PAT HICKEY is still president of the Olympic Council of Ireland after comfortably surviving a challenge from David Balbirnie at the council's a.g.m. in Dublin last night.
A vote of 27-9 reflected a conclusive, if not wholly gratifying, victory for the man whose confrontational style of presidency has generated so much controversy in recent years. It was the first time in the history of the council that an outgoing president has been opposed. Other challenges to outgoing officers perished in similar style. Louis Kilcoyne was endorsed as first vice president, defeating Brendan Foreman 24-13. With Foreman vacating his position as honorary treasurer to contest this election, it means that the 78 year old elder statesman of Irish sport is now removed from the council.
Shane McDonald and Dermot Sherlock defeated Pat McQuaid and Christy Wall by margins of 25-11 and 31-5 for the posts of second vice president and honorary secretary, respectively, in what was effectively a wipe out for the dissidents.
The five man executive committee will be made up of Billy Kennedy (cycling), who topped the poll, Aidan Curran (volleyball), Dermot Henaghan (rowing), William O'Brien (archery) and Thomas Rafter (fencing).
It means that the two primary Olympic sports, athletics and swimming, will not be represented on the board of officers, a stinging irony when measured against the fact that two other disciplines, volleyball and fencing, which did not have a single representative in Atlanta, succeeded in having delegates nominated.
The meeting, which was closed to the press for the first time, failed to provoke the expected controversy with the vast majority of the proposals going through without demur, and there were no queries about the accounts.
The exception came in Hickey's presidential report in which he was said to be stinging in his criticism of Balbirnie and Brendan O'Connell who resigned from the council last December and who both suffered damaging defeats last evening.
Afterwards Hickey was predictably euphoric about his victory. "It was an open and constructive meeting conducted in a very businesslike manner and I look forward to working with the new team of officers for the next Olympic Games in Sydney," he said.
If opposition from the floor was curiously muted in the course of the meeting, there was no lack of criticism from the dissident members as they left. "Although the voting in favour of the old guard was conclusive, it ought not disguise the fact that there is a lot of division and resentment within the council" said Chris Wall.
"The Olympic movement is about federations, not personalities; but you'd never have guessed it from this meeting. There was a lot of block voting and in the end, we had no answer to that."
Earlier, officer councils had seen fit to employ three security personnel to debar members of the media attending the meeting. Hickey said that the decision, taken less than 24 hours earlier, had been forced on him by RTE's demand to film the meeting in full.
