Hula Sport Communications
26, Sep
2024
A.D. Frazier Was “Critical Leader” for Atlanta Olympics

By Ed Hula

A.D. Frazier is remembered as a tireless second-in-command  who “got the job done” for the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta.

 Frazier, 80, died Sept. 23 at home in Mountain Bluff, a small town in North Georgia. He was a native of North Carolina. Christened Adolphus Drury, he preferred to be known as A.D.

Frazier was tapped in 1991 to become Chief Operating Officer of the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games. He would become the right hand of CEO Billy Payne. For Frazier, who at the time was managing a $10 billion loan portfolio for a Chicago bank, the ACOG posting marked a return to Atlanta where he started his banking career in 1969.

When Jimmy Carter was elected U.S. President in 1976, Frazier organized the inauguration, delivering an event $1 million under budget. Frazier also helped organize the staff of the new president from Georgia. He went back to Atlanta before heading to Chicago. He was lured back to Atlanta by ACOG chief Billy Payne. Even though his salary of $300,000 a year was half what he made in Chicago, Frazier said there were other considerations to take into account.

“One of the reasons I came back was I felt like this was an opportunity for a lodestone moment in relations of blacks and whites in Atlanta, very much a kind of the civil rights movement where we as a city stood out, stood tall,” said Frazier during an interview last year for a documentary on the Atlanta Olympics The Games in Black & White.

Frazier faced big challenges as COO. With an immutable deadline and a finite budget with no public money to help underwrite expenses, Frazier spent many late nights and early mornings at his ACOG desk, a cot nearby for naps.

Richard Pound, now retired from the IOC, led the IOC Coordination Commission for the Atlanta Olympics and met with Frazier regularly.

“A.D. was absolutely critical in managing Atlanta to get ready. He was critical to the success of the Games,” Pound said this week.

“He was someone who could get the job done,” said Pound.

Charlie Battle, one of the original group of Atlantans who launched the bid for the Centennial Olympics, says Frazier made the Games possible.

“He was a remarkable guy. He had the job of making sure everything was on time and on budget,” said Battle. He called Frazier’s recall of facts “overwhelming”.

A devotee of radio broadcasting, Frazier told me that his pillow had a tiny speaker so he could listen to the news at 4am in bed without disturbing his wife.

That fondness for the medium led him to approve a deal with an Atlanta radio station to serve as the Official News and Information Station for the 1996 Games. He first pitched the idea to me, which was then passed along to management. The deal with ACOG and WGST was first – and only one — of its kind.

Frazier bought a chain of small radio stations in North Georgia in the years after the Games. Despite some initial success, the radio stations would one by one begin to fail, as was the case hundreds of other commercial radio stations across the U.S. Outside the radio business Frazier led a private equity firm.

He wrote some op-ed pieces for Atlanta newspapers in recent years about the magic the city captured in 1996.  Here’s part of what he wrote in a piece for the Atlanta Journal Constitution on the 25th anniversary of the Atlanta Games.

“Well, friends, it was indeed a great time in Atlanta’s history. We were center stage for the world. We were fearless, brave, visionary, unified and committed to an idea ‘rooted in goodness’. We were demonstrating to the world the greatness of our Southern hospitality. We put aside those things that divided us and focused — if just for a moment — on those things that made us one. Together.”

Frazier is survived by his wife Sha, two adult children and four grandchildren. No details yet on memorial services.

18, Sep
2024
One Candidate Has Early Edge for IOC President

By Ed Hula

The biggest-ever field to run for president of the IOC is a healthy sign. Seven members have put their names forward, despite the challenges and demands of the post. That’s two more candidates than 2013, the last time a new president was chosen. Thomas Bach, 70, will step down next June. In August he rejected a call to extend his term for four more years, in part because it would have meant tinkering with the charter that governs the IOC.

Each of the seven brings distinctive qualities suitable for the IOC job. But given the state of the world, some IOC rules and a bit of history, one candidate appears to have an edge.

First, the slate of contenders eager to succeed Bach:

Sebastian Coe, 67, Great Britain, president of World Athletics, Olympian.

Kirsty Coventry, 41, Zimbabwe Minister of Sport, IOC Executive Board member, Olympian

Johan Eliasch, 62, Great Britain, president of ski federation FIS.

Prince Feisal al Hussein, 60, president of the Jordan Olympic Committee, IOC Executive Board member.

David Lappartient, 51, president of cycling federation UCI.

Juan Antonio Samaranch Jr., 64, Spain, IOC vice president.

Morinari Watanabe, 65, Japan, president of FIG, the international gymnastics federation.

Four of the nominees are heads of international federations: Coe of World Athletics, Watanabe from gymnastics, Lappartient of cycling and Eliasch skiing.

Each one is handicapped by their status as IOC members linked to their federation. Lose that federation leadership and they no longer are qualified as IOC members.  Some finagling by the IOC Session to accommodate them might be possible, but who needs the complication?

Compounding that technicality, historically no IOC president has moved from an IF leadership to the IOC presidency.

Prince Feisal would be able to serve only eight years as president, given his mandate as an IOC member calls for retirement at age 70. For him to seek a final four-year term as IOC president would require a vote by the IOC Session to extend his membership.

If he is chosen as the next IOC president Samaranch would need an IOC vote in 2030 to extend his IOC term as he hits age 70 retirement that year. The term extension would enable him to continue to serve as president for four more years. Under IOC rules he would not be eligible to receive a second extension and thus unable to seek a final term of four years as president. Samaranch’s father was the last president to serve under IOC rules that had no term limits. The elder Samaranch served 21 years before stepping down in 2001, the year the 12-year term took effect.  

One candidate beats the rest of the field with regards both to age and potential conflicts with a federation leadership. Kirsty Coventry, the sports minister for Zimbabwe, will be 42 next year, which means she would be able to serve one eight-year and one four-year term and remain in office until 2037.

Kirsty Coventry speaks to the UN General Assembly in June.

Coventry is one of only two Olympians in the running. She has three gold medals in swimming; Coe won two golds in athletics. Coventry entered the IOC in 2013 as a member of the Athletes Commission. That included four years as chair (2018 to 2021) and a seat on the 15-member Executive Board. When she came off the Athletes Commission in 2021 she was named an individual member, able to serve until age 70. Last year Coventry returned to the EB for a four-year term. The only other EB member running for president is Samaranch.

To call Coventry Bach’s protégée would not be a stretch although he will not make any public comment in accordance with IOC rules. Coventry remains the youngest member of the EB. Nonetheless, Bach has handed her high profile assignments. She chairs the commissions overseeing the 2026 Youth Olympic Games in Dakar and the 2032 Olympics in Brisbane.

A graduate of Auburn University in the U.S., Coventry has applied her business studies as a member of the IOC Finance commission. She was Bach’s choice to address the United Nations General Assembly in June where she spoke about the IOC commitment to sustainability. Her appearance is believed to be the first for an IOC member who is not president.

So far in the era of presidential term limits the candidate said to be the favorite of the incumbent has coasted to an easy victory.

Jacques Rogge was the favorite of Samaranch senior in 2001.  Some 12 years later, Rogge gave his blessings to Bach. Now it’s Bach’s turn to have a say, however discrete, in who takes over from him next June.

There are some other firsts to recognize as possible during this election.  Watanabe and Feisal would be the first from Asia. Eliasch — elected in July at the Session in Paris — would be the first from winter sports and the shortest in IOC tenure.

Samaranch would be the only son of an IOC president to also hold that post. Coe, Eliasch and Lappartient would be the first federation leaders to captain the IOC.

Coventry stands apart from her competitors, all male. The fact that other female IOC members who are also well-suited to the job did not declare suggests an invisible hand at work to make Coventry’s candidacy unique.

Not that they will vote as a monolith, but 46 of the 111 members of the IOC are female. A number of those women hail from Africa and presumably are enthusiastic about naming the first IOC president from the continent. Coventry might accrue more support globally from other members of the IOC sisterhood who realize the opportunity they have to help install a fresh face after more than 125 years of male rule. Coventry is not the first woman to run for IOC president. That distinction goes to Anita Defrantz who was eliminated early in the 2001 election won by Rogge.

Candidates have yet to file the limited briefs permitted under campaign rules. Other than this scant information, media promotion is not allowed. Members will meet in January in Switzerland in camera to hear the proposals from the seven contenders. The election is in Greece in late March. Perhaps some of them may leave the race as one candidacy appears to become inevitable. Today that edge belongs to Kirsty Coventry.

13, Sep
2024
Diplomatic Experience Needed For New IOC President

By Ed Hula

The names of those IOC members hoping to succeed Thomas Bach as president will be revealed within days. Candidates nominate themselves in a letter to Bach due by September 15. The list of candidates will be released the next day. Bach steps down in June 2025, three months after the election in March. 

Bach put his mark on the IOC and Olympics during 12 years in office. His Olympic Agenda program of reform and change appears to have put the IOC on a pathway to sustainability. The Olympic brand is financially strong and valued at $11 billion. Where cities once feared to bid, more than a dozen cities are now in talks with the IOC about hosting future Games. Gender equality is the rule now for the Olympics. New sports have been added to the program, old ones updated. Recognizing the digital world of sport, an Olympic E game event is planned for 2026. Olympic cities have been selected through 2034.

Whoever succeeds Bach will benefit from his tidy housekeeping. That said, a messy challenge that will require world-class diplomacy also awaits the new president.

I’m talking about the rift between the IOC and Russia that cracked open following the 2014 Olympics in Sochi and widened into a chasm when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022.

Compounded by a massive doping scandal revealed in 2016 that led to sanctions against Russia, the Ukraine offensive led to Russian banishment from the Paris Olympics and likely to be treated the same way with Milan/Cortina in 2026. Depending on the outcome of the war Los Angeles 2028 could be a no for Russia, too.

A question facing the next IOC president is what happens if the hostilities linger?  Despite Russia’s doping issues, the country has been an important cog in the Olympic wheel, in both sport and politics. The Olympics are diminished without Russia. At the same time, for the IOC accepting a rogue member of the community of nations is untenable.  

Russia so far has not made headway in its threat to mount “Friendship Games” as a counter to the ban on competing in Olympic events. The event is aimed at attracting the BRIC nations and otherwise non-aligned nations. Initially planned in September, there’s no word from Moscow as to whether the project is still in the works.  The IOC would be happy if it’s not.

A more pleasing forecast would picture a truce between Ukraine and Russia. While there’s no guess when the war might end, common sense would say one day in the next few years it might.

When that happens, the next IOC president will have to guide the careful restoration of Russia to the Olympic Family. The matter of reconstruction and reparations for sport infrastructure in Ukraine will be on the table. Then there will be the negotiations needed to repatriate the Russian Olympic Committee should the ROC choose to rejoin. If the answer  is yes it will be up to the IOC president to take the lead to ensure Russian compliance with the World Anti-Doping code. The IOC president would be one of the key players restoring those relations.

The current 107 IOC members includes a handful with diplomatic experience. Let’s see who is ready and willing to take on the challenge of Russia.