Sports Factor - 13/07/01: The Samaranch Era

Radio National's The Sports Factor

with Amanda Smith
13/07/01

The Samaranch Era

Summary: Juan Antonio Samaranch steps down as President of the International Olympic Committee on Monday, the day before he turns 81. So, we offer two very different views on the man who's led the IOC for the past 21 years.

Official lecturer and historian for the IOC, JOHN LUCAS, says that Samaranch revitalised the Olympic Games, and saved the organisation from bankruptcy. Meanwhile, ANDREW JENNINGS, author of "The Great Olympic Swindle" and other critical books about the IOC, thinks Samaranch has done nothing to reform the organisation.

Plus, an economist's view on how to stamp out corruption in international cricket. STEFAN SZYMANSKI, from the Imperial College Management School at the University of London, says that top cricketers are seriously underpaid when compared to their peers in other sports. And he's come up with a radical solution to increase salaries and reduce the temptation to take bribes.

And, as South Sydney fans celebrate the re-instatement of their club into the National Rugby League, die-hard supporter MARK COURTNEY considers what the past 18 months have demonstrated, when it comes to ordinary fans taking on corporate might.
Details or Transcript:
Amanda Smith: On The Sports Factor today: the Samaranch years. Next Monday, Juan Antonio Samaranch retires from the International Olympic Committee, over which he’s presided for the last 21 years. We’ll look at his legacy, from two very different points of view.

THEME

Amanda Smith: Also coming up, an economist’s solution for how to get rid of corruption in international cricket. And, the football club that refused to die. With South Sydney back in the National Rugby League competition, we’ll review the supporter campaign that toppled the corporate plan.

First though, to the man who’s led the International Olympic Committee since 1980. Juan Antonio Samaranch is hanging on to his presidency till the last possible moment; he hands over the reins next Monday, just one day before he turns 81. (Because as per current IOC rules, he has to retire by 80).

Well, what sort of an influence has President Samaranch had on the IOC, on the Olympic Games, and on ‘Olympism’? And as the IOC’s seventh President, will he be remembered for reforming, or ruining, the Olympic movement?

John Lucas is an official historian of the International Olympic Committee. John was awarded the Olympic Order by the IOC in 1996; and he says Juan Antonio Samaranch modernised, revitalised, and saved, the Olympics.

John Lucas: When he became President, exactly 21 years ago, the International Olympic Committee was bereft of any funds whatsoever. They were bankrupt, which is not nice for a large world organisation. The monies that they had used up previously came from the pocketbooks of the very wealthy, Caucasian, male members of the IOC, without monies from any other source available in the world. Samaranch came into power and immediately saw what an American entrepreneur, Peter Ueberroth had accomplished in Los Angeles in the early ‘80s and through the 1984 Olympic Games. Clever Samaranch saw what Peter Ueberroth had done and he did it 100 times bigger and better in his 21 years in, if I may use the vulgar term, tapping eleven television corporations around the world, and more than 200 international cartel corporations. So that in that period of time Mr Samaranch and his people have earned, if that’s the right word, approximately ten billions of dollars.

Amanda Smith: Has that commercialisation, corporatisation of the Olympic Games through those kind of multinational sponsorships, has that been a good thing or a bad thing, in your view?

John Lucas: Large amounts of money in the hands of people are either good or bad, or mixes of both. And I can assure that is true with regard to the IOC. Let me say one good thing: one one-hundredth of that ten billion dollars was distributed to the 20 poorest countries on earth in order to allow that country and that country’s National Olympic Committee to send young men and women to the Olympic Games, free of charge. That’s wonderful, that’s called the Olympic Solidarity Fund. At the other end of the spectrum, with so much money especially in the 1990s, some members of the International Olympic Committee who are unsalaried, volunteers, began to take advantage of this extraordinary amount of money and travelled and lived like kings and princes.

Amanda Smith: Well surely the blame for that corruption being allowed to go on must be laid with the head of that committee, with Juan Antonio Samaranch?

John Lucas: Of course. For the great majority of those 21 years, in my opinion, Mr Samaranch did good. In the last couple of years, he allowed, he was not the fountain of this corruption, but he allowed it to take place. Much earlier, he brought in women to the Olympic movement; no woman had ever been an IOC member, prior to Mr Samaranch. He brought in cash flow; the IOC was bankrupt prior to that time, now they became wealthy. Thank you, Mr Samaranch.

Amanda Smith: Has Mr Samaranch enacted his role as President of the IOC in different terms to that of his predecessors, John, of Lord Killanin and Avery Brundage?

John Lucas: Yes. Mr Samaranch first and foremost, raised the flag of idealism. But he doesn’t dwell on it. The other six presidents, that is all that they ever talked about in the many years that they were in office. They hardly ever talked about anything else, and therefore the administration of the Olympic Games from 1896 until 1980, several lifetimes, was inept, administratively bankrupt, defunct. Mr Samaranch saw this immediately because he himself was a brilliant administrator, a diplomat etc. and owner of a major corporation, and he saw that all this idealism was mere words. Unless you could get an efficient ship of state, the efficient Olympic Committee, the Olympic family and the Olympic Games. So in summation, Samaranch recited the mantra of Olympic peace and solidarity as did the other presidents, but then very quickly he got to work with his briefcase and his 15-hour a day, seven day a week, 365 day a year job, to bring efficiency to the Olympic family, and also harmony to the Olympic family. So in that way he was aeons ahead, light years ahead of his six predecessors. Samaranch was the best.

Amanda Smith: John Lucas, speaking to me there from his home in Pennsylvania, USA. John is an official historian of the International Olympic Committee, and holds the Olympic Order, which he was awarded in 1996.

Well at the other end of the spectrum, Andrew Jennings was sued by the IOC in 1994 for libelling Juan Antonio Samaranch. Andrew’s a London-based journalist, and a long-time scrutiniser and critic of the IOC. His most recent of three books is called ‘The Great Olympic Swindle’. And as you might imagine, Andrew Jennings is pulling no punches when it comes to assessing the Samaranch years.

Andrew Jennings: Well thank goodness he will become history within a very short amount of time. What is disturbing and to me despairing, is the Samaranch legacy, this legacy of wall to wall doping in elite sport, a fear that we’re not going to be able to reverse that very, very sad dimension of modern sport, and the fact that Samaranch well, just conducted a process to deliver the Games to whatever city gets the 2008 Games. It’s not been a satisfactory process, it’s not been marked by morality, in fact it’s been marked by not enough transparency, and IOC says it’s moral most days of the year, and then runs away from moral decisions when it comes to talking about human rights.

Amanda Smith: But didn’t Mr Samaranch transform the Olympic Games, Andrew, from an event that was in the doldrums (in the ‘70s very few countries wanted to host an Olympic Games) into a prestigious and lucrative and popular event that everyone wants to host, and watch.

Andrew Jennings: Let’s look at the reality, let’s get away from the IOC spin doctors and mind benders and fibbers. The fact is, back in the 1970s the Montreal Olympics actually broke even. What went wrong in Montreal was that Mayor Jean Drapeau as well as constructing the Olympic facilities which they managed to pay for with receipts from the Games, went on to do a massive amount of infrastructure, and was left with debts that would last a long time. Have you ever heard of Homebush Park, the white elephant? So you know, this problem doesn’t go away, of deluded civic leaders who create all kinds of infrastructure and other construction around an Olympic Games, and after the Games have to admit to the local people that they have got financial problems after the Games. But in fact when Lord Killanin the previous IOC President left in 1980, to be replaced by Samaranch, he remarked and later remarked very tartly in his memoirs of this kind of garbage of the bankruptcy of the Games began to be put out by Samaranch’s place-men Killanin pointed out that he left the IOC in a healthy state, with a reasonable bank balance, and let’s not kid ourselves that Samaranch did something astonishing by selling TV rights. Any fool, any toddler could sell TV rights to the marvellous Olympic Games. So let’s not give him credit for something a bunch of salesmen did.

Amanda Smith: Well Andrew, when the excesses of the Salt Lake City bid were revealed in 1999, Samaranch became an advocate for reform. In your view, too little, too late?

Andrew Jennings: Well he didn’t become an advocate for reform. I don’t accept that. Samaranch didn’t want reform, he fought reform from the very moment he took over the IOC, he fought it and he won it, and they didn’t reform. What they went through was a very expensive rearguard action, which cost them something like $3-million which might have gone to sport, which was spent with the New York PR agency Hill & Knowlton, in order to try and polish and spin an image of an IOC shocked to discover that some of its members were corrupt, and determined to reform. Well Amanda, any of us who’ve looked at the Olympics over the last 20 years have known about the endemic corruption in the bidding process. You knew about it, we all knew about it, it was a taboo subject because cities were frightened of the power of the IOC in awarding Games. So Samaranch was no convert to reform, and they didn’t reform.

Amanda Smith: Has, in your view, Juan Antonio Samaranch done anything good during his 21 years as IOC President?

Andrew Jennings: I think it’s a very sad thing that he hasn’t done anything good at all. By turning his back on positive drug tests; and let’s remember, his administration covered up positive tests, and the scientists admitted this when questioned by British and American journalists, covered up positive tests in Los Angeles, as the commercialisation was taking off. What you have to understand is this basic mistake people make. They think Samaranch is another human being like the rest of us, the point is he came out of, he was moulded by, the victim, if you want to be kind, of the fascist dictatorship that he grew up in in Spain, and he came to believe that was right. Trickle-down power was better than power from grassroots, democracy as we know it. He’s Alien Planet Zog in terms of the social and moral values of a society, and so he never was going to be able to do anything than ruin it.

Amanda Smith: Well is the IOC redeemable in your estimation, post-Samaranch?

Andrew Jennings: No. This is the point about the IOC, this smug, inward-looking group of just over 100 mostly old men, almost female-free, because there’s only about a dozen of them there now, isn’t there? And to be made up of people who do not believe in accountability, democracy or transparency. You have to close them down. They will get a new President from their current ranks who believes in all the things Samaranch believed in, which is covering up corruption, but corruption is the lubricant of the IOC.

Amanda Smith: From London, Andrew Jennings, the International Olympic Committee’s most enthusiastic critic. Andrew is the author of ‘The New Lords of the Rings’, and ‘The Great Olympic Swindle’.

Well as corruption has been a much debated issue in the administration of the Olympics, it’s also been a much debated issue in the playing of international cricket. Now throwing a game is generally regarded as a collapse of ethics. But a London-based economist has looked at this problem another way. With two colleagues, Stefan Szymanski has applied a business and economic focus, and come up with a plan for how international cricket might rid itself of bribery and match-fixing. According to Stefan Szymanski, there’s a key factor to be addressed in the matter of corruption in cricket.

Stefan Szymanski: Well, when we looked at this problem, the thing that struck us more than anything was that Hansie Crojne for example, the South African Captain, was accepting a bribe of only $10,000 to throw a match. So basically he threw away a career for what any other major sportsman in any other major sport would seem like a trivial sum of money. If you try to imagine for example, a top soccer star in Europe or a baseball or basketball star in the United States, they wouldn’t dream of accepting such a tiny bribe in order to throw a match.

Amanda Smith: Can you give us a sense of how what cricketers earn does compare to other big international sports?

Stefan Szymanski: Well if you were to take, say, a top premier league star in English soccer, they would be earning anything between 2-million pounds and 5-million pounds a year, that’s between $AU6-million and $AU15-million. And in baseball, in the United States, you would expect to see the top stars on contracts of maybe $US10-million a year, perhaps more. Whereas in cricket the retainer for 1999 for English cricketers playing Test matches was 10-thousand pounds, in Australia even though the top cricketers are paid a bit more, the contracts for the Australian players is still probably only in the region of $AU250,000. So significantly smaller sums are being paid to the top cricketers. And that goes not just in terms of the absolute money that’s being paid to them, but in terms of the share of the total money generated from the sport.

In soccer or baseball or basketball the players get somewhere between 50% and 60% of the total revenue generated by the sport. But in cricket, it looks as if the players are getting no more than 10% to 20% of the total amount of money being brought in.

Amanda Smith: So why does cricket pay its international players so much less than other sports, and this lower percentage of total revenue?

Stefan Szymanski: The real reason behind this low share for the players is that the cricket boards of each of the major countries, have to use the money that they generate from Test matches, to subsidise the lower level of the game. You have to have a lower tier of the sport in order to generate the Test match stars, but nobody goes to watch those games. They have almost no audience, so they can’t pay for themselves.

Amanda Smith: So what’s your solution?

Stefan Szymanski: Well of course one thing you could do would be just to abolish the lower tier of cricket, and give all the Test match money to the players, but we think that’s a very bad solution because you still need a breeding ground for the players and it’s important that there’s some way of training them up. So our solution is to look for a new form of competition, and what we suggest is an international club competition to set alongside Test match cricket.

Amanda Smith: So would this be to create a kind of annual tournament out of the winners of the various domestic competitions around the world, the English County champions, the winners of the Australian competition formerly known as the Sheffield Shield, in India the Ranji Cup?

Stefan Szymanski: Well we don’t think that that would work as a system, because the key thing about an exciting competition is to bring together the top players. What’s really great about Test match cricket is that it brings together the top stars head to head on a regular basis, and you need to mimic that. So we’re talking about the completely new set of clubs which would be created, and that would not only create an exciting new form of competition, an international club competition, but it would also bid up the salaries of the players.

Amanda Smith: The players, would they be based nationally?

Stefan Szymanski: The key thing about our proposal is that the way the players’ salaries will get bid up has to come through competition in the market. The problem at the moment with players’ salaries and their other weakness is, that if you’re an Australian and you’re not happy with the salary being offered by the Australian Cricket Board, you’ve nowhere else to go, you can’t suddenly become an Englishman, although we English would rather like that right now! So what we’re suggesting with our club competition is that the teams should be based in the large cities, but that each team should be required to higher a minimum proportion of foreigners. So you couldn’t fill a Sydney team just with Australians, you’d have to hire West Indians, New Zealanders, Indians, South Africans and so on as well. And that process of filling up the roster with foreign players would also lead to a process of competition for the top stars, and that will bid up their salaries.

Amanda Smith: And how would this kind of world cricket league be played, in the one-day format, or the long version of the game?

Stefan Szymanski: I think it’s going to have to be a one-day format, because you need to have a certain razzamataz, you need to draw in the crowds, you need to generate income from this.

Amanda Smith: Well Stefan, one of the other possible reasons for corruption that was cited in the Condon Report is that there’s too much international cricket played nowadays, and too many one-day games that don’t really amount to much or mean very much to the players. Isn’t your plan just going to exacerbate that problem?

Stefan Szymanski: Well I think one of the key points about our proposal is that we think this should really be run by the International Cricket Council, and it really should be seen as a way of the central governing body controlling the sport and improving its image. And we’re suggesting that they should substitute this club competition for a lot of the meaningless one-day matches, because that’s really been the problem, that these meaningless one-day games, the players don’t care, and so there again, they’re susceptible to corruption on these issues. If there’s an international club competition that they’re participating in that’s really valuable to them and they really want to win the tournament, they’ll be less tempted to engage in those kinds of shenanigans and as a result we’ll see less corruption and a stronger game, focused on a specific strong competition.

Amanda Smith: I guess I have to get my head around the fact that you’ve come up with a kind of economic solution to stamp out corruption in cricket, which is essentially a problem that I see as a moral one. So to me, your plan rewards players for their dishonesty.

Stefan Szymanski: Well clearly corruption is becoming this huge problem in cricket, and the idea that somehow it’s just because cricketers are bad people seems to make no real sense, they’re no more susceptible to this than would be soccer players or basketball players. The key fact to keep in mind is that it’s impossible to imagine a Michael Jordan or a David Beckham ever accepting the kind of bribes that Hansie Cronje and other players have been accepting, because simply it’s just not worth it to them, they’re paid so much money.

Now we don’t think this is going to suddenly turn all the players into saints, and there still will be some bad apples, and maybe some people will try to throw games and have bribery, as does happen in all sports. But it’s much easier to spot those players when there’s really something substantial at stake, and the majority of players see that it’s in their interest to stay honest and play an honest game, and earn a large salary for doing so.

Amanda Smith: Stefan Szymanski, who’s from Imperial College Management School at the University of London. And Stefan’s currently in Australia, speaking today on the economics of sport at an industry economics conference in Melbourne.

Now last Friday turned out to be a very good day for fans of the South Sydney Rugby League Club. That’s then the Federal Court ruled, on appeal, that the National Rugby League had acted illegally when it excluded South Sydney from the competition, back in October 1999. So now, the Rabbitohs will take to the field again next season, after a long and determined campaign waged by the club and its supporters. One of those supporters is Mark Courtney, author of ‘Moving the Goalposts’, his account of the struggle to save the team. A struggle that Mark says inspired great displays of effort and generosity on the part of ordinary people.

Mark Courtney: There were some amazing things happen. Ethnic communities for example, a few Greek guys decided that they wanted to do something; they organised a fund raising dinner, they publicised it in the Greek press and on community and ethnic radio stations, and raised $60,000 on the night for the club. The Lebanese community did a similar thing, they raised $55,00 or $60,000 as well from one night. And this was just not organised by the club but through a group of people who just decided they wanted to do something. Small country towns organised lots of events. There was a fund raising night in Scone, there was one in Bathurst, one in Merimbula, they were all dotted around the State where on a Saturday night the town itself and the neighbouring community, all the local towns, all the supporters of Souths, and they’re all around the place, plus supporters of the campaign, would gather, they’d have an auction, there’d be some Souths personalities who’d go down there. Some of them raised $8,000, some raised $20,000, just people wanting to contribute what they could. I think probably my favourite story about the whole thing is the family who had basically been saving for months and months and months to buy some new curtains for their family home, and they decided that the curtains could wait, but Souths couldn’t, and they sent the $5,000 cheque that they were going to buy the curtains with off to the club to be fully donated to the campaign.

Amanda Smith: Do you think that this sustained effort on the part of the club and supporters, to refuse to accept expulsion from the League, do you think that kind of tenacity surprised the National Rugby League and News Limited, that their assessment was probably that after you’d all jumped up and down and made a bit of noise for a little while, you’d go away and find something else to do?

Mark Courtney: I think that was the underlying assumption behind the business plan that they came up with. And let’s face it, it was a business plan that wanted 14 teams and wanted them geographically spread around the country, and from a pure Pay television business plan perspective, it’s probably a valid thing to do. But the underlying emotion which is what you’re talking about, was what they probably didn’t factor in to that. And a lot of the value in Rugby League, the inherent value is in branding and the tribalism of the supporters. And the two most probably well known brands, or three well known brands in Rugby League would have been the South Sydney Rabbitohs, the St George Dragon and the Balmain Tiger. And to just sort of cut those away out of the game, my belief is that they discounted things, probably because they didn’t understand the emotion and the tribalism and the culture that goes underneath that. And I’m sure they were surprised, I’m sure that over and over again they probably thought, Well, it’s got to be the end this time. And after the court case decision in November last year, there was certainly a real feeling of despair amongst the campaign. But Souths rallied, they had the march in the street a week later, 80,000 people turned up and I’m sure that the people at News Limited and the NRL thought God, when are these people going to give it away?

Amanda Smith: Well for you, does this experience with saving your Rugby League team have wider implications and resonances? I guess about the little people standing up to the big people.

Mark Courtney: Yes, I think that’s true. The cause has been thought about in those terms for a long time. We’ve seen a lot of things like bank closures in country towns and large corporations making corporate decisions which probably as noted before, look OK on a business plan but they do in fact affect people’s lives, and people always have tended to feel certainly more and more over the last 10 or 15 years, I think powerless to stop this juggernaut of rationalisation and globalisation and all of these terms that talk about the way the world seems to be going. And you really do at times feel completely powerless to do things about this, but this particular case, people felt incredibly empowered, I think because it was so deep within them, and it had links back with their families over three or four generations. And I talked to people who said it was like their father’s grave being opened, and their father’s body being tipped onto the rubbish heap because their father had been a South Sydney supporter, and their family before that for three generations had been South Sydney supporters. And it cut extremely deep to people’s emotions, and I think that was one of the things that made this fight successful. But having said that, any fight where people are prepared to not give up and just prepared to keep going and keep finding ways of getting media attention and keep finding ways of raising more money, can be successful. I wrote something the other day and sent it out to a whole heap of people on email saying ‘I hope that all of you who’ve had any part to play in this, if ever it happens again in your life, that you get something stolen from you that you thought was yours and that you valued, that you remember this and use it as a rallying point to stand your ground and stand firm’, and I think that’s really true, people do have to stand firm against these things, because if they don’t then the juggernaut rolls on.

Amanda Smith: Looking forward to the opening round of the 2002 National Rugby League season, Mark?

Mark Courtney: Oh it’s going to be an amazing day. I think it’s just going to be the most incredible day. Everyone will be there. The interesting part really from my perspective will be what happens in Round 14, when it’s in August and it’s cold and Souths may be in the middle of the table, or not going so well, that’ll be the really interesting thing. But certainly the first day will be more than a football game, it’ll be an amazing event. And I think the NRL has realised now that the game is in trouble and this is a real way of saving it. I don’t know whether the game will be saved, but this is a real chance to save the game, and they’re going to use it to every degree, and so they should, because this is what we’ve been on about for the whole time you know, that the tribalism and the traditional values and all of those things that now were previously embodied in a number of teams, a lot of those teams have gone or merged now. South Sydney now embodies physically and tangibly, all of those values and all of that tradition, and the team is there. And heaps of people are going to get on board and everyone’s going to have a soft spot for Souths now. It’s just going to be an extraordinary event, the first game. I just hope I can manage to get a ticket for it.

Amanda Smith: Which is probably not such a bad thing to be worrying about, compared to what might have been.

That was Mark Courtney, long-time supporter of the South Sydney Rugby League Club, and author of ‘Moving the Goalpasts’, a fan’s memoir of a club that’s taken a pretty remarkable journey over the last two years.

And that brings us to the end of The Sports Factor, produced this week by Carey Dell. I’m Amanda Smith.

Guests on this program:

John Lucas
Official lecturer and historian for the International Olympic Committee.

Andrew Jennings
Author of "The Great Olympic Swindle"

Stefan Szymanski
Economist from the Imperial College Management School at the University of London.

Mark Courtney
Author of "Moving the Goal Posts".