Coates wants to end bloody AOC presidential campaigns

If AOC president John Coates is re-elected, he will push for new guidelines to prevent a repeat of this acrimonious campaign.

AOC president John Coates faces a battle in Saturday’s election

If Australian Olympic Committee president John Coates is re-­elected on Saturday he will push for new guidelines for future elections to prevent a repeat of the bloody power struggle Australia’s Olympic movement has endured for the past six weeks.

Coates said he was unprepared for the bitterness of the campaign waged by his opponents and believed it had damaged the Olympic brand in Australia.

He said former Australian Sports Commission chairman Greg Hartung had suggested that guidelines for future candidates would help.

“Because of the indignity with which the campaign has been run, the AOC needs to come out with some guidelines for candidatures at elections and ... maybe provide an opportunity where you get the sports together and you can have some presentations and do it all in one go,’’ Coates said.

“That’s what we do at the IOC on the election of host cities and for the last presidential election, so I think we need some guidelines so if you want to be a candidate for any position, these are the rules that you abide by, and you have some group that oversees that.

“ I think that’s necessary. I don’t like the idea of the sports being subjected to all these meetings.’’

Some sports leaders have expressed their dismay at the vitriol unleashed during the only contested presidential election the AOC has had in the 26 years that Coates has been in charge.

Coates told The Australian that professional politicians had said to him this was “as nasty as a campaign gets’’.

However, he vowed to put the “malice’’ behind him and work for all sports if he was re-elected to the top job.

He made it clear that change would be coming to the AOC ­regardless of whether he or his ­opponent, Danni Roche, were elected president.

Coates said the current AOC executive had agreed to bring in a new organisational structure around chief executive Matt ­Carroll, the former Australian Sailing CEO who started his new job this week.

Coates said he would divest many of his current executive functions to Carroll and all staff would report to him, bringing the AOC in line with normal corp­orate practice.

He will leave it up to the new board to decide what executive ­responsibilities he would retain and to set an appropriate salary.

Roche has campaigned for term limits of eight years for AOC directors and 12 years for the president but Coates, an IOC vice-president, said the AOC would be “silly’’ to introduce term limits.

He said such limits would ­preclude Australia from having a high-ranking IOC member again because of the amount of time ­required to establish an inter­national reputation in sports ­administration.

He argued that he had been AOC president for 11 years when he was appointed as an IOC ­member and it took a further eight years for him to be voted onto the executive board.

“This is the time when I have the most influence in the Olympic movement,’’ he said.

“Everyone you ask would say that I am No 2 to Bach (the IOC president).’’

Coates pointed to his influence in helping the Tokyo organising committee choose the five sports that would be added to the program for the 2020 Games (softball/baseball, karate, surfing, skateboarding and sport climbing) and to achieve gender equality across most sports.

There has been criticism of the AOC’s marketing arrangements under Coates and he said the claim that he was “on the take’’ was what hurt him most about the claims made during the campaign.

“I wasn’t paid a zack,’’ he said.

Coates also revealed how he and Roche fell out at the Beijing Olympics, souring the good relationship they had while she was an athlete and in the early stages of her corporate career.

“I wheeled her out as one of my referees in the Jones case (Coates sued radio broadcaster Alan Jones for defamation and won),’’ Coates recalled.

Roche was subsequently appointed to the Australian team’s athletes services staff for Beijing but Coates, who was Australia’s chef de mission, said she overstepped her role and had to be pulled into line.

“There had been trouble between her and the staff,’’ he said.

“She saw herself as an ALO (athlete liaison officer) but she wasn’t and I had at one stage to come in and draw the line there and I don’t think we have ever been as close as a result.’’

Coates refused to say if he believed he would win the vote at Saturday’s annual general meeting.

“You have to take this very seriously and respect them and I wouldn’t like to call myself home,’’ he said.

“There’s a lot of work to be done between now and then but I’m getting a good hearing.’’