Philip Hersh: IOC’s bright idea -- delay talks, hurt Chicago bid
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Denis Oswald, head of the IOC coordination commission for the London 2012 Olympics, and London 2012 Chief Executive Sebastian Coe in front of posters commemorating the two previous London Summer Games. Credit: International Olympic Committee
Yet another planned formal meeting between International Olympic Committee and U.S. Olympic Committee officials on the contentious revenue-sharing issue –- which had been scheduled for Monday in Denver –- was cancelled at the IOC’s instigation.
It is unclear when the next one will be.
But don’t be surprised if it does not occur before Oct. 2, when the IOC members choose the host city for the 2016 Olympics.
Why?
At some point in the last year, a light went on in some IOC members’ heads, and they realized the longer the revenue-sharing dispute continued, the longer it could be used to hurt Chicago’s Olympic bid.
Which members? Any with an animus toward the United States that grew during the presidency of George W. Bush or a desire to help one of the other bids since the IOC chose Chicago, Rio de Janeiro, Tokyo and Madrid as finalists nine months ago.
That could include one or more of the three members of the IOC committee presumably trying to negotiate a settlement –- Denis Oswald of Switzerland, Mario Vazquez Rana of Mexico and Gerhard Heiberg of Norway.
Or the hidden power with the hidden agenda, former IOC member Hein Verbruggen of the Netherlands.
Both Verbruggen and Oswald have used the word ‘immoral’ to describe the share of revenues the USOC receives in an open-ended deal first negotiated in 1985, with additions in 1988 and a renegotiation in 1996.
Verbruggen’s own morals were flexible enough for him to turn a blind eye to the widespread doping that escalated in cycling during his 14-year tenure as president of the International Cycling Federation. Yet he had the gall to toss out some more heated rhetoric Tuesday, when he called the USOC’s revenue share an ‘abuse.’’
Oswald, president of the Assn. of Summer Olympic Sports Federations and the International Rowing Federation, never has been a friend of the U.S. and maintains the Eurocentric view that has dominated the Olympic movement since its inception in 1894.
Vazquez Rana is a very clever manipulator of the Pan American Sports Organization, which he has ruled from time immemorial, to serve his own and Latin America’s interests.
Heiberg, who ran the 1994 Winter Olympics and is chair of the IOC marketing commission, is the most realistic and understated of the three.
It was he –- before the IOC negotiating committee was expanded to three -- who had at least one handshake agreement nearly three years ago with former USOC Chairman Peter Ueberroth that was rejected when it got back to IOC headquarters in Switzerland.
Lately, there have been more cancelled negotiation meetings than there have been meetings. There are supposed to be some informal discussions over the next few days in Denver, when the Olympic sports leaders are attending an international sports gathering called Sport Accord, but suffice it to say the chances of resolution are minimal.
No wonder Bob Ctvrtlik, the USOC international relations vice president, suggested to reporters in Denver on Tuesday that the USOC would not be forced into action.
‘We’re looking for a long-term solution that benefits all members of the Olympic movement,’ Ctvrtlik told me later Tuesday by telephone. ‘Something this serious demands reasoned, calm, non-emotional discussion, and not at a time when elections are hanging in the balance.’’
(Ctvrtlik was referring to ASOIF elections, in which Oswald was re-elected president Tuesday after a bizarre process that led International Handball Federation President Hassan Moustafa to withdraw his candidacy and complain about lack of transparency. Even with no opposition, Oswald got just 19 of 26 votes, with two opposed and five abstentions.)
Somewhere along the line, the IOC made it more difficult for the USOC to accept any deal when it added the concept of retroactive money to the negotiations.
The climate for negotiations didn’t get any better when the Oswald-led ASOIF got that body Tuesday to ask the IOC to express its intention to immediately end the current deals, which likely is not legally possible.
And not just going back a few years, either. The germane retroactive time frame here is decades.
Makes you wonder if someone in the IOC is smart enough to realize that the USOC will have little incentive, moral or pragmatic, to keep negotiating the revenue-sharing issue after Oct. 2, especially if the Chicago bid winds up in a defeat as humiliating as New York’s did in 2005.
Or if the IOC members have heard the sounds of ESPN loudly smacking its corporate lips at the thought of jumping into the Olympic TV marketplace dollars-first should Chicago get the 2016 Summer Games.
Don’t count on it. After all, this is the IOC, which lacked foresight or guts that might have helped bring more money from its global sponsors in the future by helping make them happier at the Beijing Olympics.
Instead, the IOC simply rolled over to Beijing Olympic organizers’ demands to close off the Olympic Green for nearly the entire Summer Games to all but ticket holders and accredited people. So all the money the sponsors spent to build pavilions on the Olympic Green –- and build their brand with the Chinese people –- essentially was wasted.
So where are we now?
1. With the IOC making unreasonable demands while failing to reveal –- as I pointed out in a blog item last week –- the other special revenue-sharing deals some 60 other National Olympic Committees have negotiated.
(Not only that, but the IOC refuses to clarify the untruths about the USOC numbers, which are public. The USOC winds up with about 11.5% of the U.S. television rights fees, for which the given number is 12.75. It gets no more than 16% of the global sponsorship fees, not the stated 20%.
(And the argument that the USOC should gladly accept a smaller share because U.S. companies no longer dominate the global sponsor list also is both specious and murky, since the percentage of value-in-kind rather than direct financial contribution is much higher among the non-U.S. based sponsors.)
2. With the USOC knowing that any decision to accept less money would likely lead aggrieved U.S. sports leaders and athletes eventually affected by diminished revenues to seek redress in Congress, which has oversight of the USOC.
(Even with more important economic matters on his plate, you can bet Sen. John McCain of Arizona would love to drag in the IOC leadership to more hearings, as he did after the bribes-for-host-city-votes scandal a decade ago.)
3. And with Chicago caught in the middle of an increasingly ugly, prolonged battle that its Olympic bid officials thought would have been solved long ago.
The continued lack of resolution should have been a sign.
-- Philip Hersh
