Fredericks leaves 2024 Games bid role
Print Edition
IOC member Frank Fredericks has stepped down from his role overseeing the 2024 Olympic bidding process after a US$300,000 payment from a banned track official was revealed.
“Paris and Los Angeles are presenting two fantastic candidatures and I do not wish to become a distraction,” the four-time Olympic silver medalist from Namibia said yesterday in a statement.
Stepping aside as IOC evaluation chairman was “in the best interests” of the bidding process, the ex-sprinter said.
Fredericks, who won his Olympic medals in the 1990s, would have led an April 23-25 visit to Los Angeles. Paris will be evaluated by an IOC team on May 14-16.
“(I)t is essential that the important work my colleagues are doing is seen as being carried out in a truthful and fair manner,” Fredericks said.
Fredericks also will not take part in July meetings in Lausanne, Switzerland, that are a key stage in the voting contest. IOC members will hear from city campaign leaders and about the evaluation visits.
Fredericks has denied wrongdoing after his integrity — and the 2016 Olympic hosting vote — was questioned by French daily Le Monde last Friday.
Fredericks previously said he contacted the IOC Ethics Commission ahead of Le Monde revealing that a company linked to him was paid US$299,300 on October 2, 2009, the day Rio de Janeiro won 2016 Olympic hosting rights.
The money was transferred by Papa Massata Diack, the son of Lamine Diack, a disgraced former IAAF president and former long-time IOC member.
The elder Diack is in France where state prosecutors are investigating alleged corruption in the IAAF. His evasive son, who has been banned for life by the IAAF, is thought to be in his native Senegal.
Le Monde reported that Papa Massata Diack’s marketing company received US$1.5 million from a Brazilian businessman days before Rio’s victory in a four-city contest. Fredericks, a senior IAAF official, has said he had a marketing contract with Papa Massata Diack’s agency, Pamodzi Sports Consulting, from 2007-11.
“I reiterate that I was never involved with any vote manipulation or for that matter any other inappropriate or illegal practice,” said Fredericks, who joined the IOC in 2004 as an athlete representative and was a member of the IOC executive board at the time of the Rio vote.
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