Elevation of a Lord

HIGH above the Isar River embankment in the ornate home of the Bavarian parliament, the 74-man International Olympic Committee met last week behind guarded doors to select a new president. After the ballots were counted and burned, Irish whisky was delivered to the conference room. The choice of drink was appropriate. Some hours later it was announced that the successor to Avery Brundage, for 20 years the autocratic arbiter of international amateur sport, was Michael Morris, Baron Killanin, of Dublin.

The elevation of Lord Killanin came as no surprise. The only other contender for the post was Count Jean de Beaumont of France, who to many of the committee members seemed too much like the outgoing president. "We felt," one member confided after the lopsided (but unannounced) vote, "that 20 years of Brundage had been ample."

Most amateur athletes would agree. Unreasonably censorious and sometimes inconsistent in his decisions, Brundage has in fact been a controversial influence on the games for nearly half of their modern history. As chief of the U.S. Olympic Committee in 1936, he dismissed Swimmer Eleanor Holm Jarrett from the team sent to Berlin because she drank champagne during the Atlantic crossing. The same year, he countered attacks on Nazi anti-Semitism by issuing a brochure that argued that "the persecution of minority peoples is as old as history." Since becoming I.O.C. president in 1952, Brundage has, if anything, grown more stern and less realistic. He has crusaded against "shamateurism" and decried political interference in the Olympics while at the same time largely ignoring the major transgressors of Eastern Europe. In an age of liberalization and reform, he has become more and more of an anachronism.

Lord Killanin's views are not diametrically opposed to those of Brundage. For example, he sided unsuccessfully with Brundage on the Rhodesian issue. But his new eight-year term does augur the beginning of some healthy changes in the Olympic movement. "I don't believe in open Olympics," he says. "I don't believe in professional Olympics. But I do think we have to realize that we are about to enter the last quarter of the 20th century." Killanin has already hinted at one possible change. In an effort to shake the image of the I.O.C. as "a board of old men," he suggests that younger people--perhaps former medal winners--be invited "to consult with us in our decisions."

At 58, Lord Killanin is 26 years younger than his predecessor. Short and paunchy, he looks like a pipe-smoking leprechaun when he stands alongside tall Fitness Faddist Brundage, who represented the U.S. at the 1912 Stockholm games in the pentathlon and decathlon.* Although Killanin never competed in the Olympics, he was no slouch as an athlete; he has been an amateur boxer, rower and horseman. Like most members of the self-perpetuating I.O.C., both men are wealthy. But Killanin has a much more varied and worldly background than Brundage, who worked his way through the University of Chicago, made a fortune in construction and then virtually retired to concentrate on the Olympics. Educated at Eton, Cambridge and the Sorbonne, Killanin worked for three Fleet Street newspapers and became a major in the British army before turning to business. Now chairman of Bovril Ltd. and the Lombard Bank, he also heads the Dublin Theater Festival and the Galway Race Track, and has produced several movies, including The Quiet Man, which was directed by his friend John Ford.

Killanin can also be an iconoclast and has been known to poke fun at fellow I.O.C. members and at some of their lofty Olympic principles. Once when a member was late for a meeting and blamed an airline by name, the Irishman hushed him by saying: "No advertising, please. This is the Olympic movement."

*Brundage's favorite event was the heel-and-toe walk, which he once described as "the closest a man can ever come to the pangs of childbirth."

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