Following threats by the International Olympic Committee to remove triathlon from the Olympic Summer Games if the sport’s infighting doesn’t stop, Les McDonald, head of the International Triathlon Union is planning a trip to the International Olympic Committee headquarters in Lausanne Switzerland.
McDonald, ITU president since 1989 and the man at the centre of the turmoil, said, “ten of us are going to Lausanne to tell Mr. Felli the strife is mainly over”.
Several national triathlon heads have a campaign to oust McDonald, alleging he runs the sport autocratically. McDonald feels he birthed the ITU and sees a European and Latin American faction trying to take triathlon’s headquarters away from the sport’s North American roots.
“It sound good to say ‘we’ll kill all of the corruption and all’. Part of (Rogge’s) rationale is to show (the Olympics) are cleaner than clean now and kick triathlon out of the program”, he said. “It’s easy to knock us out. We are a young sport and we don’t have any prime ministers or kings or queens on our executive board.
“But we need to stay in the Olympic program for the sake of the athletes and I will take 10 of our people to Lausanne and tell him we’ve pretty much cleaned up in-house. As for corruption in a sport, look for what percentage of money is spent on administration. We take the cheapest flights and stay in the cheapest hotels”.
The IOC’s executive board will meet in Lausanne in mid-December. The board could recommend that the federation be stripped of Olympic recognition. Expulsion from the Olympics would require a vote of the full IOC assembly, which meets in Salt Lake City in early February on the eve of the Winter Games.
