COLORADO SPRINGS — Five-time Olympic basketball player Teresa Edwards has been named chef de mission of the U.S. Olympic team for the 2012 London Games, replacing an Olympic gold medalist in gymnastics whose public opposition to same-sex marriage prompted his resignation.
Edwards was appointed Tuesday by the 15-person board of the U.S. Olympic Committee to provide leadership for a projected 575 Americans, while acting as a U.S. representative to the International Olympic Committee, other national Olympic committees and London organizers. It was a role held for eight days by USA Gymnastics chairman Peter Vidmar, 50, who resigned last month amid controversy stemming from his anti-gay marriage beliefs.
A winner of two gold medals and a silver at the 1984 Los Angeles Games, Vidmar demonstrated in 2008 in support of Proposition 8, a voter approved law that overturned a California Supreme Court ruling to restrict marriage in that state to one man and one woman.
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Los Angeles Times records indicate Vidmar, a Mormon, gave $2,000 to the cause, and The Orange County Register quoted him at a street corner rally as saying, “It’s good for our society to stay with a traditional definition of marriage.”
Openly gay Olympic figure skater Johnny Weir ripped the USOC for Vidmar’s selection, telling the Chicago Tribune he “wouldn’t want to be represented by someone who is anti-gay marriage. . . . The fact this man who is very publicly against something that may be represented on the American team is disgraceful.”
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