Battle of Olympic proportions to knock John Coates from AOC

Australia’s long-time Games supremo is embroiled in a contest for survival.

Australian Olympic Committee president John Coates for the first time faces a challenger. Picture: Matthew Sullivan

It was late last year that Andrew Plympton was passed the hottest potato in Australian sport.

Having served as president of the St Kilda Football Club and Yachting Australia, and on the boards of the Australian Olympic Committee and Australian Sports Commission, Plympton had seen and done most things in sports administration. This was the first time he had chaired an AOC remuneration committee review of John Coates’s salary.

Confidentiality prevents him from divulging what was discussed in that meeting held deep inside the AOC’s modern offices overlooking Sydney’s Circular Quay. The outcome however, is something Coates has rarely experienced in his 26 years astride Australia’s Olympic movement. He was denied a bump in pay.

“I took the time and effort and energy to speak to the previous chairman of the remuneration committee, Peter Montgomery,’’ Plympton tells Inquirer. “He gave me chapter and verse and all the reasons why John’s consultancy agreement came into place and the reasons for his increases and level of remuneration.

“The recommendation that came out of my committee was there would be no increase to his agreement, and there would be a review post the installation of the new CEO and delineation of ­duties.’’

Don’t worry about Coates; he won’t go hungry anytime soon. Until the AOC’s incoming chief executive Matt Carroll takes up his post and a new AOC board is elected on May 6, his consultancy fee will stay frozen on $717,500. When his car allowance is included, the package is a hefty $729,000. Against the backdrop of a bitterly contested campaign for control of the AOC, it is a figure that sets Coates well apart from everyone else who works in Olympic sport administration. It is a figure that sets Australia apart from the rest of the English-speaking world.

In the four years between the London and Rio Games, the AOC generated average annual revenue of about $22 million. By comparison, the USOC last reported total revenue of $187m, the Canadian Olympic Committee $61m, the NZOC $5.17m and the British Olympic Association reported turnover of $17.6m. BOA chairman Hugh Robertson is paid a modest £20,000 (about $33,120) honorarium. The heads of the other national Olympics committees are unpaid.

Inquirer is not aware of another national Olympic committee of a developed nation that pays its president a generous, full-time executive salary. Coates’s consultancy fee is 40 times the average annual financial grant the AOC provides to the Olympic sports it directly supports.

At about the time Plympton was chairing the review of Coates’s salary, Coates was moving against the man he had invited on to the AOC board eight years ago. Plympton is one of seven AOC executive members nominated by Olympic sports. This time around Coates asked Australian Sailing, the sport that endorsed Plympton, to nominate someone else.

The upshot of those backroom machinations is telling. This week, Australian Sailing nominated Plympton for one of the two vice-president posts on the AOC. In ­addition, Australian Sailing president Matt Allen, the person who refused to disendorse Plympton, is one of 11 nominees now running for a spot on the AOC board.

If Plympton gets his way, the future carve-up of duties between the AOC president and chief executive won’t involve Coates at all. He publicly supports Danielle Roche, an Olympic champion hockey player who has nominated for AOC president in an unprecedented attempt to knock Coates off his AOC perch.

The battle for control of the AOC has thus far been framed as a clash between two powerful figures at the top of Australian sport, John Coates and ASC chairman John Wylie. As a narrative, it is compelling and in some part true.

There no question Wylie wants to see the back of Coates, a man he considers an impediment to Australia performing better at future Olympic Games. Plympton and Roche both sit on Wylie’s ASC board. Supporters of Coates such as Roche’s old Hockeyroos coach Ric Charlesworth have warned against a government takeover of the AOC. Phil Coles, a former AOC and IOC member with no great love for Coates, also sees a dark conspiracy at work.

“This is coming from government, there is no other way to see it,’’ Coles tells Inquirer. “This is not about John Coates, it is about ­bureaucrats trying to control the Australian Olympic movement.’’

Ron Harvey, a former AOC member who was a chief executive of the ASC and a director of the Australian Institute of Sport, takes the same view. He says a letter Wylie wrote to Coates at the end of last year suggesting greater collaboration between their organisations was a thinly disguised government grab for AOC sponsors and cash. “I think this sports commission has got a lot to answer for,’’ he says.

As tempting as it is to view the battle for the AOC exclusively through this prism, to do so misses a bigger picture. The president, two vice-presidents and seven executive members of the AOC are nominated and elected by the Olympic sports, current AOC and Australian IOC members and two members of the athletes’ commission. The way Olympic politics usually work in Australia, Coates tells the sports who he wants on the board and they nominate and support his candidates.

Not this time. At the close of nominations on Thursday, 16 candidates had been put forward for 10 positions. At least seven of these are Roche supporters or independent of Coates. After a quarter of a century of patronage, fidelity and unchallenged rule, the Coates hegemony is at an end. There is a groundswell for change from within the AOC board and across Olympic sport.

Michael Murphy is one of the new nominees vying for a spot on the AOC board. He was an Olympic diver and is the president of Diving Australia. Due to an AOC constitutional quirk that groups diving, swimming, water polo and synchronised swimming together as aquatics, his name was put forward by diving’s kindred sport, gymnastics. He says he was encouraged to nominate by other smaller sports that want an independent board member to represent their interests. The Harvard graduate’s day job is managing the Australian investments of Bain Capital, a private equity firm with $100 billion under management.

He says an encouraging thing about the AOC dust-up is the number and quality of people who have nominated to join the board: “I think that is very healthy and I would like to think that those with a vote will look at the CVs of each candidate, look at their background and think about the mix of talent, skills and experience.’’

Within this altered environment, some candidates previously supported by Coates are reluctant to be seen as part of his ticket. It is understood that AOC member and Volleyball Australia president Craig Carracher, widely considered a Coates protege, needed to be convinced by his own sport to nominate again. Athletics Australia president Mark Arbib is marshalling numbers for Coates but doesn’t see himself as a potential successor. Nicole Livingstone and Danielle Woodward, two AOC board members championed by Coates four years ago in the name of gender equity, won’t be on his ticket this time round.

Disquiet about Coates has been building inside the AOC boardroom since before the Rio Games. An early trigger was Coates’s decision to support Russia’s participation in the 2016 Olympics despite overwhelming evidence that Vladimir Putin’s regime authorised and directed the systematic doping of athletes in summer and winter sports.

Coates supported a decision by the International Association of Athletics Federations to ban Russia from the Rio track and field program but sided with IOC president Thomas Bach and the rest of the IOC executive in leaving the door open for Russia to compete in other sports. He didn’t consult his fellow AOC directors and, as he explained, paid no regard to what they might have thought.

“IOC members do not represent and promote the interests of international federations, nat­ional Olympic committees, or other organisations of the Olympic movement in which they serve,’’ he said at the time.

To sports that have long watched their athletes lose to cheating Russians, the IOC position was a craven capitulation. Inside the AOC, things only got worse once the Games began.

The primary business of the AOC is to send Australian teams to Olympic Games. Its core responsibility is the few weeks, every two years, that it assumes stewardship of our summer and winter Olympic athletes.

In Rio, AOC members were aghast at what they saw. While our athletes were still competing, Coates publicly lambasted the ASC funding model and questioned the involvement of corporate leaders such as Qantas chairman Leigh Clifford who volunteer their time and expertise to chair the boards of Olympic sport.

He took particular aim at Swimming Australia president John Bertrand and ridiculed the meagre medal return from the pool. Australian journalists were briefed by AOC officials against our own swim team. Chef de mission Kitty Chiller threatened to send home our best performing athlete in Rio, Emma McKeon, for a minor curfew breach. Nine Australian athletes ended the Games inside a Brazilian police station after trying to gain entry to a basketball match with dodgy accreditation supplied by AOC officials.

Plympton says his personal relationship with Coates fractured when he confronted the AOC boss on these matters. “I think it is because of my criticism of him, behind closed doors, on his complete lack of judgment in making the calls — inappropriate and misunderstood — (about) the work the Australian Sports Commission is doing along with the national federations, of trying to get the best outcome of high performance in this country.’’ Plympton was not the only voice of dissent.

After every Games, the AOC conducts a post-mortem of all aspects of our Olympic performance. As part of the Rio review, the AOC athletes’ commission provided feedback on behalf of the athletes. On the day he tabled his report to the AOC board, commission chairman Steve Hooker delivered a blunt message.

Australian athletes wanted assurances that, come Tokyo, the AOC’s media and communications staff would act in their interests. AOC media director Mike Tancred, a loyal supporter of Coates, was livid at the suggestion that his team had been anything but supportive of Australian athletes in Rio.

Ron Harvey says the issue of Coates’s pay is a red herring. As a former chairman of the AOC remuneration committee, he approved a series of generous pay increases for the AOC boss. He tells Inquirer that although Coates’s pay arrangements appeared to be unique among NOC presidents, a more relevant benchmark was the seven-figure salaries paid to AFL chief executive Gillon McLachlan and his predecessor, Andrew Demet­riou. He says the AOC president runs Australia’s Olympic movement whereas the chief executive is merely an office manager.

“The president can go to Tokyo tomorrow and see the Japanese prime minister the next day,’’ says Harvey, a former principal private secretary to Malcolm Fraser. “Our Australian ambassador to Japan has trouble seeing the Japanese prime minister three or four times a year. The president can go to nearly 200 countries in the world and get precedence to see the head of government. His international footprint is enormous. We not only get him extremely cheap as a consultant, the Australian government gets him for nothing.’’

This might have been true under John Howard and Kevin Rudd. At the moment, the federal government doesn’t appear to get Coates at all. Last month, at the height of the tensions between the AOC and ASC, Sports Minister Greg Hunt brought forward Wylie’s reappointment as ASC chairman for a further three years. At a black-tie Sydney Institute dinner on Thursday night, Malcolm Turnbull in his keynote address singled out Danielle Roche, who was seated in the front row alongside national political and business leaders. Was the PM sending a message to Coates or merely acknowledging one of his Bondi constituents? The Roche family have long been generous donors to the Liberal Party.

When the various branches of the Olympic family gather at AOC headquarters on May 6 to decide the future shape and direction of the Australia’s Olympic movement, they will mark either the end or the beginning of the end of Coates’s reign. Even those sports still strong in their support for Coates are impatient to see his succession plans.

If Coates’s greatest ongoing value to the AOC is his influence in international sport, then it is worth noting that his term as IOC vice-president and his maximum, eight-year stint on the IOC executive expires this year.

By the time the Tokyo Games are officially opened, he will be 70, the mandatory retirement age for IOC members. However it votes, Australia’s Olympic family must contemplate a future without John Coates.