Will USOC/IOC TV squabble torpedo Chicago 2016 bid?

The highly paid cognoscenti running the U.S. Olympic Committee appear to have stepped in it again.

No sooner had USOC leaders Wednesday finished trumpeting their new, long-discussed U.S. Olympic Network, a joint venture with Comcast expected to launch sometime in 2010, than International Olympic Committee officials were responding angrily to what they called a pattern of American arrogance.

The IOC, it seems, hasn't given its ful go-ahead for the network, which would carry live events such as Olympic Trials, and also extensive Olympic archival footage. In fact, it may not even have partial go ahead with the IOC, which seems concerned about the new network's potential impact on NBC.

NBC, recall, has its own fledgling, multi-platform Olympic sports network, Universal Sports, carried in the Seattle market on Comcast channel 115 and on over-the-air digital broadcasts. It also has a long-running, passionate love affair with the IOC, which simply cannot resist advances from the network, especially when $2 billion TV rights checks are attached thereto.

Result: The USOC, famous for its insulting "cease-and-desist" letters to small businesses (including a former Olympic National Forest worker who dared publish a mountain trail map with the word "Olympic" in the title) got a little cease-and-desist letter of its own, from the IOC, the Chicago Tribune's Phil Hersh reports today.

It apparently didn't mean much to USOC leaders roughing it at a Sun Valley confab. They barged ahead with previous plans to announce the new network, anyway. And then they feigned surprise at word of raised IOC hackles.

This comes on top, recall, of an ongoing, long-simmering dispute between the two groups over distribution of international broadcast and sponsorship revenues -- a split that much of the rest of the Olympic world believes unfairly favors the United States. That dispute was put on hold recently, much to the relief of Chicago 2016 organizers looking down the barrel of an Oct. 2 IOC host city selection vote. This is the critical time period when peace and calm generally are expected to reign, not only in bidding cities, but between the bidding nations and the IOC.

But the new TV rights squabble already is being viewed as another potential landmine for the Chicago bid, already racked recently with political problems in the wake of Mayor Richard Daley's recent switcheroo decision to capitulate to the IOC's usual demand for full taxpayer indemnity against potential Games losses.

"I don't see how this can help," IOC Executive Board member Richard Carrion of Puerto Rico told the Chicago Tribune Wednesday.

Carrion further criticized the USOC in an interview with the New York Times, saying the group had been warned to hold off on the TV announcement.

"We alerted them on Monday to the serious issues we have and that we should discuss them before their announcement, but they said they had to go ahead," Carrion, a key IOC TV negotiator, told the paper. "That's not how a partnership should work. I guess this is their style of doing things."

"We've given the rights to NBC to be the Olympic network," he continued. "And I don't think something else called the Olympic network will fly."

That reaction, we are to believe, came as a surprise to the USOC's chief operating officer, Norm Bellingham.

"To say they caught us by surprise is an understatement," he told the Associated Press.

It's unclear where things go from here. Chicago 2016 officials, clearly horrified at the notion of a new IOC/USOC mud wrestle, wisely are saying nothing.

So let the conspiracy theories begin. What are the odds that NBC's Dick Ebersol, who has bragged that he comes just short of running the Olympics (see: his literal changing of night to day with regard to the swim schedule at Beijing to put Michael Phelps in East Coast primetime in the U.S.), made a phone call or two to his subjects in Lausanne, Switzerland, and urged that the fledgling U.S. Olympic Network be put to the sword?

It never has been entirely clear, after all, that public demand exists for one major Olympic sports network, let alone two. And the USOC, whose new leadership, to be charitable, seems to be scrambling to handle a political learning curve, has little time to pull this one out of the fire.