A long-running feud at the highest levels of USA Track & Field will finally come to a head this summer against the backdrop of a governance debate playing out across the U.S. Olympic movement.
It’s been three months since veteran track coach Vin Lananna filed a formal grievance against the USATF board, accusing it of effectively negating the 2016 membership vote that made Lananna president by kicking him off the board.
Lananna, elected to a four-year term, has been out of power since the board put him on “temporary administrative leave” in February 2018, citing alleged conflicts of interest involving his former role as president of TrackTown USA and the federal investigation into the 2021 IAAF World Championships being awarded to the Eugene, Ore., facility. He claims the vote was illegitimate under USATF bylaws.
Insiders expect a ruling on his grievance in the next few months. Lananna is seeking full restoration of his position as president and, crucially, also to be named chairman of the board of directors.
But the Lananna drama is more than a personality clash. It’s the latest fault line in a long-running debate over who should hold the real power in Olympic sports governing bodies: a board of directors mostly composed of people with no direct ties to the sport, and who are free to name a chairman from their own ranks; or the organization’s paid membership through direct elections.
Longtime track coach Vin Lananna has filed a grievance to be reinstated as president and chairman of the board of USA Track & Field.ap images
This is a particularly ripe issue at USA Track & Field because the organization rewrote its bylaws in 2015, effective Jan. 1, 2019, to consolidate the elected board president position with the chairman. This means members — not the board — decide who is chairman, a position that wields outsized power through control of the agenda and direct supervision of CEO Max Siegel.
That move would appear to put USATF at odds with the U.S. Olympic Committee, which has forced USA Diving and USA Boxing to install new, independent directors this year after finding conflicts of interest with insider chairmen. The USOC declined to comment for this article, but in 2014, then-USOC CEO Scott Blackmun told USATF that its board is too susceptible to narrow member interests because so many of them are directly elected.
Interim USATF board president and chair Mike Conley says the chairman and president roles should be held separately.
“I think the president represents pretty much the broad constituency base of the organization, and has a lot of duties in doing that, in communication, and getting out in the field and going to events,” Conley said. “That should be the focus of the president. And the chair should stay at the 30,000-foot level and run the board and the business of the organization.”
The Lananna grievance stands separately from the bigger issue of governance policy. But it’s not the first time that rank-and-file USATF members say the board has ignored clear vote results. In 2014, the board named Stephanie Hightower as its representative to the IAAF after delegates had voted for Bob Hersh. Even if the rest of the board sincerely thought Lananna should step down during the investigation, his supporters say, that is the members’ decision to make.
David Greifinger, a Los Angeles-area attorney who wrote the bylaw change in 2015 and now represents Lananna in his grievance, understands the USOC’s desire to have more rigorous oversight of staff. But the answer, he said, is professional auditing, not undermining members.
“Given that USATF is a democratic organization that, by and large, picks its own leadership, it seems to me that the constituents’ pick should be the one that runs the show,” Greifinger said.
Lananna said he campaigned expecting to serve in the combined chairman-president role based on the change to the bylaws (previously, presidents could seek the chairman position once they joined the board). But his grievance is about the board’s refusal to follow bylaws, which don’t allow the board to remove a president without a membership vote.
The USATF board has not issued a formal answer to Lananna’s grievance. A required attempt at mediation failed. A resolution by September is “feasible,” said Norman Wain, USATF general counsel.
