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New USOC boss gets less edgy about going public

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By Philip Hersh

We sat on the edge below a balustrade in the Empire Room at the Palmer House Hilton last Thursday. It wasn’t the most comfortable perch, but Stephanie Streeter is getting used to being in such positions.
It was my first face-to-face meeting with the acting CEO of the U.S. Olympic Committee, who moved into that position in what seemed like a palace coup to oust Jim Scherr. We had talked once by telephone, three days after the March 5 leadership change.
That interview had no introductory banter. I simply fired one hard question after another at her, and — no matter what I felt about her answers — she impressed me by not ducking a single one.
This time, we exchanged a few niceties before I heated up Streeter’s seat.
She had just taken part in the news conference announcing the start of voting for the U.S. Olympic Committee Hall of Fame class of 2009 and then done some interviews with local TV and print outlets.
This is the part of the job that Streeter has felt the least comfortable with. In her career as a corporate executive and CEO, the only people to whom she had to answer were corporate boards.
(Coincidentally — ironically? — the new USOC chairman, Larry Probst, also is adjusting to the idea of media visibility and public scrutiny after a life spent in the corporate world.)
Despite nearly five years on the USOC board, enough time for her to see how visible Scherr was in the media, Streeter did not understand the public scrutiny she would face as CEO of an organization that answers to America. That was clear when I asked her last week what had been most unexpected about the USOC job so far.
‘It’s the public nature of the position,’’ Streeter said. ‘I thought I had appreciated it, but not to the extent I experienced it when you guys beat the hell out of me in the first two weeks. I didn’t expect it. It wasn’t pretty.’’
Among the things I had hammered Streeter abiout was her apparent hesitation about resigning from the USOC board of directors, an unconscionable conflict of interest since that board would review her performance as CEO. Streeter told me Thursday that the issue would soon be resolved, and a day later the USOC announced her resignation from the board.
Truth be told, the board allowed Streeter to be criticized longer than necessary over the issue, because she resigned from two board committees after only two days on the job and offered her general resignation from the board barely a week after that. It should not have taken another month for that to be finalized and announced.
While Streeter told me Thursday that she had not yet made up her mind about whether to become a candidate for the permanent CEO job, she clearly is leaning that way with her decision to relocate from Neenah, Wis., to Colorado Springs, Colo., where the USOC is headquartered. The idea of having a commuter CEO, even an acting one, plainly was ridiculous.
The search for a new CEO will begin late this year, but Streeter will remain the boss at least through the 2010 Winter Olympics.
Which made it surprising that she was not part of the Chicago 2016 news conference following the International Olympic Committee’s evaluation commission visit, especially since both the USOC and Chicago 2016 seize every opportunity to trumpet the ‘unprecedented partnership’’ they have established between a U.S. bid city and its Olympic committee. (Probst had to leave because of a family issue.)
Streeter was aware her absence had been noticed but made no apologies for it.
‘I had supported it [the bid team] throughout the visit,’’ she said. ‘The people involved and the face of the bid were at the press conference, and I did not need to be there.
‘That’s what a good partner does. You are there when you need to be, and you are not when it is more important for someone else to be there.’’
I’m not going to beat you up on this one, Ms. Streeter, but I don’t agree. After years of leadership turmoil that had made the USOC into an international joke until Scherr’s respected five-year tenure, you needed to show your face, despite its being one that shies from the spotlight — or even photographers’ flashes.
It is, as you put it, the public nature of the position.

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