Olympic-sized lies
USOC president resigns after Peglar's background check
By Tori Peglar

Tori Peglar

When (a University of Colorado) alumni magazine editor asked me to write an article on Sandra Baldwin, the first female president of the United States Olympic Committee, I jumped at the opportunity. Defying seemingly insurmountable odds, Baldwin had broken through the glass ceiling of the Olympic Committee in 2000, shattering a 106-year streak of male presidents.

Her credentials were impressive: a bachelor's degree from the University of Colorado, a doctorate from Arizona State University, professor for 11 years and a successful real estate executive. She had even worked as a river guide, a sign of her drive for adventure and tolerance for uncertainty.

But when I turned in my story on Baldwin's accomplishments, the magazine's fact-checkers could not find her in the University of Colorado's listing of graduates and degrees. I called CU's academic records department for clarification, but Baldwin turned up only under her maiden name, Mary Alexandra Hawes, 1957-59.

There had to be a mistake. I called Arizona State University to verify that Baldwin had received her doctorate there in 1967. By the time the conversation ended, my neat little package of a story had unraveled. There was no Ph.D. under Baldwin's name – only a B.A. in 1962 and an M.A. in 1969. Across the phone line that stretched from the Arizona desert to the foothills of Colorado, I felt the rush of catching someone in a lie.

Almost every major newspaper in the country had written about Baldwin and her academic credentials, yet not one of them, apparently, had ever bothered to check them. Some newspapers had even mentioned the title of her dissertation – "Neoclassic Backgrounds of Nathaniel Hawthorne's Aesthetics" – and more than one had noted that she was a tenured professor. It suddenly dawned on me that there could be as few as two people in the whole world who knew that Baldwin's academic credentials were false. I was one of them.

The adrenaline rushed through my body as I imagined the headlines on my story. But my stomach dropped when I thought of Baldwin. The news could brand her in the same way adultery had branded Hester Prynne in Hawthorne's novel "The Scarlet Letter."

As a reporter, I've covered my share of Greek tragedies. I've stood on a rural highway, piecing together a story of a desperate woman who fatally jumped from her moving car while her husband and children watched from their seats. I've written about a teacher who wrote fanatical love letters to his sixth-grade student. I've interviewed a woman who fought breast cancer and the public's ignorance of the disease until the cancer consumed her. Stories like these gleam with the fragility of the human condition in its ugliest and most tragic form.

But the Baldwin story was harder for me to write, perhaps because of her high-profile position. I squirmed as I acknowledged one journalistic truth: A story can melt a person's reputation into a puddle of sound bites and news clips. I found myself in a quandary: to disclose the inaccuracies or not.

It's hard to believe today that there are still women who are the "first" female president or CEO of companies and organizations. But Baldwin was a "first" at the U.S. Olympic Committee, and I almost believed that made her untouchable. I was born one year after Title IX became law, which automatically made me a child of the women's movement. As a teenager, I watched my country learn how to talk about rape and sexual harassment. "Glass ceiling" became a household word. Would I be doing a disservice to the women's movement by exposing one of its pioneers?

In the end, I chose to expose the truth for two reasons: my desire to jump on a story that would certainly make national headlines, and my conclusion that a lie is a lie no matter what gender you are.

After Baldwin admitted to falsifying her degrees to me in a phone interview from Malaysia where she was attending an Olympic conference, I called up Mike Moran, the chief communications officers for the U.S. Olympic Committee, to get his comments. Then, since it was clear that the university alumni magazine was not the place for this story, I e-mailed the piece to The Greeley Tribune, a newspaper in Colorado where I had worked as an education reporter until last summer.

But the Tribune, swamped with breaking local news stories, decided to hold my story for comment from another member of the Olympic committee. Meanwhile, a wire service reported that Baldwin had abruptly left Malaysia without explanation. In fact, Baldwin, alerted by Moran, had left for the States to face the publicity that would inevitably follow the story they knew was coming. But it didn't take long for Olympic reporters at the Chicago Tribune, The Denver Post and Associated Press, among others, to put two and two together with help from inside sources.

The story swept across the country like a hurricane. The next day, she resigned.

But I lost more than a byline that day. Watching from the calm of the storm, part of me wished I had never unearthed the inaccuracies. Baldwin shattered my naïve illusion that people in positions of power got there because they did all of the things they said they did.

Sometimes, it's more rewarding to cover prom fund-raisers.

(Bylines editor's note: Tori Peglar teaches at the University of Colorado at Boulder and works as outreach coordinator at the CU Heritage Center. Although she didn't get the byline on the story, The Denver Post and an ethics columnist for The New York Times gave Peglar credit for discovering Baldwin's fabrications.)