Reid: Track's Hightower should step up and step…
Reid: Track's Hightower should step up and step aside
USATF president Stephanie Hightower, center, with L.A. City Council president Herb Wesson, left, and L.A. mayor Eric Garcetti in January, has IAAF Council aspirations.
By Scott Reid | sreid@scng.com | Orange County Register
December 12, 2014 at 11:00 p.m.
This should be a time of celebration for American track and field, a time of triumph and promise.
The sport should be basking in the glow of Meb Keflezighi's Boston Marathon triumph, celebrating a summer when Jenny Simpson emerged as the best female miler on the planet and steeplechasers Evan Jager and Emma Coburn stamped themselves as medal contenders for Rio de Janeiro, and reveling in a season in which young guns such as Kaylin Whitney and the U.S. junior men's 4×100-meter relay pronounced themselves ready to challenge Jamaica's world sprint domination.
Instead, the spotlight has been hijacked by USA Track & Field president Stephanie Hightower.
Hightower is the poster child both for why U.S. track, despite its competitive success, has continued to fade from the radar of mainstream America, and an increasingly all-too-common class of Olympic and international sports officials who have betrayed what's best for their sport to chase their own self-serving agendas.
Yet even in this age of the Blatter-fication of sports governing bodies, Hightower might be without equal in terms of the disparity between her massive ego and her actual achievements.
With her six-year tenure marred by incompetence, dysfunction and one high-profile disaster after another, Hightower's only apparent talent has been in backroom politics. Let's put it this way: Hightower would fit right in on the FIFA board.
Which brings us to Hightower's latest coup, launched from the shadows.
The International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) is track's global governing body. The IAAF is governed by the IAAF Council, whose 27 members are elected to four-year terms by representatives of the IAAF's 212-member federations the year before the Olympic Games. Each nation can nominate one candidate.
At last week's USA Track & Field convention in Anaheim, the organization's membership voted 392-70 to recommend that the group's board nominate Bob Hersh for election to the IAAF Council. It would be hard to find a more dedicated, versatile or ethical person in U.S. track than Hersh, who in four four-year terms on the council has risen to IAAF senior vice president.
Hersh is so well respected internationally that he received more votes in the last IAAF election than Olympic champions Sebastian Coe, the London 2012 CEO, and Sergey Bubka. Either Coe or Bubka is expected to be elected IAAF president in 2015.
But from almost the minute she was elected in December 2008, Hightower has been angling behind the scenes for Hersh's IAAF position. Until 2009 the IAAF nominee was selected by the full USATF membership. Hightower pushed for the 12-member USATF board to make the selection, and fought the compromise that eventually was implemented that required a two-thirds vote by the board to overturn the membership recommendation.
In Anaheim, Hightower finally pulled off her power grab as the pro-Hightower board voted 11 to 1 to disregard the membership's landslide vote for Hersh and instead nominate Hightower for the IAAF Council.
The move was especially shortsighted given that the U.S. now loses all the international clout Hersh built up and there is no guarantee Hightower will be elected to the council.
"Turns out our @usatf board is full of (expletive) except one," former U.S. 5,000-meter champion Lauren Fleshman tweeted. "Only one member voted with the OVERWHELMING constituent support of Bob Hersh."
"Members of @usatf Board of Directors that voted to disregard the membership's recommendation: you should be ASHAMED of yourselves!!!" U.S. middle distance runner David Torrence tweeted. "Hightower shows poor professionalism as President, & I ALONG with 392 other voting members, do NOT believe in her as IAAF Council."
Hightower's lack of professionalism and questionable ethics have long been evident.
A 1992 report by Ohio inspector general David D. Sturtz found that Hightower spent 160 hours on the Ohio taxpayers' dime making 2,695 local and long distance calls while working in the communications office of the Department of Mental Health. Hightower initially contested some of the calls but agreed to drop the matter in a deal in which the state agreed not to seek repayment of the $3,291 that the calls cost in wages and benefits.
On Hightower's watch, Columbus' Urban League lost a $7.5 million federal Head Start grant, which accounted for 72 percent of the organization's budget. During Hightower's six scandal-ridden years on the Columbus Board of Education, she successfully maneuvered to limit public comments at board meetings, and the district lost 6,000 students to private or charter schools.
The district also enrolled Hightower's child at a highly sought-after school even though she had not filed the proper paperwork and bypassed the normal lottery system that allocated students into the school, according to the Columbus Dispatch.
Hightower was back in the headlines in her hometown last year when she mistakenly told radio station WOSU-FM that "when you look at the Columbus City Schools, there is over 95 percent of those children who have fathers or mothers that have been incarcerated at one point in time."
U.S. track exists largely due to the generosity of a handful of shoe companies, most notably Nike. The folks in Beaverton have often been heavy-handed in trying to exert control over the sport at the expense of its athletes. But even with all its flaws Nike has kept the sport from going the way of cinder tracks.
The question is what happens when Uncle Phil is no longer in the picture? The survival of American track would best not be entrusted to the likes of Hightower.
Fleshman, a five-time NCAA champion at Stanford, was on the right track when she tweeted "a real leader understands when nobody wants you to lead them, and step aside."
It's time the USATF membership takes back the sport from Hightower and recall her and the board. Now that would be something the sport could truly celebrate.
Contact the writer: sreid@ocregister.com
Scott Reid | Reporter
Scott M. Reid is a sports enterprise/investigative reporter for the Orange County Register. He also covers Olympic and international sports as well as the Los Angeles' bid to host the 2024 Olympic Games. His work for the Register has led to investigations by the International Olympic Committee, the U.S. Department of Education, the California Legislature, and the national governing bodies for gymnastics and swimming. Reid's 2011 reporting on wide spread sexual abuse within USA Gymnastics and the governing body's failure to effectively address it led to Don Peters, coach of the 1984 record-setting Olympic team, being banned from the sport for life. His reporting also prompted USA Gymnastics to adopt new guidelines and policies dealing with sexual abuse. Reid's 2012 and 2013 reporting on sexual abuse within USA Swimming led to the banishment of two top level coaches. Reid has won 11 Associated Press Sports Editors awards for investigative reporting since 1999. He has also been honored by APSE for game writing, and enterprise, news, and beat reporting. He was an Investigative Reporters and Editors award finalist in 2002 and 2003. Prior to joining the Register in 1996, Reid worked for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the Dallas Times Herald. He has a B.A. in the History of the Americas from the University of Washington.
sreid@scng.com
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