Ottavio Cinquanta

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Ottavio Cinquanta (Rome, 1938) is President of the International Skating Union and a member of the International Olympic Committee. He has held the ISU position since 1994 and the IOC position since 1996. Prior to becoming ISU President, he was one of the members of its Technical Committee for short track speed skating from its inception in 1975, and was elected Vice President for speed skating in 1992.

Cinquanta grew up in Milan, Italy where he trained as a speed skater. His family was in modest circumstances. Cinquanta never attended university, but he was trained as an accountant. At the time of his election to the ISU presidency, at the age of 56, he retired from his position as a manager at Tusco Petrol, an Italian oil company.

When Cinquanta was first elected to the ISU Presidency, he was initially regarded as a progressive who introduced prize money at ISU events after negotiating a $22 million/year television contract with ABC Sports, which put the federation on much firmer ground with respect to competition from the unsanctioned professional skating competitions which had become popular in the wake of the attack on Nancy Kerrigan in 1994. The television money also allowed the ISU to fund a variety of developmental programs in both figure skating and speed skating, including, for example, the ISU Junior Grand Prix.

However, because of his speed skating background, Cinquanta has been the subject of a considerable amount of criticism from the figure skating community, particularly in Canada and the United States. During the 2002 Olympic Winter Games figure skating scandal, he was criticized for his evasiveness and his admission that he didn't "know figure skating so well".^[1] In spite of his professed lack of knowledge about the sport, he proposed a new scoring system for figure skating^[2] whose major feature is secrecy which would prevent anyone from ever knowing how an individual judge had marked the competition. The implementation of secret judging at the 2003 World Figure Skating Championships in Washington, D.C., was controversial enough to result in a fan protest at that event ^[3], with Cinquanta personally being jeered by the audience whenever he was introduced.^[4]^[5]

Cinquanta had previously been loudly booed by fans at the 1996 World Figure Skating Championships in Edmonton, Alberta, after he invoked a technicality to prevent local skating favorite Kurt Browning from skating in the opening ceremony of that event^[6]^[7] and again at the 1998 Championships in Minneapolis, Minnesota.^[8]

In spite of his unpopularity among North American fans, Cinquanta has been re-elected to the ISU presidency without opposition multiple times.