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.