Some election drama this week in the U.S. Olympian and Paralympian Association (USOPA): an ethics committee found Anne Warner Cribbs ineligible for a post and ordered a new election.
The USOPA is a high-profile alumni organization for Olympians and Paralympians. The group held elections this fall for its Executive Committee. But the elections themselves stirred up an investigation by the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee’s Ethics Committee. The USOPA posts are important because the alumni organization holds two board seats on the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee board of directors.
The Ethics Committee ruled that Cribbs was ineligible for the post she’d been running for, based on her representation of herself as an Olympic gold medalist, according to The Orange County Register. Cribbs did compete in the heats of the 4×100 medley relay in 1960, and her Team USA teammates won gold in the final with a different breaststroker. But the IOC didn’t start giving out medals to prelims swimmers until 1992, so Cribbs did not win a gold medal.
The USOPC sent an email to USOPA members announcing that the Ethics Committee had called for a new election. Though that message didn’t name Cribbs, it did note that the Ethics Committee had “identified opportunities to improve the nominating process, which include conducting background checks on candidates.”
How is this even an issue? Wikipedia, an easy to find internet search references it here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Warner_(swimmer)
She placed sixth in this event at the 1960 Olympics, and also swam for the gold medal-winning U.S. team in the qualifying heats of the 4×100-meter medley relay.[1] She did not receive a medal because only those relay swimmers who competed in the event final were medal-eligible under the 1960 Olympic rules.
Does not sound like she was trying to hide anything. She swam on a gold medal team and it’s splitting hairs to say she did not. If it’s recognized now as gold to swim on a prelim team, why is it not recognized then? Unless you want to continue to support IOC injustice.
According to the article that’s linked, she’s alleged to have pulled some shady stuff when she was board chair of USA Table Tennis. I’m guessing the gold-medal fib, or whatever you want to call it, was just used as a pretense to remove her from this USOPC post after it was discovered that she had a controversial past.
“alleged to have pulled some shady stuff” is not a concrete example of anything. Sounds like someone is out to get her. Where is the article on this shady stuff, and what shady stuff was it?
I don’t know, the medal status thing kind of sounds like splitting hairs. If she had simply said she was a “prelims swimmer on the gold medal-winning Olympic medley relay team,” would she have still been eligible for the post?
From the linked article, it sounds like people didn’t like her for other reasons (perhaps justifiably), and they used her medal status as an excuse to boot her off of the committee.
I’ve seen the gold medal at her house. So how did she get it?
It sounds like this woman has serious mental problems. She probably had it made herself.
This reminds me of how ASCAs John Leonard used to go around falsely telling people he was a special forces sniper in the Vietnam War and Skip Kenney, who was, called him out on it.