ATR First: IOC Honors Samaranch on His Centennial

(ATR) The International Olympic Committee will pay tribute to Juan Antonio Samaranch Torelló on the centenary of his birth on Friday, July 17.

Coincidentally, Thursday will mark the 40th anniversary of his election as the seventh IOC President at the 83rd Session, prior to the opening of the Moscow Olympics.

A well-informed source at the IOC revealed to Around the Rings that the tribute will consist of a memorial in the church where the Olympic leader from 1980 to 2001 attended mass during his stay in Lausanne.

It is the same church that, after Samaranch's death on April 21, 2010, was filled with nearly 4,000 people for his funeral.

This time "attendance at the chapel will be restricted to close friends and family," said the source.

The children of the former IOC helmsman, Maria Teresa and Juan Antonio Samaranch Salisachs, will be present at the religious ceremony alongside IOC President Thomas Bach.

The tribute will take place shortly after the end of the 136th IOC Session, which will for the first time be held by video conference as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.

The health crisis itself will prevent a massive turnout at the remembrance mass, including personalities from different parts of the world.

Although ATR has not been able to confirm the guest list, people who have worked alongside Samaranch since his arrival at Vidy Castle are expected, such as his personal assistant Annie Inchauspe, Francoise Zweifel, Fernando Riba and Pere Miró.

Miró, the current Deputy Director of the IOC, is the longest-running senior official at the IOC. Samaranch chose him to succeed Anselmo López after the Atlanta Olympics in 1996, at the head of Olympic Solidarity and then also gave him the role of Relations with the NOCs, due to his role in the Organizing Committee of the historic Barcelona Games -1992.

The press chief of the successful Catalan Games, colleague Pedro Palacios, his collaborator for decades and his biographer, declared this Wednesday to the Spanish agency EFE that Samaranch would have approved the difficult and complex decision to postpone the Olympic Games in Tokyo until 2021 because for him "the health of athletes came first".

Thomas Bach, who, with the backing of Samaranch, was part of the first IOC Athletes Commission in the Baden Baden Congress in 1981, has written that the Spanish Olympic leader has left a legacy of great value "and the great responsibility to continue his immense work".

ATR does not rule out that the opening of the 136th Session of the IOC could also remember the former IOC President who describes himself as the modernizer of the Olympic Movement

Written and reported by Miguel Hernandez

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