IOC postpones final decision on Bob Hasan expulsion

IOC postpones final decision on Bob Hasan expulsion

Reuters, Mexico City

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) decided on Monday to postpone a final decision until July on whether to exclude Indonesia's Muhammad "Bob" Hasan from the organization.

An IOC session opening on Wednesday was due to make a decision on Hasan who was suspended from the IOC last year after being sentenced in Jakarta to six years jail for graft.

But IOC director general Francois Carrard said a meeting of the IOC's ruling executive board decided to postpone a final vote until the July session in Prague because a judicial review of the case was still being carried out in Indonesia.

"A person has the natural right for a full process and the executive board decided to suspend the decision until Prague," he said.

Hasan, a golfing partner of former Indonesian president Soeharto, remains suspended from the IOC which he joined in 1994.

It is rare for the IOC to throw out a member although 10 were forced to leave the organization during the Salt Lake City corruption scandal in 1998 and 1999.

The IOC is keen to clean up its image after the worst corruption scandal in its history when the 10 members broke rules on accepting gifts from Salt Lake when it was bidding to host last February's Games in the mid-1990s.

Meanwhile, the head of modern pentathlon, one of the oldest Olympic sports, said on Monday that the IOC would be voting against its "soul" if it decided to throw the sport out of the Summer Games this week.

Speaking as International Olympic Committee (IOC) members started to gather for a meeting where they could scrap three sports from the Games for the first time since 1936, Klaus Schormann said he had received a lot of support in his campaign to save modern pentathlon, introduced into the Games in 1912.

The sport's Olympic future is under threat together with baseball and softball as IOC president Jacques Rogge looks to scale down the Games after decades of expansionism under his predecessor Juan Antonio Samaranch.

"I have talked to more than 80 IOC members and they have been very supportive. They say the sport is the soul of the Olympic movement. It is part of our moment and they support that," the International Modern Pentathlon Federation (UIPM) president said in an interview.

Since his election as president last year, Rogge, concerned that the Summer Olympics are getting too big and expensive to organize, has pledged to try to cut the size of the Games. For the first time since 1936, an IOC session of all members opening on Wednesday will discuss proposals to chop sports from the program.

An IOC report published in August said baseball and softball were very popular in certain countries but said the popularity was not reflected throughout entire regions or continents. It said there was a lack of global participation by nations and athletes in modern pentathlon because it was expensive to practice.

Money is very much at the heart of these proposals since it costs host cities a great deal of money to build baseball and softball stadiums which can be difficult to use for other sports afterwards.