failed a steroid test in 1988 and was stripped of his gold medal. “Out of this disaster will come glory,” Samaranch said. “It will demonstrate to the world where we stand on doping. It will demonstrate to the atheltes that the difference between cheating and detection will narrow very fast.” It took another decade for non-Olympic sports to attack the performance-enhancing drug menace.

Samaranch was selected to lead the IOC in the wake of devastating turmoil: Public riots and a backlash to the black-power demonstrations of U.S. athletes at the 1968 Mexico City Games, the terrorist massacre of 11 Israelis in Munich in 1972, a black African boycott and financial flop at the 1976 Montreal Olympics and a U.S. boycott of Moscow in 1980.

Yet he presided over astounding Olympic prosperity: Olympic television rights increased 500 percent and corporate sponsorship 600 percent, two facts that also fueled some of the harshest Samaranch critics. Britain’s Andrew Jennings, co-author of the 1992 book, “The Lord of the Rings,” argued that under Samaranch, “corruption became the lubrication of his Olympic industry” and he “fleeced sport of its moral and monetary value.”

Revelations of the vote-buying scandal that brought Salt Lake City the 2002 Winter Games badly stained Samaranch’s reputation, but he reacted with reforms for a more open and democractic process. Quietly but repeatedly, the debonair Spaniard — only 5-5 and one of the rare IOC members without a pedigree as an Olympic athlete — got results. He first maneuvered his way into sports prominence as a young man by writing a newspaper column on roller hockey under the pseudonym “Stick” and regularly quoting a previously unknown goalie named Juan Antonio Samaranch.

From there, he became a coach and federation chief of roller hockey — a sport that was briefly a candidate but never granted Olympic inclusion — and eventually a member of the IOC. In 1987, when his hometown of Barcelona was bidding to host the 1992 Olympics, Samaranch, as IOC president, had no vote in the decision, “but I assure you,” Pound said, “it was the loudest non-vote you can imagine.”

Barcelona won, of course.

More impressive, possibly, were Samaranch’s efforts to assure full participation at the 1988 Seoul Olympics, bringing together the world superpowers, the Soviet Union and United States, for the first Summer Games in 12 years following two government-engineered boycotts, an accomplishment cited by some historians as the first thaw in the Cold War.

Pound called Samaranch “a statesman, and very good at it. He made the IOC a political factor in its own right, to the point that it can now respond, sometimes in advance of events, to political changes.”

He successfully agitated to put the 2008 Olympics in the new economic and political frontier of Beijing, to have the Belgian surgeon — and former Olympic sailor — Jacques Rogge elected his successor as president, to get his son, Juan Antonio Jr., appointed to the IOC. Twice, he had the age limit changed to keep himself as the committee’s chief. In retirement, as the IOC’s president-emeritus, he continued to exert his influence, though last year, his plea to IOC members “to consider granting my country the honor and also the duty” to stage the 2016 Summer Olympics in Madrid failed.

Then again, the 2016 winner, Rio de Janeiro, will bring the Games to South America for the first time — which had been another goal of His Excellency. Good ol’ Billy Bob.