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USOC exec Larry Buendorf has spent the last 23 years protecting Team USA, and the 23 years before that protecting the president.
Photo by: BEN FISCHER / STAFF
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Photo by: AP IMAGES
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There’s no such thing as a low profile for Team USA at the Olympics, but Chief Security Officer Larry Buendorf does his best to keep the contingent incognito. It’s a mantra that’s dictated his life for nearly 50 years.
He’s so quiet, a lot of people don’t even know he stopped a presidential assassination attempt.
Before he became the U.S. Olympic Committee’s first security chief in 1993, Buendorf was a secret service agent for 23 years. He was the one who disarmed and tackled Charles Manson disciple Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme as she approached President Gerald Ford with a pistol in 1975.
“Boonie,” as he’s known, rarely speaks of that moment. As he walked the halls of the temporary USA House in Rio one rainy morning, colleagues and friends warmly greeted him. But many are clueless about his status as a bona fide hero.
Retired Olympic hockey gold medalist and IOC member Angela Ruggiero didn’t find out until after her second Games. “We had to draw it out of him,” she said.
Buendorf says he doesn’t want a reputation for something that happened in a matter of seconds more than 40 years ago that he concedes could have gone either way. He resisted this interview for months.
“If they want to know a little bit about me beyond what they know, they can go Google it,” he said. And as he sees it, he’s got a high-stakes job to do now.
“I’m really more interested in what they think of me today,” Buendorf said as his phone chimed with incoming notices from the field. “If that’s all they have to live on, that’s not a good thing. I’d like to have a reputation for what I’m doing now.”
Accounts of the Fromme assassination attempt on Ford are inconsistent at times, but Buendorf says the generally accepted history is essentially correct. She didn’t have a bullet in the chamber but the gun was loaded. The major correction he’d like to offer: He didn’t “place the webbing of his thumb in front of the hammer,” Buendorf said. “It was a .45, it’s a slide. I stopped the slide.”
He says the scariest part was when he had Fromme on the ground, holding her weapon, while the rest of the detail escaped with Ford. “First of all, I didn’t have a vest on,” he said. “Second of all, I don’t know who’s coming next. That’s seconds of thinking, as I think about it, that came and went.”
It wasn’t a matter of fate or professional perfection, he said. He reflects on how easily he might have missed Fromme, and that’s one reason he doesn’t talk about it much.
“I could have been in not such a good position if somebody had distracted me,” he said.
As head of Team USA security, Buendorf, 78, borrows from his experience on the presidential advance detail more than active protection. Rio 2016 and the Brazilian government are in charge of protecting Olympians while they’re in the village or sporting venues, so his primary role is as a liaison between the USOC, the U.S. State Department’s major events division, and local security forces to fill in gaps or adjust internal plans.
He also plans security for three off-site training facilities rented by Team USA years before the Games, and hires and oversees a small army of private security guards for those facilities. Like in his own life, he preaches a light footprint for Americans.
Because of Buendorf’s influence, American officials traverse Rio without the flags that adorn many IOC members and diplomats’ cars, and athletes don’t fly the flag outside at the village. Buendorf’s own parking pass is a wordless image of an animal. “Why put USA on a van going down the street?” he says. “You might run into the one person who doesn’t like the USA and now you’re a target.”
Incidentally, Buendorf finds the media hype around Rio’s risks ridiculous, even though several other countries’ athletes have been victims of robberies and media members say their bus was shot at Tuesday night. “I’m very comfortable,” he said.
USOC board member and Olympic gold-medal bobsledder Steve Mesler remembers landing in Turin, Italy, for the 2006 Games. Anti-American sentiment was running high with both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars aflame. He saw security guards on rooftops and heavily armed military escorts blocking off intersections. It was scary.
Until Buendorf briefed the team.
“You just all in the sudden put those things in the background, because you know Larry’s got it,” Mesler said. “He had this level of detail that reminded me of my coach, and my coach is the person I respected most in the world. Every four years, you’d get the same feeling with Larry.”
In 1993, Buendorf never expected to stay with the USOC this long. But he caught the Olympic fever, as he put it, as he traveled to Lillehammer in 1994 and then Atlanta in 1996, watching the young athletes win medal after medal. He finds it hard to contemplate the end of his career. Since initially declaring his retirement after the Rio Games, he reconsidered and now is staying around for Pyeongchang, South Korea, in 2018.
Next year will be a transition year, when he expects to begin training a replacement. When Buendorf finally calls it quits, he’s eyeing a third career in protection. He plans to volunteer with other retired agents to help find missing children.
