Hickey goes straight to the IOC

OLYMPIC GAMES: Pat Hickey has warned that if the International Olympic Committee (IOC) were to support Britain in the dispute between the Olympic Council of Ireland (OCI) and the British Olympic Association (BOA) they would be overturning what the former Irish IOC president, Lord Killanin, had established over 40 years ago.

The president of the OCI was speaking at yesterday's announcement of Government funding of elite athletes in the run-up to this summer's Athens Games.

Lord Killanin presided over the IOC from 1972 to the Moscow Games of 1980.

The IOC is to arbitrate on the matter in which the BOA have officially - and, from their point of view, properly - included Northern Ireland in the name of their team for Athens. In doing so they have drawn the ire of the OCI and Hickey for claiming what the Irish organisation see as effective jurisdiction over Northern Ireland athletes with regard to the Olympic Games.

Hickey insists it is the OCI who are the national governing body for the island of Ireland, not the BOA, and he has gone directly to IOC headquarters in Lausanne to ask their lawyers to sort out the problem.

"I spoke to the IOC in-house lawyer this morning, Howard Stupp. I think it's a question of them getting the paper work together and making a decision," Hickey said. "We feel we don't have to make a case. To be on the safe side we've dug out from the bunkers Lord Killanin's memorabilia and IOC executive board meetings of the time, and his correspondence with Avery Brundage (IOC president prior to Killanin) at the time of the London Olympics of 1948, all of the documents supporting our position and showing the precedent.

"The IOC goes on precedent. I cannot see them going back on something a former president of the IOC accomplished when he was in office.

"The only way this can be resolved now is that the IOC make the decision. They will just have to confirm that the OCI and their statutes, which have been approved, is the Olympic committee for the island of Ireland. Then that will be the end of it.

"It is incorrect to say the BOA have had their statutes approved. They are talking about 1981 statutes. I don't know about that, but it doesn't matter anyway. My view is that this 1981 date is a red herring. It has no relevance.

"They (BOA) are talking about their own statutes. What the IOC has in their files is a different thing. We can have anything we want in our statutes. We can have, for example, that every Friday evening the OCI have to have a meeting in the Ashling Hotel in Dublin. But the IOC don't care about that."

Hickey, who is also secretary general of the European Olympic Associations, which represents 48 National Olympic Committees (NOC) out of 201 NOCs world-wide, believes London, who are bidding to stage the 2012 Olympic Games, are one of the front runners. As a voting member of the IOC committee which will decide which city will stage the 2012 Games, he is not in a position to say whether he believes London will achieve their aim, but he feels they are already suffering a backlash at home.

"London is one of the front runners. There is no doubt they are in the top three at the moment and one of the favourites," he says. "I think they've a very good chance. It's a fabulous city and they have very good sports technicians. They have a very good chance of getting the Games.

"But because they didn't answer our queries or return our phone calls there has been a massive backlash by the British media regarding the London bid. They are running around now trying to reclaim ground and saying that they want the status quo to remain. If they wanted that to happen they should have left things as they were and they should not have tried, by stealth, to add Northern Ireland onto the words of Great Britain in the statutes. It's only when they decided to add on Northern Ireland that it all erupted."

The BOA maintain the status quo has not changed.