IOC official seeks to avoid age limit
Associated Press
ACAPULCO, Mexico -- One of the most powerful figures in the Olympic movement is trying to get around the age-limit rules to keep his high-ranking IOC position until 2014.
Mario Vazquez Rana, the Mexican media magnate who has headed the Association of National Olympic Committees for 31 years, was re-elected this week to another four-year term.
The 78-year-old Vazquez Rana will be 82 at the end of his next mandate. That would put him two years past the International Olympic Committee's mandatory retirement age of 80.
Vazquez Rana pushed through an ANOC resolution Friday calling on the IOC to let him retain his spot on the IOC and its policy-making executive board through the rest of his term.
"I feel like I am 60," Vazquez Rana said. "As long as I can keep on working, I will keep on working, whatever my chronological age."
Vazquez Rana was elected to the IOC in 1991. As leader of the world's national Olympic bodies, he automatically gets a seat on the executive board.
The proposal sets up a sensitive choice for the IOC, which enacted the age limit rule as one of its major reforms in the wake of the Salt Lake City corruption scandal.
"I owe it to my colleagues on the executive board to discuss it with them," IOC President Jacques Rogge said, declining to comment on the merits of the case. Vazquez Rana's status is unlikely to be decided at the current IOC board meetings in Acapulco. The issue is expected to be discussed at the next board meeting in Lausanne, Switzerland, in January.