Several years removed from a management and ethics scandal that streamlined the U.S. Olympic Committee, corporate confidence has returned to the USOC and sponsor dollars are flooding in like never before.
Yet the USOC's new board of directors -- downsized last year from 123 members to 11 -- has not yet granted approval to a 2005-08 budget that was first presented nearly two months ago despite the relative outpouring of money backing it.
Chariman Peter Ueberroth is trying to lead the organization through a fiscal renaissance.
(Mike Blake -- Reuters)
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_____ 2004 Summer Olympics _____
• Look back at the Athens Games, highlighted by Michael Phelps's eight medals and marked by unfounded worries over terrorism.
• Photos
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The essence of the delay: Chairman Peter Ueberroth, on the job since last summer, and the rest of the board have demanded that the USOC start acting like the business it began to resemble -- at least in structure -- after last year's organizational overhaul.
And the USOC's business, Ueberroth reminds, is investing in U.S. athletes.
"It's important that we spend every dollar very effectively and carefully," Ueberroth said yesterday by phone from his office in Los Angeles. "That will result in more for the athletes, and that is consistent with [our] athletes-first policy."
"It's a different exercise than the organization has probably gone through in the recent past."
Quibbling little with the substance of the budget presented by USOC Chief Executive Officer Jim Scherr and his staff, Ueberroth and the board have urged officials to expand their fundraising goals while demanding better accounting and consideration of worst-case scenarios to ensure that the organization thrives even if financial prospects worsen.
Ueberroth said he expects a USOC budget to be approved in the coming weeks, but only for 2005 rather than the entire quadrennium.
"We ask our athletes to be world class, the best they can be," Ueberroth said. "All we're doing is applying the same requirement to ourselves."
Ueberroth's oversight of the budget discussions, the board's first major foray into the governance of the organization, sheds light on the leadership style he has brought to the USOC. His approach seems in line with the sky-is-the-limit yet fiscally sensible tack he took while at the helm of the organizing committee for the 1984 Summer Games in Los Angeles, which are credited with turning the Summer Olympics from a deficit-saddled enterprise into an immensely profitable one.
"He's very driven," Scherr said in a telephone interview this week from Seattle. "He settles only for excellence. . . . He's a hard-driver on building revenue, keeping expenses low and building organizational capability."
The financial future of the organization has never looked better despite the fact that there will be no Olympics on U.S. soil earlier than 2012 (New York is one of five cities bidding for the opportunity to hold those Games; Paris is considered the front-runner).
Heartening to Olympic officials who endured a sponsorship dry spell in the aftermath of the 1999 Salt Lake City ethics scandal is the $410 million already guaranteed through 2008 through sponsor contracts and television revenues.
"It's well in advance of what we've ever done in the past," said Scherr, who took over in 2003. "We anticipate corporate sponsorship to be at an all-time high during the 2005-2008 quad."
