A Long and Winding Road ❖

A Long and Winding Road IOC/USOC Relations, Money, and the Amateur Sports Act Stephen R. Wenn* In November 1978, U.S. President Jimmy Carter signed Public Law 95-606, known as the Amateur Sports Act (ASA), into law. It represented the U.S. government’s legislative response to the findings of the President’s Commission of Olympic Sports struck by Car- ter’s predecessor, President Gerald Ford, in 1975. Declining U.S. international sport results in the Cold War era, the surging levels of success enjoyed by Soviet athletes, and others from behind the “Iron Curtain,” as well as a dismal outcome for the United States Olympic Committee (USOC) at the 1972 Munich Olympics where administrative bun- gles and disappointing athlete performances grabbed the headlines, pushed Ford, and eventually federal legislators, to intervene. The central purpose of the ASA was to streamline the administration of U.S. Olympic affairs, and place the USOC in a better position to administer U.S. interests as a means of effecting change to the Olympic results table (by country). Less well known, or reported, at the time, were clauses that strengthened and broadened the USOC’s exclusive rights to the use of the Olympic five- ring logo in U.S. territory. USOC officials had lobbied Congress in advance of the pas- sage of the ASA for enhanced legal protection for the USOC’s rights to the use of Olym- pic marks and emblems. It would be a number of years before USOC officials truly understood the revenue generating platform that it had also received through these changes to the ASA. In the 1980s, it employed the ASA as leverage to obtain significant shares of U.S. Olympic television revenue and money flowing from the fledgling TOP (The Olympic Program, now The Olympic Partners) global corporate sponsorship program. This paper charts the genesis of the ASA and the manner in which it steered IOC/ USOC relations concerning Olympic revenue during the IOC presidencies of Juan Antonio Samaranch (1980-2001) and Jacques Rogge (2001-2013), and demonstrates that the ASA served as a festering source of friction that damaged inter-organizational trust. Towards the close of Rogge’s presidency both sides took steps to address this issue, ultimately resulting in a means of distributing U.S. television and TOP funds acceptable to the USOC and IOC through 2040. ❖ Introduction In October 2014, Oslo’s withdrawal from the 2022 Olympic Winter Games bid competition prompted consternation and hand wringing in Lausanne, Switzer- land where IOC officials considered the troubling reality that only two cities * Stephen R. Wenn is with the Department of Kinesiology and Physical Education, Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, ON, Canada. Olympika XXIV (2015), 1-46 1 Wenn from the original slate of six finalists remained. Media commentary focused on a list of provocative IOC needs associated with hosting and how this might have contributed to Norwegians’ sense of unease with Oslo’s bid, the earlier decisions of Stockholm, Lviv, and Krakow to shelve their efforts, and that the two cities remaining, Almaty and Beijing, were located in countries (Kazakhstan and China) where public dissent is not prized. Cities believed the financial risk out- weighed the possible benefits. It was not a positive circumstance.1 In 2012, former United States Olympic Committee (USOC) President and the impresario of the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, Peter Ueberroth, issued a warning concerning the increasing financial burden tied to bidding for, and hosting, the Olympic Games. “I really hope the IOC can encourage future cities by making the requirements much simpler, by requiring less expenditure, and that the actual bid process is not so expensive,” observed Ueberroth, “it doesn’t serve anybody in the present world economy to have these Games costing the amounts they do.”2 The IOC, intoned Ueberroth, risked the less-than-robust bidding environment of the late 1970s when the intrusion of world geo-politics and the pall cast by Montreal’s massive post-Olympics debt, constrained bidding interest. Oslo’s 2014 decision, which mirrored those rendered in Stockholm, Krakow, and Lviv, confirmed Ueberroth’s prescience on this issue. Judith Grant Long, a University of Michigan scholar who explored the bur- geoning infrastructural demands on Olympic host cities, highlighted the “IOC’s interest in recalibrating the infrastructure required of host cities, since the viabil- ity of its mission, and its political power, is predicated on [a] strong candidate pool.”3 Jacques Rogge’s successor, IOC President Thomas Bach, was not tone deaf on this matter and understood the necessity of confronting challenges tied to the new bidding and hosting environments. Bach’s Olympic Agenda 2020 think tank exercise, and its resulting 20 + 20 recommendations, aimed, in part, at dealing with the host city conundrum. His determination fostered a number of policy decisions enacted at the IOC’s Extraordinary Session in December 2014, decisions that heralded greater succour to prospective host cities.4 The IOC also needed to make the bidding environment more welcoming to U.S. bid cities. The USOC (and U.S. cities) stood removed from the 2018, 2020, and 2022 bid processes in light of the embarrassing preliminary round defeats of New York (2012) and Chicago (2016), respectively, at IOC Sessions in 2005 and 2009. Tension between the IOC and the USOC over Olympic revenue distribution (that ensnared Chicago),5 sparked by the IOC’s European bloc’s frustration with the lack of progress in negotiations to alter the commer- cial revenue (television rights and global corporate sponsorship fees) distribution formula, and the continuing leverage afforded to the USOC by the Amateur Sports Act (ASA, 1978) in these discussions, explained the USOC’s reticence.6 In the waning months of Jacques Rogge’s presidency, Rogge, IOC negotiators, and their USOC counterparts (notably Executive Director Scott 2 A Long and Winding Road Blackmun and President Larry Probst) bridged this previously intractable divide on the USOC’s share of future Olympic dollars through 2040, and the USOC moved forward with prospective bid cities for 2024. By 2024, it will have been 28 years since the U.S. hosted an Olympic Summer Games. Boston, the candidate city that prevailed recently in the 2014 American domestic bid competition, offered the IOC an opportunity to return the Games to U.S. soil, always a fruitful terrain for revenue generation. The inside track was Boston’s, but a groundswell of local opposition to the bid presented tangible concerns for the Boston bidders, the USOC, and the IOC.7 Boston withdrew from the global competition. It was replaced by Los Angeles as the USOC-backed candidate city, after hurried discussions between Los Angeles officials and the USOC. Were the IOC to grant Los Angeles the right of hosting the 2024 Olym- pics, it would signal in the most powerful way that the two sides have realized that they really do need each other.8 The IOC, USOC, the Amateur Sports Act, and Money: A Brief Overview In the 1970s, the U.S. government sought to resolve administrative infighting involving the USOC, the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU), and the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) as a means of enhancing the perfor- mance levels of future U.S. Olympic teams. The increasing dominance of athletes on the international stage who hailed from behind the “Iron Curtain” concerned U.S. government officials who feared for its effect on “American prestige abroad.”9 It was thought that this bureaucratic squabbling compro- mised America’s ability to compete with its arch-rival in the global sporting arena, the Soviet Union. The ASA established a new structure for the USOC and elevated its autonomy in the management of U.S. participation in international amateur sport. It also provided the USOC an avenue for revenue generation by granting it exclusive use of Olympic marks and emblems in its domestic territory. However, years passed before the USOC realized that it possessed the combination to the vault of U.S. Olympic dollars. In 1985, the USOC secured 15% of TOP (The Olympic Program, now The Olympic Part- ners) global sponsor revenue in exchange for its consent for the inaugural set of multi-national companies to operationalize their TOP marketing platforms in the U.S.10 Later in the same year, emboldened by this financial windfall, the USOC demanded accommodation financially if television advertisers wished to continue the existing practice of employing the Olympic rings on U.S. Olympic telecasts.11 The IOC, faced with little legal recourse given that it had not previously obtained sufficient legal protection for Olympic marks and emblems, reached an accord with the USOC. The USOC, in asserting its rights 3 Wenn to permit U.S. Olympic broadcasters to sublicense the use of Olympic marks and emblems to those companies purchasing advertising time, extracted 10% of the value of future U.S. Olympic television contracts from the IOC.12 Soon thereafter, the USOC pressed for a greater share of TOP revenues and connived with federal politicians to further enhance its share of U.S-generated Olympic television revenue. Again, the USOC was accommodated. The IOC granted the USOC 18.5%, and later, 20% of TOP revenue, and 12.75% of future U.S. Olympic television contracts commencing in 2004 (Athens).13 The financial advantage enjoyed by the USOC over the world’s other National Olympic Committees (NOCs) pertaining to this revenue stream became an increasing source of irritation for many IOC members, especially those based in Europe. Juan Antonio Samaranch’s successor, Jacques Rogge, sought to amend the formula for distribution of Olympic revenue generated from TOP and the sale of U.S.

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