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Juan Antonio Samaranch


gotosy

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I am reminded of a political cartoon that ran right after Richard Nixon died with Nixon appearing in a cloud before St Peter, seated at a desk with two equal sized folders labeled 'Good Dick' and 'Bad Dick' on them and St. Peter says into his phone "Hold my call, this one may take a while."

I'm so torn on JAS. On the one hand, he did a lot to revive the Olympics after The Three Ms of Doom (Munich, Montreal and Moscow), but you cannot argue against him having a nasty habit of getting his way if we wanted a particular city to get the Games, which wasn't so good for the growth of the movement since it meant those who ponied up the most cash got the big show.

I suppose the good and the bad will be a part of the record, as everything else is. Just glad he is with his wife again and at rest.

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Farewell to one of the most corrupt individuals sport has ever seen

Now can Sepp Blatter, Jack Warner & João Havelange please be taken from this earth also

Samaranch_599967a.jpg

I dont know if Samaranch was or not a Franquista, but he is being catalonian i dont think he was cause they were so represed in franquismo.

In other side everyone knows here in Spain that many important people, singers actors,... had to do the role as franquistas cause they could die, and i wanna to think that Samaranch was one of them, Spanish history in Franquismo is a bit ... and many people fougth for survive, so lets see him as the man who made we now love Olympics so much cause it is the supermegabig event in worldwide over all other and forever ( omg what i said? lol )

RIP Samaranch today Spain cries for you!and the olimpic movement too!

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Anyone else fairly disturbed by the idea your passing might be announced to the world on twitter?

An important figure in the Olympic movement, perhaps the most important in modern history - and probably a victim of his own success as we see in many sports that when one man dominates for so long (i.e. Bernie Ecclestone, Sebb Blatter), it does the organisation no favours at all.

And without being too disrespectful, I wonder if he passed six months ago ahead of the vote on 2016 whether Madrid may have got the nod ahead of Rio. I suspect the affections for Juan Antonio Samaranch may be greater in death than it was in life.

Twitter is just one of the medium they used to release the news, it's not like they did it in a casual twat only(as Kathy Griffin would say).

I'm sorry for anyone's death, but I am still somewhat bitter that he screwed Toronto out of 2008 bid.

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'Great survivor' who left tainted Olympic legacy

Financial Times

Published: April 22 2010

Juan Antonio Samaranch, who has died aged 89, led the International Olympic Committee to its greatest prosperity and its worst corruption scandal. He took control as commercial sponsorship turned to sport for new marketing opportunities and reoriented the games into a marketing vehicle for the world's best-known consumer products.

He held power for 21 years, becoming the second-longest serving president after the IOC's founder, Pierre de Coubertin.

Samaranch was the great survivor. Probably the last of his generation of European fascist politicians to remain active in public life, Samaranch reinvented himself to the degree that his supporters proposed him as a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Born to a prosperous Barcelona textile family, in his teenage years - as General Franco raised the standard of rebellion against the Spanish republic - Samaranch rushed to join the youth fascists.

In the 1950s he entered politics via Barcelona city council, later joining Franco's rubber-stamp Cortes, Spain's upper house of parliament. In the last years of the dictatorship, Samaranch was appointed political chief of Catalonia, wearing fascist uniform and giving the right-arm salute until Franco's death in 1975.

As late as 1971 he told a local paper: "I'm a man loyal to all that Franco represents. I'm a man of the Movimiento and of course I'm going to remain loyal for the rest of my life."

From the mid-1950s, he sought an alternative career. He became a sports official, signing his letters to government officials: " Siempre a tus ordenes te saluda brazo en alto " - "I am always at your service with my arm raised."

A place was found for Samaranch on the IOC in 1966 and he climbed the ladder. On becoming president in 1980, he called an Olympic convention and pushed through opening the games to professional athletes, which increased the value of the TV and marketing contracts - the latter going to his patron Horst Dassler's ISL company.

Revenues soared and Samaranch ensured he gave his IOC members a five-star lifestyle, flying first class and staying in top hotels.

The high point of his Olympic career should have been the Barcelona games of 1992 but his image was damaged when two British reporters revealed his fascist record and alleged corruption within the IOC.

Four years later, in Atlanta, the American HBO network screened pictures of Samaranch in fascist uniform with Franco.

By the end of 1998, Samaranch's reputation hit rock bottom as evidence emerged some IOC members had taken cash and other favours to give their votes to Salt Lake City for the winter Olympics of 2002.

Every accusation of corruption from the 1980s through the 1990s was met with Samaranch's mantra: "My members are clean and I trust them 100 per cent."

For a decade, he claimed the IOC was waging "a war" against performance- enhancing drugs. Few believed him. A BBC Panorama programme alleged he was involved in the suppression of lab tests showing positive results at the games.

For all the apparent success of his last Olympics, in Sydney, Samaranch's legacy was drug-fuelled elite sport that many fans could not trust.

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Former IOC president Samaranch's funeral begins

BARCELONA, Spain — The coffin holding former IOC president Juan Antonio Samaranch, draped with the Olympic flag, has been wheeled into the Catalonia state headquarters to the sound of the Olympic hymn.

The procession was watched by the Spaniard's family and a host of international figures and dignitaries, ahead of Samaranch's funeral later Thursday.

Current International Olympic Committee president Jacques Rogge says only Pierre de Coubertin, the French baron who founded the modern games, was more influential for the Olympic movement.

Rogge called Samaranch a "generous and compassionate man" who left a "great legacy" that the IOC pledges to preserve.

AP

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Agreed! It was so cheesy!

super cheese. i wanted to puke so bad when he did that. that was crossing the line for me. i even remember reading an article that he was campaigning for the austrians during the 2010 bid. he wanted a china games and he got when toronto or paris had a very superior bid. maybe 2008 should have just been given to beijing instead of having all the bidding hoopla.
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I am reminded of a political cartoon that ran right after Richard Nixon died with Nixon appearing in a cloud before St Peter, seated at a desk with two equal sized folders labeled 'Good Dick' and 'Bad Dick' on them and St. Peter says into his phone "Hold my call, this one may take a while."

I'm so torn on JAS. On the one hand, he did a lot to revive the Olympics after The Three Ms of Doom (Munich, Montreal and Moscow), but you cannot argue against him having a nasty habit of getting his way if we wanted a particular city to get the Games, which wasn't so good for the growth of the movement since it meant those who ponied up the most cash got the big show.

I suppose the good and the bad will be a part of the record, as everything else is. Just glad he is with his wife again and at rest.

Same Here. Thanks for making the games to the modern specticle it is today. No thanks so much for the corruption days.

I'll pay my respects with adding the following to my signature (although it was there when i joined about a month ago) on what he really wanted to say to Atlanta...which is something i'm not thankful to him about.

At the closing ceremony of Atlanta 1996, IOC President Juan Antonio Samaranch said in his closing speech, "Well done, Atlanta" and called the Games "most exceptional". In reality, he really meant to say "You Suck @$$ Atlanta" and call the games "The Worst Olympics Ever! We would've done better in

!"
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Hehe, i was thinking already why no one mentioned his Atlanta speech (a probable reason for why many people in this forums hate him :rolleyes: )

And about being a supporter of Franco, he had to do that. It was that or being shoot by a firing squad <_< . A lot of famous spaniards (such like Fernando Fernan Gomez) had to do this as well (and he even admited some years before his death that all the stuff he did in the 50s was to save his life because of Franco repression)

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One of the things Samaranch did right was to allow Professional players in Olympic Basketball and Olympic Hockey. It's something his successor Jacques Rogge wasn't going to screw up. I know that some Olympic diehards would rather see both sports go back to amateurs, but having professionals in those two sports was one of the best things to ever happen to the Olympics. It would have been interesting to see what would have happened to basketball and hockey in the Olympics if the professionals were still barred from the Olympics. Perhaps it would have gone the way of Olympic baseball, removed from the games.

Samaranch allowing for NBA players to play Olympic basketball starting with Barcelona in 1992 was probably what led to the rapid growth of basketball as an international sport, so much so that nowadays, a majority of the teams in Olympic basketball have names familiar to basketball fans. Four of the biggest names in the NBA served as flag bearers during the opening of the Beijing games in 2008.

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The Brazilian Olympic Committee (COB) and the Rio 2016 Games Organizing Committee have declared three days of official mourning for the International Olympic Committee’s honorary president and former president, Spaniard Juan Antonio Samaranch.

Curiously, the campaign that culminated in the choice of Rio de Janeiro to host the 2016 Olympic Games, after a direct confrontation in the final round of the IOC vote against the city of Madrid, for which Samaranch had worked intensely, originated in advice the Spaniard gave to Nuzman. “He told me that if Brazil wanted to bid to host the Olympic Games, the country first had to organize a large multi-sport event like the Pan American Games. And everything went according to the wise words of Samaranch. The excellent organization of Rio 2007 gave us the base for our successful Rio 2016 bid. Even though we were on opposite sides of this race, there was always a lot of mutual respect. Brazilian Olympic sport will be eternally grateful to Juan Antonio Samaranch,” said Nuzman.

http://aroundtherings.com/articles/view.aspx?id=34670

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Samaranch given state-like funeral in Barcelona

King Juan Carlos and his family, current IOC president Jacques Rogge and high-profile figures from Spanish sport and politics were among the mourners.

Rafael Nadal, the world's number three tennis player, helped carry the coffin to the city cathedral.

The casket, draped in the Olympic flag, had earlier been placed in the chapel at the Catalan regional government's palace and hundreds of people filed past to pay their respects to the man who brought the Olympic Games to the port city in 1992.

...

Samaranch will be buried at the cemetery on the Montjuic hill near the stadium that was used for the 1992 Games.

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE63L4YR20100422?type=sportsNews

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Funeral already? That was quick! They sure didn't muck around and waste time to make sure he was firmly planted in the ground!

I guess they were ready. They probably already had most of the preparations done a while ago.

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I guess they were ready. They probably already had most of the preparations done a while ago.

I'll admit I'm surprised how fast he's being buried too, but in this day and age, maybe we've been conditioned to funeral pagents that run for days thanks to people like Ronald Reagan, Lady Di and Michael Jackson.

Burial site seems appropo, given he screwed Paris out of 1992, just another victim of the almighty ego of JAS.

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He knew he was dying and likely planned ahead. Heck, even if his health wasn't failing, the man was 89. You can't live forever. And while he was IOC president for 21 years, it isn't like he was a pope, president, or princess. I'd say the vast majority of people would say "Juan who?" if told of his passing.

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Well, as I've been away and not had a chance to pass a few words, guess I better throw in my two cents....

The Wily Old Falangist was without doubt the best and worst thing to happen to the modern Olympic movement since the end of WW2. His single minded ambition to turn the IOC into a fiefdom which in turn elevated his own importance to that which he considered on a par with real world leaders, paralleled with the ethical malfeasance he tolerated if not encouraged meant that the Olympic movement was bound to hit its lowest depths thanks to the bid scandals around Salt Lake City. The manner in which he made sure that his favourites emerged as leading members of the IOC resulted in a clique that in turn was happy to forgo the moral dilemma of awarding the Olympics to Beijing, capital of a regime that to all intensive purposes flouts many of the human rights embodied in the Olympic Charter. Samaranch was more subtle than Brundage when it came to a Machiavellian pursuit of Olympic power, but at heart I am sure he saw the IOC and the Games as a way to elevate his own status away from his Franco-supporting past, rather than some kind of maniacal obsession with Olympic purity (which it could be argued that Brundage possessed).

On the other hand Samaranch presided over an Olympic movement that went from its nadir of the games of Moscow and Los Angeles, to the unqualified successes of Barcelona, Lillehammer and Sydney. Financial growth and political stability for the IOC meant the Olympics became something to be pursued, which until Samaranch's era was never a public or sporting policy agenda for most countries. He also was partly responsible for the ascension of Jacques Rogge, who has been an admirable successor.

As for issues such as drugs, rampant commercialism and the challenges of gigantism and new media for the Olympics, Samaranch was possibly not in as much control as both supporters or opponents would believe. I honestly believe that no matter who would have succeeded Killanin would have had to bite the bullet on bringing in corporate dollars to the games, facing down systemic and individual dope cheating and struggling to keep the Olympics relevant in the last 20 years of the twentieth century.

So overall the Wily Old Falangist's legacy is a conflicted IOC and Olympic movement, bloated with success, desired by many, opposed by many as well, bound tightly to the commercial realities of big dollars, with the simpler and perhaps more human era of his predecessors a pale shadow of the huge event Samaranch steered during his apogee.

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I'll admit I'm surprised how fast he's being buried too, but in this day and age, maybe we've been conditioned to funeral pagents that run for days thanks to people like Ronald Reagan, Lady Di and Michael Jackson.

Burial site seems appropo, given he screwed Paris out of 1992, just another victim of the almighty ego of JAS.

In Spain law is 24h not before and if u want wait more time ... but people use to wait only 24h ( i say cause im doctor and it is limit to wait , u cant before )

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