United States Olympic Committee
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The United States Olympic Committee (USOC) is a non-profit organization that serves as the National Olympic Committee (NOC) for the United States and coordinates the relationship between the United States Anti-Doping Agency and the World Anti-Doping Agency and various international sports federations. Under the Ted Stevens Olympic and Amateur Sports Act, the Committee is chartered by the United States government as a monopoly.
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[edit] Mission
As a NOC, the Committee supports American athletes in general and Olympic athletes in specific and selects and enters athletes for participation in the Games of the Olympiad, Olympic Winter Games, and Pan American Games. The Committee provides training centers, funds, and support staff to elite athletes.
The USOC also acts as the United States representative for all Olympic matters, including for the evaluation cities that are prospective nominees to host an iteration of the Olympic Games; the Committee ultimately submits a bid to the International Olympic Committee (IOC) on behalf of a selected city.
[edit] History
Upon the 1894 founding of the IOC, the two constituent American members, James P. Sullivan and William Milligan Sloane, formed a committee to organize the participation of American athletes in the Games of the I Olympiad contested two years thence in Athens, Greece.
The Committee operated under various names until it acquired its present name in 1961, and it subsequently assumed responsibility for some training of American participants in the Paralympic Games, some of whom, as with Olympic athletes, coaches, and promoters it honors, in view of athletic achievement, sportsmanship, or effort to generate interest in a sport amongst prospective athletes and prospective spectators and fans, with induction into the U.S. Olympic Hall of Fame.[1]
[edit] Awards conferred
Since 1974, the USOC, upon the vote of its board of directors and members of the print and broadcast media from amongst athletes nominated by the sport governing bodies representing those sports that are contested at the Olympic level, has conferred athlete of the year honors to each of a male and female; in 1996, the Committee added an award for best team. [2]
[edit] Governance
The Committee is led by a twelve-member board of directors composed of corporate executives, representatives from certain national sports federations, and former Olympic athletes. Peter Ueberroth, the president of the committee that organized the Games of the XXIII Olympiad, contested in 1984 in Los Angeles, California, serves at present as the head of the USOC.
