Kevin Mitchell says Atlanta’s juggernaut has left the Olympic caravan in need of urgent repair for Sydney 2000 and finds a growing belief that it can only move ahead with confidence if Juan Antonio Samaranch is ousted
TO STUTTER and then triumph, as Michael Johnson did, surely defines the resilience and the brilliance of the human spirit. The question being asked as the cleaners moved in on emptied stadiums in Atlanta, however, was whether the Olympic movement can afford any more false starts.
Sydney in four years’ time will come under intense scrutiny. The Olympic movement, sooner or later, will have to make hard choices about the direction in which this caravan is rolling.
Representatives from Australia at this blighted tournament have gone home with a book full of problems — or challenges, as the Americans call them — to contemplate. There are legitimate concerns, security uppermost among them, along with the very scale of the Greatest Show On Earth. Containing commercialism within the parameters of an amateur ethic that died decades ago is another challenge — the challenge being to keep a straight face while bowing towards the TV moguls and corporate heavyweights.
We shall all walk away with widely divergent views. The general consensus is that Atlanta, like a gambler down to his last few chips, just about got away with it.
Some will remember Atlanta more fondly than others. The magnificent human train that is Johnson, who tripped a little then flew to a world record in the 200m, moves on in his golden slippers; Carl Lewis too, growing old disgracefully quick. After tragedy and the inevitable controversies, the friendly, bungling hosts of Georgia’s capital count the cost, in reputation and dollars, while dissident voices within the International Olympic Committee ponder a challenge to their aged president, Juan Antonio Samaranch, the man whose approval sealed Atlanta’s successful bid. There are unconvincing whispers of a coup.
More important than any grand issues, though, and ineluctably linked with them, was the death of an innocent woman, Alice Hawthorne.
Whatever clinical objectivity it takes to compartmentalise the anonymous killing of a 44-year- old mother in the supposed safety of the Centennial Olympic Park is not immediately apparent from this quarter, nor to her injured daughter. If the response to these outrages is measured in the scale of the killing, how many deaths would it take to cancel the Games? You can be sure such a calculation did not delay the organisers.
Were the founder of the modern Games, Baron de Coubertin, to appear among us now, he might have suggested a substantial pause, perhaps a cessation.
But, if proof were needed that the Olympic Games have outgrown their fanciful brief, it came in the practical, unavoidable decision to apportion a brief period of time to mourning, to instigate an investigation and to kick-start the juggernaut of Atlanta `96, as unstoppable in tragedy as in the television ratings.
The bomb went off at 1.35am. As daylight spread on the blood in Centennial Park, Monica Seles was preparing to beat Gabriela Sabatini on the tennis court and Donovan Bailey had geared himself up to demolish the 100m field at the Olympic Stadium a few miles south. The boxers boxed and the veteran American diver Mary Ellen Clark paused on the platform as 10 946 paying customers fell silent for Mrs Hawthorne before Clark carried on to bronze.
Saturday was also the day that Jonathan Edwards would believe in his legs and in God. The best in the world at the triple jump, he would falter, for silver only. Edwards’s seemingly ambivalent response bears closer examination.
Immediately after, Edwards queried how anyone could complain about relative failure on the very day that someone had died in such circumstances. Beforehand he had said: “We’ve come to jump in the Olympic Games, and nothing’s going to put us off that. Once we are on the track, we are thinking about one thing: trying to compete to the best of our ability.”
It is not so odd. At this level athletes are the product of their own intensity. For most, the journey is four years long. The prospect of wasting that investment, knowing the moment passes so quickly, is sufficient reminder of how fragile their finely-tuned skills can be to lift them to sometimes phenomenal heights. One distraction is regarded the same as another and is ignored with the same strength.
Later, however, the more measured view will prevail among those athletes best equipped to handle success and failure. Edwards is such an athlete. It is impossible, for instance, to imagine him reacting in the same churlish manner as Linford Christie after his disqualification from the 100m final. Or like a wearisome parade of beaten American boxers, whose capacity for complaining about decisions was unlimited and unedifying.
Amateur boxing has slipped quite a way since the days of Dick McTaggart. Snooker and darts are in the waiting room; boxing is not far from the wastepaper basket. Perhaps that is Great Britain’s hope, after another abysmal medal count: Stephen Hendry mounting the podium, followed by Jocky Wilson.
Nor should the weight of expectation weigh future Olympians down the way it always seems to do: sport should not be refined torture, although it ought to remain a test of character. Often it is the losers who are winners.
In Atlanta some handled defeat, or celebrated superiority, with the finesse of a club bouncer. Others were positively uplifting.
Devotees of freestyle wrestling were treated to the spectacle of the brothers Zhabrailov, Lucman (34) and Elmadi, four years younger, competing against each other for different countries — and walking away from the mat smiling. Nobody is quite sure how the loser, Lucman, came to be representing Moldova, and his brother Kazakhstan, but everyone warmed to the presence of Lucman in Elmadi’s corner in his failed bid for gold. It was the sort of cameo that typified the old spirit of the Olympics.
What more often represents the new face of this huge undertaking, though, is the experience of the defending super-heavyweight judo champion, David Khakhaleichvili of Georgia.
Without even a koka to his name, he was thrown out for going to the wrong place for his weigh-in. These Games started off in distressingly punitive mode.
And, for those who imagine the litany of complaints from Atlanta about the appalling transport arrangements were the mere whinging of journalists, seek out Canadian fencer James Ransom for an opinion. He was taken to so many wrong venues before arriving at the World Congress Centre that he took the platform for his epee with only minutes to spare — and lost.
If the Olympic movement is to go forward with any confidence from Atlanta, there are those who say it must be without the man who has done much to transform it from a financial liability into a vehicle for generating enormous wealth, His Excellency Juan Antonio Samaranch.
He turned 76 last month, but age has only enhanced his imperiousness and there is little sign that he will step aside quietly next year. If there is to be a challenge, it will come from one of two men.
The first is Primo Nebiolo, a rival with impeccable lobbying skills. An IOC member and president of the International Athletic Federation, he is three years younger than Samaranch and might have more ambition left than his Spanish colleague. He was portrayed in Sports Illustrated last week sitting alongside Fidel Castro and under the headline: “The dictator who runs track and field”. Therein are catalogued the dictator’s weaknesses, chief among them a lust for power.
It might be an easy transition. Last year Nebiolo, supported by Brazil’s Fifa president, Joao Havelange, and the Mexican media and sports magnate, Mario Vasquez Rana, had the IOC put the retiring age for the president up from 75 to 80. This would allow Samaranch to continue next year — as well as letting Nebiolo go for the job in 2001, when he will be 78.
The other contender is an altogether different player. Dick Pound, elected as an IOC vice-president last month by two votes ahead of a septuagenarian from India who has survived several heart bypass operations, was in the news for all the wrong reasons.
Walking across a street in downtown Atlanta against the lights late on Wednesday night, Pound and his wife Julie were reprimanded by a traffic policewoman. A slight altercation ensued. Mrs Pound, who was said to have been drinking, is alleged to have kneed the officer in the groin — and on Friday she was in court, charged with public order offences. While it is not the crime of the century, Pound’s political opponents within the IOC could seize on the incident if he chose to launch a campaign for Samaranch’s job next year.
That would be unfortunate. Pound, an IOC baby at 54, is a Montreal lawyer and former Olympian who talks sense and is widely respected among the silent army of IOC members who rarely speak out against Samaranch or Nebiolo.
Pound has served on many IOC sub-committees and has helped negotiate television rights since 1983. He has a supporter in the similarly youthful Australian IOC member, Kevan Gosper, although he too was only voted aboard last month by a couple of votes and does not have an established power base. An insider said Pound is unlikely to move as `he doesn’t have the numbers — the network of Samaranch and Nebiolo is too strong to break’.
When Nebiolo arrived here he was upset to find that Samaranch had commandeered the top floor of the designated IOC hotel, the Marriott. Nebiolo kept his relatively meagre accommodation there — and also booked a penthouse suite at the Hyatt. A man whose ego cannot be housed in a single hotel suite is a man to be watched.