- USA Track & Field (USATF) received two bids to host the 2024 Olympic Marathon Trials, from Orlando, Florida, and Chattanooga, Tennessee.
- Late in the selection process, USATF, with the support of the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee (USOPC), disqualified Chattanooga’s bid, due to a conflict of interest. A member of USATF’s board of directors, Jim Estes, was a consultant on Chattanooga’s bid.
- Estes, however, had disclosed his role with Chattanooga, in May 2022. USATF leadership knew about the perceived conflict but was unclear in their instructions to Estes about how to handle it. As the bid process went on, he recused himself from discussions during board meetings on the Olympic Marathon Trials.
- Estes attended the Chattanooga site visit and then was asked to leave. After the site visit, USOPC began an investigation into Estes’s role. But they did not interview Estes until after Chattanooga had been disqualified.
On November 8, USA Track & Field (USATF) announced that the 2024 Olympic Marathon Trials had been awarded to Orlando.
On the same day, USATF CEO Max Siegel sent a letter to organizers from Chattanooga, Tennessee, the only other city that had bid on hosting the event, informing them that their bid had been disqualified.
The disqualification was due to the involvement of Jim Estes, who serves on the USATF board of directors and was also consulting on the Chattanooga bid—even though Estes had informed USATF in writing of his consulting role with Chattanooga, had discussed it on a call with leadership of USATF, and had recused himself from board discussions around the Olympic Marathon Trials.
A copy of Siegel’s letter, which was provided to Runner’s World by the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee (USOPC), read, in part, as follows:
“It is not disputed that Jim Estes, a sitting member of the USATF Board of Directors was a paid consultant of your local organizing committee with obligations specific to this bid. That fact on its face impacts the credibility of your submission to such a degree that consideration of it as a viable bid risks the integrity of the process.”
The decision to disqualify happened on October 25. “USATF made the final decision and it was aligned and agreed upon by the USOPC,” Kate Hartman, a spokesperson for the USOPC, wrote in an email to Runner’s World.
No clear direction
In a conversation with Runner’s World and his attorney, Jon Little, Estes presented his version of events.
He first disclosed his relationship with Chattanooga in a conflict of interest form he submitted in May 2022. Conflict of interest (COI) forms are required for board members of national governing bodies. Conflicts are not uncommon in Olympic sports, where small numbers of people have highly specialized areas of expertise that are useful across the sports world.
Estes—who was an employee of USATF from 2005 to 2016—said he has been through several board training sessions, where board members are urged to disclose their potential conflicts of interest. The saying in these cases is “disclose and recuse,” which is what he did.
Estes, who also consults on other prominent running events throughout the U.S., such as the Houston Marathon and the Twin Cities Marathon, said he heard no objections or concerns raised after disclosing his Chattanooga ties. He stood to earn a consulting fee of less than $8,000 for advising on technical aspects of Chattanooga’s bid.
“It is fair to say that the initial May disclosure was overlooked, albeit not intentionally,” Hartman wrote.
In July, Estes updated his COI form again to disclose he was employed by another national governing body, USA Badminton.
At the end of July, USATF’s chief operating officer, Renee Washington, informed the USATF ethics committee and the USOPC of Estes’s conflicts, after he submitted the updated form.
“The July 31 email exchange between USOPC and USATF was focused on Mr. Estes’ accepting a role as COO for USA Badminton,” Hartman wrote. “That was flagged by USOPC as a COI violation to USATF. That email triggered USATF and their ethics committee to look closely at the additional disclosures that Mr. Estes provided, and that’s when it was discovered that the full list of disclosures included Chattanooga.”
On August 7, Estes had a phone call with Washington, Norman Wain, USATF’s general counsel, and Mike Conley, the chair of USATF’s board of directors. The call was to discuss Estes’s conflicts, and according to Estes, the phone call provided no clear direction of how he should proceed beyond communicating with Conley when information about the Olympic Marathon Trials was being discussed in board meetings.
Conley wrote in an email to Runner’s World that his understanding after the August 7 call was “the office, Jim, and I would regroup to discuss conflicts as they arise.”
At no point, Estes said, was he told that his involvement with Chattanooga would cause the city’s bid to be disqualified. If he had heard that, he would have had two choices—resign from the board or stop working with Chattanooga. He would have stepped away from Chattanooga—he wouldn’t have wanted to be the reason the city couldn’t move forward as a candidate to host.
The matter didn’t come up again until Estes went to Chattanooga during the site visit, September 26–27. Site visits allow bidding cities to give USATF and USOPC staff and volunteers a presentation on their plans for the event, a tour of a potential course, and a chance to experience the community. Orlando had had its site visit during the previous week.
On the second day of the site visit, a USATF staffer, Adam Schmenk, who is the managing director of events and entertainment, raised concerns to Chattanooga organizers about Estes’s presence.
Estes was asked by Chattanooga organizers to leave—and he did (even though the process did not follow what he thought had been discussed during the August 7 call, when concerns were supposed to go through Conley).
That was the last Estes knew about the Marathon Trials discussion for 6 weeks.
Hartman wrote to Runner’s World that the site visit was the first time Estes’s involvement in that bid became known to USOPC, which opened its investigation immediately following the site visit.
An unusual board vote
On October 9, the USATF board of directors was meeting at a retreat in Miami Beach. Estes was not there; he was working at the Chicago Marathon with elite athletes, so he joined the meeting via Zoom as did several other board members.
The board went into executive session—which means the discussion is not recorded into the meeting minutes; it remains private to those who are attending the meeting.
During the executive session, Conley sent a text to Estes to tell him that the subject of the Olympic Marathon Trials would be coming up, and asking him to excuse himself when it did. Estes did, and his recusal is noted in the board meeting minutes.
The executive session lasted about an hour, according to minutes. After the executive session, the board took a vote and decided, unanimously with one abstention, to issue an “advisory vote of approval for the 2024 USATF Olympic Trials - Marathon to be awarded to Chattanooga.” The minutes note that “final approval remains with the USATF National Office.”
In other words, the decision on the Trials site was not the board’s to make. So why was it being discussed at a board of directors meeting?
In a phone call with Runner’s World on December 16, Siegel, who as CEO is a nonvoting member of the board, said he raised the Trials issue with a board as a chance to build unity on the host city. “Even though the ultimate authority lies with the national office, it was my intention to try to create consensus,” Siegel said.
He said he had no personal reason to favor Orlando.
“[That] is simply not the case,” he said. “Frankly, we have two competitive bids, and when the bids came to us, they had been fully vetted, they had committees that reviewed [them], and both of the bids, in everyone’s opinion, were quality bids.”
One option left
On October 25, in conjunction with the USOPC, USATF national office staff decided to disqualify Chattanooga’s bid, due to Estes’s involvement.
At that point, USATF had two choices: It could either reopen the bidding process. Or it could go back to Orlando organizers and ask them to make changes to their bid to improve it. That’s the option USATF went with.
They asked Orlando to increase its prize money to $600,000 (the prize purse for the 2020 Olympic Marathon Trials was $480,000), cover hotel rooms (double occupancy) for all Trials qualifiers for three nights, and provide transportation to and from the airport for athletes. They asked for changes to the start and finish line and asked for assurances that no portion of the course would be on brick road.
Orlando agreed to all the changes on October 27.
Questions remain
On November 8, USATF made its announcement in favor of Orlando, and Chattanooga learned of its disqualification.
USOPC stands by USATF in the matter of the disqualification.
“All board members have a duty to avoid these types of conflicts,” Hartman wrote in an email to Runner’s World. “In this case, [Estes] believed, incorrectly, that he could satisfy his duties and obligations as a USATF board member by recusing himself from any discussions of the bidding process.”
Hartman’s email continued, “Mr. Estes did disclose his involvement, but he is also aware of the conflict-of-interest policy that all board members are acquired to abide by. There is no evidence that either Chattanooga or Mr. Estes intended for this arrangement to confer an unfair advantage, but USATF as an organization has the responsibility to manage actual, potential, and perceived conflicts of interest to avoid even the appearance of impropriety or unfairness in the competitive bidding process.”
Estes said he wasn’t interviewed by the USOPC as part of its investigation until November 15, 7 weeks after the site visit and 3 weeks after the disqualification had already taken place. He wonders how thorough the investigation could have been if he was at the center of the controversy, but they didn’t talk to him.
Jon Little, Estes’s lawyer, said, “This is a typical USOPC investigation, which is done to retroactively justify the results that they need.”
Estes feels the letter from Siegel to Chattanooga unfairly tarnished his reputation in the close-knit running industry and especially with Chattanooga.
“My integrity means more to me than just about anything professionally,” he said. “I was raised to value that. Think about your day and know that you might have made mistakes, but just be able to tell yourself you acted with integrity. That’s the way I’ve always operated. At the end of the day that’s really all we have.”
Estes hopes by coming forward to Runner’s World he can clear up the questions his colleagues—on the board, with the Chattanooga organizing committee, and in the running community at large—may have.
“My goal is, for lack of a better way of putting it, to clear the clouds around my name,” Estes said. “I want those clouds cleared.”
Sarah Lorge Butler is a writer and editor living in Eugene, Oregon, and her stories about the sport, its trends, and fascinating individuals have appeared in Runner’s World since 2005. She is the author of two popular fitness books, Run Your Butt Off! and Walk Your Butt Off!
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