Samaranch, Juan Antonio

▪ 2000

      In 1999, after nearly two decades as president of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), Juan António Samaranch was faced with two major scandals: alleged corruption within the IOC and the rising use of performance-enhancing drugs by Olympic athletes. Since his election as IOC head in July 1980, Samaranch had proved to be a strong, resilient leader and a shrewd politician. As he moved the Olympic Games toward greater popularity, higher television ratings, and increased commercial earnings, however, his organization apparently stumbled over its own standards of sportsmanship and ethical conduct. In 1998 an Olympic-bidding scandal emerged in Salt Lake City, Utah, which led to investigations into the “selling” by IOC members of their votes for Olympic host cities. (See Sports and Games: Sidebar (An Olympic-Sized Scandal ).) Samaranch called for a formal inquiry into IOC vote buying and headed an international conference on drug abuse, but there were heightened calls for the president to pass the torch long before his term officially ended in 2001. He testified about the Salt Lake City scandal before the U.S. Congress in December.

      Samaranch, born on July 17, 1920, was the son of a wealthy textile manufacturer in Barcelona, Spain, and was educated at the city's Higher Institute of Business Studies. After the Spanish Civil War (1936–39), he joined the family business and later worked in real estate development and banking. He competed in boxing and roller hockey from an early age, and in 1951 he helped initiate an international roller hockey championship in Barcelona. He joined the Spanish Olympic Committee in 1954, the same year he was elected to the Barcelona city council. Elected to the IOC in 1966, he occupied a vice presidential post in 1974–78. Samaranch, who had been president of the Catalan regional council since 1973, was appointed Spain's ambassador to the Soviet Union in 1977 and served until 1980, the year in which he became IOC president.

      Advancing the policies of his IOC predecessor, Lord Killanin of Ireland, Samaranch aggressively diversified the IOC's revenue sources from television contracts to brand-licensing schemes. He also welcomed professional athletes to Olympic sports such as tennis and basketball, arguing that Soviet-bloc countries had been sending professionals to the Games for years and that some nonprofessional athletes in the U.S. and elsewhere already earned huge sums for commercial endorsements. An accomplished politician, he mended bridges between Soviet- and NATO-bloc countries following boycotts of the Moscow (1980) and Los Angeles (1984) Games, worked out a compromise that permitted both China and Taiwan to enter Olympic teams, allowed participation by a post-Soviet team in 1992, and opened the Olympic Museum in Lausanne, Switz., in 1993. His autocratic style of rule and apparent arrogance earned him many enemies, however, and writers such as the British journalists Andrew Jennings and Vyv Simson stoked the embers of Olympic criticism. Whether or not Samaranch was to blame for failing to police the IOC, he was certain to remain a controversial figure.

Stephen P. Davis

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