Horst Dassler, Adidas Chairman, Dies at 51

Horst Dassler, chairman of Adidas, the world’s largest sporting goods manufacturer and a highly influential behind-the-scenes figure in the world Olympic movement, died Friday of cancer in Erlangen, West Germany. He was 51.

Dassler, whose firm provided shoes, uniforms and equipment for many of the world’s Olympic teams, was instrumental in bringing together the Latin-East Bloc coalition that elected Spain’s Juan Antonio Samaranch president of the International Olympic Committee in 1980.

Although never a member of the IOC, in recent years he was present at almost all IOC meetings and gave some of the most lavish parties attended by leading members of the Olympic community. He was also a frequent source for reporters covering Olympic affairs.

At the end of the Los Angeles Games in 1984, Dassler said that the Eastern European Olympic committees had been privately infuriated by the Soviet Bloc’s boycott of those Games and predicted that there would be a great deal of pressure on the Soviet Union to participate in the 1988 Seoul Games.

“Los Angeles proved the Olympic movement can get along very well, if it needs to, without the Russians,” he said.

As a friend and, some said, a mentor of Samaranch, Dassler also did a lot of Olympic business. Another of his firms, International Sports and Leisure (ISL) of Lucerne, Switzerland, has an exclusive marketing contract with the IOC.

But it was as a benefactor of Olympic teams that Dassler was remembered Friday.

“He cared about the less affluent national Olympic committees and provided the uniforms and equipment so they could compete,” said Anita de Frantz, the recently elected IOC member from Los Angeles. She also noted that Dassler had financed a sports magazine, Champion d’Afrique, that helped develop Olympic consciousness in Africa.

Said Monique Berlioux, former IOC executive director, in a statement in Paris: “He wanted to be the king of sport, not only a shoemaker.”

Dassler was the only son of Adolf (Adi) Dassler, who in 1924 founded Adidas in Germany. The firm, which currently employs 11,000 people and produces 280,000 pairs of sport shoes daily, remains wholly owned by the Dassler family.

Dassler, who long managed the highly successful French operations of the company, became board chairman after the death of his mother, Kaethe, three years ago. He is survived by his wife and two children. Four sisters maintain ownership shares in the Adidas enterprise.

He had received the gold order of the IOC, the Distinguished Service Award of the United States, the Order of Merit of the Ivory Coast and was the first German named to the French Academy of Sports.