Primo's inside track to success

As the Godfather of international amateur athletics is laid to rest, Stephen Downes reflects on the other sporting spirits which fell victim to his iron rule, eye for income, and blind spot for drug tests

THERE were at least three ghosts circling around the Stadio dei Marmi in Rome last Tuesday morning, when the great and the not-so- good of world sport gathered to hear the eulogies to Primo Nebiolo.

As the sombre group listened to a speech from Juan Antonio Samaranch, the old Falangist blueshirt who heads the International Olympic Committee, it was easy to imagine that above them hovered the ghostly apparitions of Nebiolo, the International Amateur Athletic Federation president who died last Sunday, aged 76; of Florence Griffith Joyner, the world record-breaking sprinter who died 14 months before, aged just 38; and, the scariest ghost of all, the spirit of fair play, which had suffered another dire wound 12 years earlier, when Giovanni Evangelisti was presented with the World Championship long jump bronze medal just a hop-step-and-a-jump away in the Stadio Olimpico.

The "Marmi" is unlike any other athletics track in the world. Built by Mussolini, it stands in the shadow of the stadium used for the 1960 Games, and the outside of the arena is lined by grandiose, mock-Classical statuary. Very nouveau fascist. Whoever chose it as the venue for the memorial service to one of the great dictators of world sport obviously had a well developed sense of mischief.

Make no mistake, Nebiolo will be missed. His 18 years as president of the IAAF were often controversial, and frequently scandal-ridden, but they saw a previously moribund sport transformed into a modern multi-national, multi-billion dollar business, professionalised both on and off the track.

For Nebiolo, the ends always justified the means. "If you don't want to have critics," Nebiolo once said, "you must not try to do great things." Of world sports figures, only Samaranch and Sepp Blatter, the Swiss who heads the world soccer federation, Fifa, were seen as wielding more influence. The short, bald Italian wheeled and dealed his way into the international corridors of power. When the British royal family refused to assuage his ego with an invitation to Buckingham Palace and some sort of honour, he moved the IAAF's headquarters out of London. When he wanted a cherished membership of the IOC, he threatened to restrict athletics at the Olympic Games to under-23s, just as football had done. Samaranch swiftly co-opted Nebiolo into "The Club".

With his gravelly voice, it often sounded as if Nebiolo had learned English by watching Marlon Brando movies, but this was not the only reason he became known as The Godfather of world athletics. He took great pride in the fact that there were more member federations of the IAAF, what he liked to call "the athletics family", than there are countries affiliated to the United Nations. In Seville in August, Nebiolo's IAAF accepted its 206th member.

Five times elected as president of the IAAF, he never once had to face any opposition: no one else dared. Nebiolo's version of democracy saw him give every IAAF member nation a vote, and then pay over millions of the IAAF's cash in "development funding" to eastern Europe, Africa, Asia and Latin America, all in the confident expectation that the recipients would line up behind him. It is not surprising then that Nebiolo's official biography included reference to honours presented to him by those other great democrats Nicolai Ceaucescu - the Butcher of Bucharest - and Cuba's Fidel Castro.

Primo Nebiolo was born in Turin, Italy, on July 14, 1923. After the Second World War, when he fought for the partisans, he read law at the University of Turin, where he was a contemporary of Gianni Agnelli, the head of the Fiat empire. It was an association which would continue throughout their lives.

When Nebiolo assumed the presidency of the IAAF in 1981, there was no track world championships, and no lucrative annual Grand Prix series. Then, the sport was still being run by the Chariots of Fire generation: the Marquess of Exeter, a former Olympic hurdler upon whom one of the characters in the Oscar-winning film was based, had been president of the IAAF for 30 years from 1946.

Under Exeter, the IAAF's headquarters was an unpretentious house in Wandsworth, south London, with just three staff and two secretaries, and a part-time clerk to keep account of the little cash that they had in the coffers.

When Nebiolo took charge, the IAAF's bank balance showed less than #100,000. In the decade from 1985, the IAAF struck sponsorship and television deals worth an estimated #700m. Nebiolo's last major financial coup came in 1996, when he signed a deal with the European Broadcasting Union worth #110m for coverage of the IAAF's World Championship events through until 2001. Right up to his death, he was working on his legacy, a new TV deal which would take in the World Championships from 2003-2009.

Yet in more recent years, Nebiolo's Midas touch seemed to be deserting him.

The TV moguls could no longer be persuaded to stump up ever- increasing sums of money for the quadrennial World Championships. So, to generate more cash, Nebiolo turned to the athletes themselves, placing an ever-increasing competitive demand on their often frail bodies, as he staged ever more prestige events, such as World Championships every two years, and the new annual Golden League series.

Nebiolo's rule of the IAAF was dogged by controversies involving banned drugs. "I am not the president of the pee-pee," Nebiolo would often complain whenever another urine analysis showed one of his precious stars to have transgressed. There was the feeling that Nebiolo had a contempt for drug testing, something which he had to be seen to do but which too often undermined his masterplan for the sport. Nebiolo's personal objections to the idea that the IAAF should start the 21st century with a clean slate by throwing away the old, drug-stained record books, saw that proposal dumped.

Nebiolo was himself implicated in cover-ups of positive drug tests at the 1984 Olympics. Documents from the former East German secret police, the Stasi, record Nebiolo - then head of the Italian athletics federation - as having argued for the cover-up of a positive test on the Italian hammer thrower, Gianpaolo Urlando. There was no official notification of Urlando's positive test until 18 months after the games, long after any scandal might have been created.

"We thought Nebiolo was trying to protect an Italian athlete," one senior IAAF official recalled, "and that he was trying to make athletics be seen as free from drugs. We felt he sacrificed the honesty of international athletics."

Nebiolo's next outrage was even more blatant. It was in the men's long jump at the 1987 World Championships in Rome, where an Italian, Giovanni Evangelisti, took the bronze medal after officials added at least 47cm to his final-round jump, that Nebiolo's dark hand touched most heavily. Nebiolo never accepted responsibility for the Evangelisti scandal, and the IAAF investigation which he set up found no wrong-doing. But the affair cost Evangelisti the bronze medal and Nebiolo his seat on CONI, the Italian national Olympic committee. After police and CONI investigations, their independent report complained that there had been "pronounced intervention by the IAAF intended to interfere and prevent the discovery of the facts".

But Nebiolo truly believed that what he did was in the best interests of the sport. It was also usually in the best interests of Primo Nebiolo. That was why he accepted $20m from NBC in 1987 to alter the timetable of the athletics at the Seoul Olympics to better suit American audiences. This money was used to establish the International Athletics Foundation, effectively Nebiolo's very own slush-fund, under his complete control.

Those 1988 Olympics also marked the greatest controversy in Nebiolo's reign, with the positive drug test on Ben Johnson, the winner of the 100m final. The women's sprint were also won with suspicious dominance by Florence Griffith Joyner, a previously unremarkable sprinter who was suddenly beating the world's best by as much as second, with times which, 11 years on, are still unchallenged.

Griffith Joyner died a year last September under suspicious circumstances which may yet lead to a court case involving her husband, Al Joyner, the 1984 Olympic triple jump gold medallist. With Nebiolo also now dead, we may never know what it was that persuaded Griffith Joyner to announce tearfully her sudden and unexpected retirement, at the age of 27, just four months after her successes in Seoul.

Copyright 1999
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