IOC President avoids the curly ones

By PETER CALDER

His title is president but he is fond, it is said, of being addressed as "your excellency," which befits his noble status as a marquis.

But he travels like an imperial majesty of fable. His home is a hotel suite in his Swiss base of Lausanne and he has the best suites wherever he goes. When he is in his native Barcelona, Spain's biggest savings bank, of which he is honorary chairman, picks up the tab for his luxury digs and fine dining.

It's not too much to call Juan Antonio Samaranch the emperor of the International Olympic Committee.

He is the man who has presided over the Olympic movement in the modern era, dragging it from the edge of penury into the modern multi-billion dollar extravaganza that is Sydney - plastered with logos, studded with sponsors, hog-tied by "official partner" arrangements.

But the persistent and pungent whiff of scandal still clings to the IOC's hand-tooled and highly polished shoes. Samaranch's stewardship has been dogged with stories that stink, most notably Salt Lake City's corruption-stained bid for the 2002 Winter Olympics.

And this year Samaranch none-too-subtly lobbied Indonesian President Abdurrahman Wahid to release the country's IOC member, Mohamad "Bob" Hasan, from custody so he could be here. Hasan is awaiting trial on charges of multi-million dollar fraud during the Suharto regime.

Any hope that we might get some answers to real questions from Samaranch at a press conference yesterday evaporated in the first few minutes. The conference - the only time, barring an unforeseen crisis, that Samaranch will take questions until the Games are over - was a study in the most courteous evasion.

In his trademark navy-blue suit and blue shirt Samaranch sported an expression of pained innocence, his jowly face as mournful as a beagle's. He looked like he was wondering why everybody was asking such hurtful questions - and he stepped out of their path with all the elegance of a Catalan toreador.

A Russian haltingly asked what the committee was doing to rid itself of corruption.

"What we are doing," Mr Samaranch answered smoothly, "is that when a member is not going the right way we will expel him from the IOC."

Asked what the "admirable personal qualities" of Hasan were which made him "the perfect fit inside your IOC" Samaranch leaned forward and read out a list of the sporting bodies Hasan had been president of. Next question.

Only the naive would have expected more. Samaranch was in the diplomatic corps for only three years, as Spain's ambassador to Moscow from 1977 to 1980. But if diplomacy consists in speaking a lot and saying nothing, it's plain he never left the job.

The 80-year-old Olympic supremo once enunciated for an interviewer in his native land his golden rules of diplomacy and they provide a telling insight into the way he shows the IOC's face to the world to this day.

"Know how to listen," he urged. "Never speak in a language not your own (an interpreter provides you with time to think). Convey credibility. Have a clear objective. And understand that you may not reach your aim in a straight line. So be ready, when necessary, to employ a few curves."

The dapper and elegant Samaranch was a junior minister in the Government of Spanish dictator General Francisco Franco and clearly has no regrets about that period of ascent.

"I am not ashamed of what I did," he told the New York Times last year. "Franco did good things for my country."

And as the president since 1980 of the IOC, the society that is the "supreme authority" of the Olympic Games, he has had scant exposure to the idea of public accountability.

He also once worked as a sportswriter using the nom-de-plume Stick. And it was obvious from his appearance before the assembled press in Sydney yesterday that he had learned from experts how to avoid what Mark Todd might call "a curly one."