Salt Lake City was devastated. The International Olympic Committee, meeting in Tokyo in September 1990, had just chosen Atlanta as the site for the 1996 Summer Games. The decision seemed to knock any other U.S. city out of contention to host an Olympics - summer or winter - for many years.
As Salt Lake City officials huddled in Tokyo hotel rooms, scrambling for ways to salvage their 24-year quest to stage a Games, Harvey Schiller, then-executive director of the U.S. Olympic Committee, offered his best advice: Bring in Anita DeFrantz.Little known outside sports circles, DeFrantz, 43, is the senior of two U.S. members on the IOC, the private group that decides all Olympic matters. If Salt Lake City had underestimated her clout, that was understandable. The 104-member IOC - with only seven women - is known as the province of aristocratic, mostly graying men.
But slowly, DeFrantz has become one of the Olympic movement's more influential members. A lawyer who won a bronze medal in rowing at the 1976 Montreal Games, she is the only woman on the 11-member IOC Executive Board, the true seat of Olympic power, and the first black woman ever elected to it.
Now, her name even surfaces in back-room discussions about the committee's top job. Willi Kaltschmitt, an IOC member from Guatemala, says: "She has the potential to be anything she wants in the Olympic movement."
When Salt Lake officials returned home, they began to court DeFrantz. They held a banquet in her honor, gave her helicopter tours of possible Olympic venues, and even taught her to ski.
In return, she started tipping off the bid committee to the personal interests of each IOC member (upon learning from DeFrantz that one member was an avid gardener, the committee bought him a fancy book on horticulture). She talked Salt Lake boosters out of a planned statewide torch relay; locals thought the event would impress the Olympic officials, but DeFrantz suspected they would consider it an inappropriate use of one of their most-famous symbols. She arranged for Utah officials to meet with everyone from Vice President Al Gore to Princess Nora of Liechtenstein.
Salt Lake City got its Games - the 2002 Winter Olympics - in a landslide vote last year. "I went straight up and kissed Anita," says David R. Johnson, now a senior vice president of the Salt Lake City Organizing Committee.
The sports world, however, remains a man's world, and DeFrantz would be ineffectual without the backing of such traditionalists as Spain's Juan Antonio Samaranch, the 76-year-old IOC president. She has made her mark not by bucking the system, but by working within it. The IOC "isn't the kind of organization where you can stand up - firebrand in hand - and storm the walls," notes Michael B. Lenard, vice president of the U.S. Olympic Committee. De-Frantz's middle-class roots and down-to-earth manner often play well in the stodgy, pompous arena of Olympic politics.
Such Olympic ambitions never occurred to DeFrantz before her sophomore year at Connecticut College, in New London, Conn., when she spied a strange-looking craft used in rowing competitions. A coach standing near the boat told her: "You'd be perfect for it."
Until then, DeFrantz had applied her nearly 6-foot-tall, muscular build mainly to swimming and high-school band (there were no team sports for girls at her Indiana high school). In rowing, she thrived, winning six national championships, a world-championship silver medal and - about five years after she took up the sport - an Olympic bronze. After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania Law School, she practiced law and began training for the 1980 Games in Moscow.
When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, DeFrantz received a phone call from a magazine reporter. "President Carter says we're going to boycott the Olympics," she recalls the reporter telling her. DeFrantz's response was blunt: "We? Where was we when I was training my tail off in the freezing cold weather?"
She gained instant celebrity as one of a handful of athletes willing to publicly slam the boycott.
Raised by a community-activist father and an educator mother, De-Frantz had been encouraged to voice her opinions. She even led a group that filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Olympic Committee. "Those who earn the right to be Olympians should be the ones to decide," she says.
DeFrantz's campaign earned her enemies on the U.S. political scene, but her profile within the Olympic movement soared. "She still gets a lot of credit for that around the world," says Andrew Young, former U.S. A ambassador to the United Nations and current co-chairman of the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games.