The CEO tries to steer a contract to his brother’s company. He’s investigated–and cleared–by an ethics committee headed by someone with a previous professional connection to the CEO. Some board members resign in protest. Others blame the company president for leaking the ethics flap in an effort to force out the CEO. The infighting tarnishes the company’s reputation and threatens its future.
What a mess. American athletes, sports fans and supporters of the Olympic movement can only watch in disgust as the United States Olympic Committee implodes in feuding, conflicts of interest and petulant power struggles.
The job of the committee is to get the best American athletes to the Olympic games. Because of chronic mismanagement, that mission is being derailed. At least one major corporate donor–the chief source of funding for U.S. Olympians–is asking why it should lend its name to such an incompetent operation.
If all this were happening anywhere but the USOC, shareholders and regulators already would have risen up in arms. The turmoil prompted a Capitol Hill hearing Tuesday called by Senate Commerce Committee Chairman John McCain.
The USOC, of course, is not your ordinary company and this is not your ordinary corporate scandal. This scandal underscores a festering management crisis at the organization charged with fulfilling America’s Olympic hopes.
The 1978 Amateur Sports Act created the USOC as a non-profit company controlled by volunteers who set policy. A paid executive and staff raise money and run things. That’s unwieldy–the volunteer executive committee has 22 members, the board of directors 123 members–and guarantees continuing clashes between the volunteer president and the paid chief executive.
CEO Lloyd Ward precipitated the recent flap by trying to steer a lucrative Olympic-related contract to his brother’s company. The USOC’s ethics committee investigated and found–incredibly–that didn’t constitute a firing offense or call for any punishment at all. USOC’s president, volunteer Marty Mankamyer, is under fire because some board members accuse her of using the ethics flap to force out Ward.
If this were just a feud between Mankamyer and Ward, personnel changes could resolve it. But the USOC has run through a dozen CEOs in its quarter-century history. Ward is the fourth CEO and Mankamyer the third president just since 2000. The problem isn’t just the people, it’s the organization itself.
It’s time to dump this outmoded structure, which has become a breeding ground for dysfunction. It no longer suits an Olympic movement that has long since ceased to be purely amateur. The USOC is a $125-million-a-year business. It should be run like one. Congress created what has become this hydra-headed monster 25 years ago. Congress must fix it now before its turmoil does irreparable damage to the very athletes in whose name it exists.
