AT last year's Winter Games, the President of the International Olympic Committee, Juan Antonio Samaranch, was presented with a samurai sabre. It now seems high time for the 78-year-old patriarch to fall on his Olympic sword. He, himself, is under a cloud following the disclosure that he accepted a shotgun and a hand gun worth more than the limit allowed for such gifts from the committee bidding to take the Games to Salt Lake City. But the reasons he should step down are more concerned with other revelations of worms in the Olympic bud.
First there was the scandal surrounding the bid by Salt Lake City for the Winter Games in 2002. Mr Samaranch says up to 16 members of the International Olympic Committee which decides where the Games shall be held were implicated in an investigation into cash payments, college scholarships, free medical treatment, lavish gifts and other inducements related to the US city's winning bid. Two members of the IOC have resigned already.
Now a huge shadow has been cast over Sydney's winning bid for next year's Summer Games after an Australian IOC member admitted to having offered US$70,000 to two African IOC members the night before the Australian city beat Beijing as the site for the event by just two votes. A special meeting is under way in Switzerland this weekend of top IOC officials to discuss whether all the 16 should resign - or be pushed. And in March, an assembly will be held with Mr Samaranch saying his priority is to restore 'the prestige' of the IOC and reiterating that he has no intention of resigning.
He has held on tenaciously in the past to his post, getting his tenure extended by six years from the usual retirement age. But the Olympic movement needs a new breath of life. Any sports event as huge as the Olympics cannot remain impervious to the pressures of money. The IOC needs to be reformed to take account of the realities of today's sporting universe to deal with the challenges of lobbying, drugs and the realities of shamateurism.
Mr Samaranch has presided over an enormous growth in the Olympic Games, but he has come to symbolise an old oligarchy which is out of touch with the heady mixture of money and democracy that characterises international sport today. The Olympics still represent an ideal; it needs a new leader and a new direction to live up to the glories of its past.