The USOC wants your cash -- and with its salaries, might need it

Keep a grip on your wallet, Olympic fans.

Hoping to tug at your patriotic heartstrings, the U.S. Olympic Committee is about to launch a big fundraiser, "America Supports Team USA."

Nothing wrong with that. It costs money to field strong Olympic teams, and the U.S. Olympic Committee, which raises almost all its money through fundraising, broadcast revenues and sponsorships, always seems to be in need of more. Especially now, when many athletes are struggling to make ends meet because of the recession and dried-up sponsorships.

But a look at the annual tax reports filed by the USOC as a non-profit might make Americans think twice before opening their checkbooks.

Eight USOC officers made more than $300,000 in 2008. And those were the paupers. Chief operating officer Norman Bellingham took home $663,369; former CEO Jim Scherr, $619,507; former communications officer Darryl Seibel, $367,779; chief of international relations Robert Fasulo, $356,214.

On and on, with 19 topping the $200,000 mark. (See the full salarly list below). And nearly all of them live in Colorado Springs, Colo., which, last time we checked, was nowhere near the top of anyone's High Cost of Living list:

Is anyone else taken aback by those numbers? The COO of the non-profit U.S. Olympic Committee pushing $700K a year?

Is this the USOC, or AIG?

Not only are USOC executive salaries failing to decline in recessionary times, they're going hell-bent in the other direction. Bellingham, for instance, got a 63 percent raise from 2007 to 2008, federal reports indicate.

Scherr, recently ousted in a palace coup by his board of directors, apparently led by new interim CEO Stephanie Streeter (nobody's talking), got a 10.5 percent bump last year. And Seibel, also leaving the Colorado Springs offices last week under what can charitably be described as odd circumstances (who walks away from a $368,000 a year PR job that comes with an unlimited Olympics pass?) got a 7.8 percent increase.

(It's striking how many job titles on that list are preceded by the word "former," indicating that something else is askew in the corporate culture of the place. But nobody seems to leave empty handed. USOC severance money flows like wine at a Roman orgy, financial reports suggest. We won't know how much ousted chiefs like Scherr and Seibel walked away with to "pursue other interests" until next year around this time, when new IRS "Form 990" reports are filed.)

Overall, while the rest of the world cut back, USOC salaries rose from $35 million to $39 million in 2008.

This is not by accident. It's by design.

In a teleconference Friday, Streeter staunchly defended the high-and-rising USOC pay structure, and suggested it will continue.

"I believe that they are justified," she said of the salaries. "We have a significant amount of talent we're trying to attract from both the sports, corporate and other worlds. It's my opinion that you get what you pay for."

National surveys, she added, indicate USOC salaries are "not out of line" with other non-profits.

But they probably seem out of line to lower-rung people in the Olympic movement, many of whom work for a relative pittance, and believe working for the USOC, or for a sport's national governing body, is a privilege.

Still, high pay at the USOC may qualify as a victimless crime. It's tough to argue that those big USOC salaries are draining funds from athletes. In fact, the USOC's four-year financing for the national governing bodies of winter sports headed into Vancouver 2010 is 55 percent more than the same sports received in the leading into the Turin Games of 2006.

"The athletes," Streeter said, "are my top priority."

No evidence suggests otherwise. But the USOC pay figures still seem high -- particularly at a time when the rest of corporate America is cutting back, and major USOC sponsors such as Home Depot and GM and now Bank of America are bailing out.

If those salaries truly are in line with other institutions, it says more about what's wrong with corporate America than what's right about the USOC.

Add the sheer-gall factor. Does the USOC really expect citizens, out of patriotism, to make "charitable" contributions to an organization whose leaders are taking home 600K a year?

Streeter sees no such contradiction. Executive salaries simply are not on the table as a means of getting through tough economic times, even as the corporate world increasingly looks at USOC sponsorship as a decidedly non-essential expenditure. And even as the organization lays off 54 mid- and lower-level employees, supposedly to make budgetary ends meet.

"We're comfortable with what we're paying people," Streeter said.

Maybe that's because she's sharing the wealth -- although we don't know how fully. Streeter, the head of a largely closed institution that's made a vaunted push for "transparency" in recent years, refused to divulge her own salary when queried about it Friday, telling a reporter to wait a year until the USOC is forced to list it in IRS paperwork.

"You'll see it in the 990s when it's published next year," she said curtly.

Touche.

But Streeter will quickly learn that in the news business, that's called creating an issue. And for the USOC, creating this one -- while asking for disposable cash from a nation with 10-percent unemployment -- is poor timing, at best.

Isn't this the sort of PR disaster they're paying former Bush Administration propagandist Ari Fleischer an undisclosed amount of money to prevent?

Here's hoping America's Olympic braintrust gets real before reality is forced upon it -- and athletes really do wind up holding the bag.

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U.S. Olympic Committee, top salaries, 2008:

Norman Bellingham, chief operating officer: $663,369
Jim Scherr, former chief executive officer: $619,507
Darryl Seibel, chief communications officer: $367,779
Robert Fasulo, chief of international relations: $356,214
Rick Burton, former chief marketing officer: $345,326
Courtney Harrison, former chief of member and event services: $335,016
Damani Short, former chief information officer: $323,336
Rana Dershowitz, general counsel/chief of legal and government affairs: $303,264
Steve Roush, former chief of sport performance: $298,524
Walter Glover, chief financial officer: $287,196
Chris Duplanty, USOC board liaison: $281,747
Steve Bull, former director of government relations: $249,067
Charlie Huebner, chief of U.S. Paralympics: $246,723
Larry Buendorf, chief of security: $235,299
Doug Ingram, director of international games: $228,583
Chris Sullivan, chief bid officer: $213,292
Gary Johansen, associate general counsel: $208,532
Amy Savela, associate general counsel: $207,824
John Pierce: managing director of brand and research management: $202,260
Debra Yoshimura, managing director of audit: $196,676