主题：【整理】纽约时报：萨马兰奇逝世 -- 元亨利

Following is part of the obituary in The New York Times for Samaranch. It talks about his achievements, which were only, perhaps, matched by that of Coubertin, the founder of the modern Olympic Games. It also talks about the problems he faced during his tenure: scandals, corruptions and the issue of doping. Above all, to Chinese, Samaranch was a major agent in awarding Olympic Games to Beijing, China in 2008. We will miss him.

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Juan Antonio Samaranch, Who Transformed the Olympics, Dies at 89

By JERE LONGMAN

Published: April 21, 2010

Juan Antonio Samaranch, a dominant figure in the modern Olympic movement who over 21 years guided the Games from a period of boycotts and near bankruptcy to an era of unprecedented success and damaging scandal, died on Wednesday in his home city, Barcelona, Spain. He was 89.

The cause was heart failure, said a spokesman for the Quirón hospital in Barcelona, where Mr. Samaranch had been admitted.

In a statement on Wednesday, Jacques Rogge, who succeeded Mr. Samaranch as president of the International Olympic Committee, called him “the man who built up the Olympic Games of the modern era.”

Mr. Samaranch, a former Spanish diplomat, led the I.O.C. from 1980 to 2001. Inheriting an organization with only $200,000 in cash reserves, he guided its transformation into a multibillion-dollar enterprise.

His stamp on the Games was considerable. Major boycotts by Africans, Americans and Soviets hobbled the Olympics from the mid-1970s through the mid-’80s, and he navigated an end to them. Under a program called Olympic Solidarity, he brought financial aid to underdeveloped nations and encouraged the whole world to participate in the Games, from Jamaican bobsledders to Syrian heptathletes.

He opened one of the most closed old-boy clubs, welcoming women as members of the I.O.C. and elevating the participation of female athletes in the Winter and Summer Games to more than 40 percent.

He also ended the sham of amateurism. Americans had often been paid under the table, and Eastern bloc athletes had essentially been state-sponsored employees. But under Mr. Samaranch, many of the world’s greatest professional athletes, including Michael Jordan and Lance Armstrong, became Olympians, and athletes who were once forced to abandon their Olympic hopes after college were able to continue to compete while building financially successful careers.

Mr. Samaranch’s final achievement before stepping down on July 16, 2001, was to bring the 2008 Summer Games to Beijing, thus awarding one of the world’s foremost sporting events to the world’s most populous nation for the first time.

His political skills were evident earlier in the separate participation in the Games of China and Taiwan; in the return of South Africa to the Olympics after apartheid was dismantled; in the participation of the former Soviet republics as the Unified Team in 1992 after the Eastern bloc collapsed; and in the joint march of North Korea and South Korea at the opening ceremonies of the 2000 Summer Games in Sydney, Australia.

Only Pierre de Coubertin, the French baron who founded the modern Games in 1896, had a longer tenure than Mr. Samaranch’s. And to John J. MacAloon, a historian of the Olympics and a professor at the University of Chicago, no Olympics leader, aside from de Coubertin, was more significant.

“It’s rare that a single person manages to transform so thoroughly an international organization as important as the I.O.C., or an institution as significant as the Olympic Games,” Professor MacAloon said. “His major achievement was to give the I.O.C. a political competence, an ability to deal with states and the United Nations in a way that earned both interest and respect.”

But Mr. Samaranch’s tenure was also marred by scandal. Ten Olympic committee members either resigned or were expelled in the late 1990s after receiving more than $1 million in cash, gifts, scholarships and other benefits as part of Salt Lake City’s winning bid for the 2002 Winter Games. Other members were linked to improprieties in the bidding for the Atlanta and Sydney Olympics.

As a former sports official in Spain in the fascist Franco regime, Mr. Samaranch had come to tolerate a degree of corruption. He tended to co-opt his enemies and ignore the unsavory reputations of some of the members he brought into the I.O.C., among them Francis Nyangweso, a former defense chief for the murderous Ugandan dictator Idi Amin.

“It’s a little like the story of the baboon climbing a pole,” Dick Pound, an I.O.C. delegate from Montreal, said. “The higher the baboon climbs, the more undesirable are the parts exposed.”

While the Games became immensely popular under Mr. Samaranch, they also became hugely expensive and difficult to manage. At the 2000 Sydney Games, journalists outnumbered athletes by 2 to 1, state government bailouts totaled $140 million, and the city was left with huge, little-used stadiums.

Mr. Samaranch was also faulted over the issue of doping, which the I.O.C. did not begin to take seriously until after the police uncovered a scandal that nearly shut down the 1998 Tour de France. Many Olympic officials said the failure to mount an effective campaign against the use of banned performance-enhancing drugs was Mr. Samaranch’s greatest deficiency.

When he replaced Mr. Samaranch, Dr. Rogge said doping was the biggest crisis facing international sport. “It is the credibility of sport that is at risk,” he said.