DENVER (AP) — More than 27 months since it was greenlighted by Congress, the panel established to investigate the inner workings of the U.S. Olympic structure has yet to conduct a formal interview because of bureaucratic red tape and slow action from the same lawmakers who had expressed a pressing need for better oversight.
Two Olympics — the Summer Games in Tokyo and Winter Games in Beijing — have come and gone since the Commission on the State of U.S. Olympics and Paralympics was signed into law and charged with looking into, among other topics, the handling of sex-abuse cases that were mismanaged for decades.
It took 19 months after it was established by the new law in October 2020 for the commission to be able to access the $2 million Congress budgeted for its use, then four more months for the government to post the job, and four months after that to identify and hire the panel’s executive director. Now that the money is available and the leader is in place, budgeting laws dictate that the commission has to decide how to spend the $2 million by Sept. 30 or risk not being able to use it.
Executive director Kevin Brown – who, to this date, is the panel’s only paid employee – says it’s an unrealistic timeline. He said emails and phone calls explaining the issue to lawmakers and their staffs have not led to much discussion, let alone an extension. Brown’s group plans on conducting dozens of interviews and gathering thousands of pages of documents. It must hold at least one public hearing and write a report to detail its findings. He anticipates the project will take around a year.