Olympic Movement

INTERNATIONAL ICE skating officials have a long way to go to assure fans and aspiring young skaters that the sport is honest. The suspensions handed down Tuesday to French judge Marie-Reine Le Gougne and French ice federation president Didier Gailhaguet fall short of inspiring confidence. The two are banned from judging international skating events for three years, and banished from the 2006 Winter Olympics, for allegedly trying to fix the outcomes in pairs and dance competitions at the Winter Games in Salt Lake City.

THE International Olympic Committee passed all the reforms that anyone could expect, and asks to be forgiven all sins.Not so fast.The verdict should be: So far, so good.Credibility requires probationary approval followed by a hard look at implementation.The sins are several: Corruption, soliciting pay-offs for awarding games to cities bidding to host them. Arrogance, conducting affairs in secret as a private club that is nobody else's business. Indifference, both to world opinion and to scientific advances on the doping front.

FOR FOUR YEARS the world argues the power politics, arrogance, corruption, drugging and professionalism of the Olympic Movement. But when the fire is lit and the Games begin, all that vanishes for two weeks and a bit. The athletes take over. Everyone else, be still. With the Cold War gone, the spectacle is more purely about sport, as was intended at the start of the modern Games in 1896, than in most of its history. Instead of power politics and the vain pursuit of national glory, the world is visited with the spectacle of International Olympic Committee members as free-loaders selling their votes for venues to the most lavish host city.

USOC: Helmick violated ethics rulesFormer United States Olympic Committee president Robert Helmick repeatedly violated rules regarding ethical conduct by Olympic officials, according to a scathing report released yesterday in Grapevine, Texas. "The report concludes that Mr. Helmick's behavior, among other things, gave rise to conflicts of interest and the appearance of conflicts of interest and engendered a general perception that Mr. Helmick was trafficking on his Olympic position to the benefit of private clients," said Arnold Burns, a former U.S. deputy attorney general who conducted the three-month investigation.

Earnhardt nears Winston Cup titleDale Earnhardt all but clinched his fifth NASCAR Winston Cup championship with a ninth-place finish yesterday, as Davey Allison overpowered the field for an easy victory in the Pyroil 500 in Phoenix. Earnhardt, the defending series champ, needs only to start the season finale on Nov. 17 at Atlanta Motor Speedway to nail down the title that will move him within two of seven-time champion Richard Petty. They are the only drivers to have won the title more than three times.

LAUSANNE, Switzerland -- Members of the International Olympic Committee compliantly fell into line yesterday with the insistence of Juan Antonio Samaranch that they begin instituting legitimate, if incremental, reform in an attempt to restore credibility to the damaged Olympic movement.The 93 voting delegates unanimously voted to end their unlimited memberships and to restrict future presidents to a maximum of 12 years in office, as well as to select 15 active athletes to the IOC. The session will continue today with a vote on the contentious issue of whether to allow delegates to visit cities bidding on the Winter and Summer Games.

Pressure forces out Helmick from IOC postRobert Helmick resigned under pressure as a member of the International Olympic Committee yesterday in Switzerland. That move spared Helmick and the IOC the likely embarrassment of a formal vote asking him to quit.Helmick, 54, an attorney from Des Moines, Iowa, also had resigned under pressure as president of the U.S. Olympic Committee in September. Once one of the most powerful figures in international sports and considered a potential successor to Juan Antonio Samaranch as IOC president, Helmick's 30-year sports career bottomed out in the wake of revelations he had represented six clients with ties to the Olympic movement.

Seeing brownQuestion: Who are the Cleveland Browns named after?Would you believe Joe Louis?That is what sportscaster Len Berman believes. According to Berman, the name came out of a newspaper contest. The winning entry was Brown Bombers, honoring then-heavyweight champion Joe Louis. The name was shortened to Browns. Berman said that story had come from the team itself.In the wake of the death of Paul Brown earlier this month, Newsday's Stan Isaacs went to Chuck Heaton, dean of Cleveland sports writers, for the definitive word.

INTEGRITY, rectitude and fair competition must define the Olympic Games. Faced with mounting evidence of rampant bribery in the selection of host cities, the self-perpetuating International Olympic Committee must clean up its act.The charges: Salt Lake City paid IOC members to vote for it to host the 2002 Winter Games, after Nagano, Japan, did the same for the 1998 Winter Games. So far, six IOC members have been expelled, four have resigned and three more face expulsion at the group's March 17-18 meeting.

As trolls and vetters pranced at the closing ceremonies of the Lillehammer Winter Olympics, as world-class athletes mugged for the cameras like kids on spring break, and as the extinguishing of a torch elicited some melancholy, like the feeling of having to return to the real world after a vacation, one might have felt a little debt to Baron Pierre de Coubertin. He was the Frenchman who revived the Olympic movement 98 years ago after a 1,500-year hiatus from the games of Ancient Greece.Yes, the modern Olympics are bloated by commercialism.