BOSTON -- In his first executive committee meeting, new U.S. Olympic Committee boss Norm Blake encountered plenty of griping about his methods but no resistance to his plan to shake up the organization and shift funding among sports.
Two months after coming in from the business world to tackle the USOC's problems, Blake laid out a detailed blueprint Friday of how he wants to reshape virtually every aspect of the way the USOC and the national governing bodies of sports operate."I've never seen an organization like this," Blake said of the haphazard way the USOC has been operating for years, with its far-flung national governing bodies acting like subsidized fiefdoms. "I'm not saying it's bad, it's just much different than I'm used to."
Blake smiled, adding that he wanted to be careful in his criticism.
"But I think we made a great step forward today with the executive committee. They endorsed the organizational direction we're taking, where we are going to be clearly much more cost efficient.
"The bottom line is there is a commitment to becoming more performance oriented."
The most controversial aspect of Blake's plan, the idea of taking money from about 20 sports that don't figure to win medals and giving more to those that bring in the most gold, was accepted by committee members with little discussion.
Blake is going to give winter sports another chance to get additional help from the Colorado Springs-based organization for the 2002 Winter Games in Salt Lake City, USOC spokesman Mike Moran said.
Moran said Blake will meet with winter sports leaders within a few months after the 2000 Summer Games in Sydney end in October and see if they've come up with any new plans that could lead to more medals in Salt Lake City.
Blake said earlier this week they'd told him that more money wouldn't mean more medals than are already anticipated. USOC leaders are hoping to double the 13-medal-record set at the 1998 Winter Games in Nagano, Japan.
USOC executive committee members also quickly agreed to Blake's calls for a more streamlined structure and a greater accountability for every dollar spent. His new management team includes Mark Lewis, who is the Salt Lake Organizing Committee's marketing chief.
Lewis will keep his Salt Lake job, but will also be the managing director of sales and corporate partnerships for the USOC, a job that will be around after the 2002 Winter Games are gone. He already was named to head the marketing partnership between SLOC and the USOC that is selling corporate sponsorships for the Games.
Where Blake encountered the most flak from committee members, particularly those representing national governing bodies and athletes, was in the quick way he devised his plan without consulting everyone at different levels.
"The biggest issue was not the substance but how it all came about," Blake said. "I've been on board for 60 days. There's a broad constituency that's trying to be served here. I tried to come up with workable principles that we could all relate to, with an understanding that it needs to be refined and we need to build consensus behind those principles.
"I elected not to try to listen to everybody and go through a process of trying to come up with something at the end. I did enough toe-dipping with those constituencies that I understood fundamentally what the issues were."
Blake felt that rather than drag out the process with discussion and incremental changes, it was more important to move ahead quickly and create momentum throughout the whole organization.
"If you try to do things incrementally, it never gets done," Blake said. "So it was important for me to move with speed and dispatch to try to do the best I could to encompass all the issues and concerns of various constituencies, but frankly not touching every base and holding every hand. "The bottom line is that nobody disagreed with the principles."
The next step, Blake said, is to implement the changes while making sure not to alienate anyone in the different sports.
One of his challenges will be to decide how much money to shift from the weaker sports to the traditional powerhouses in the quest for more medals. Some sports already are moving in that direction on their own. Skiing, for example, is shifting money and support out of the Nordic events and into the alpine events. But other sports that can expect cuts, like biathlon, team handball, weightlifting, field hockey and table tennis, are worried about their future.
"They don't know what the impact is going to be yet, and I don't know, truthfully," Blake said. "It's getting down to a basic business plan with an NGB in terms of setting their objectives. There is a legitimate concern because it may not be a good thing for them. How bad, how ugly and how harmful it is, they don't know. But it's not going cold turkey. We're going to be responsible. They've been dependent on our funding for years. We can't all of a sudden turn off the spigot. This is going to be a phased in process."