In a rare response, WMA Executive Vice President Tom Jordan has replied to my request for comment on posts involving Dieter Massin’s resignation from the WMA Organizational Advisory Committee. Here is Tom’s note to me, without any deletion or modification:

Ken,
Your post to several message boards has been passed along to me, and you
are so off base, it would be laughable, except that you again insinuate
that I have been using my position as Executive Vice-President of World
Masters Athletics for personal gain. So, please post this reply to all the
message boards you have circulated your slanders:
Dieter Massin’s resignation from the Organizational Advisory Committee are
for reasons of his own, and it’s not my place to say what they are. He
will make them public at the time and place of his own choosing. But I can
tell you that they have nothing to do with me personally or the tours run
by our company, Northwest Event Management, Inc.
Regarding “TMOs”, Ken, where have you been for the past 14 years?? The
Travel Masters Organizations (originally Travel Veterans Organizations)
have been around since before I was ever on the WMA Council and before our
company ever ran a Masters tour. There is nothing “new” about them, and
certainly nothing “buried” in the WMA Standard Contract. Originally, the
10% provision was put into the Contract circa 1991 in a effort to encourage
travel agents and individuals to organize and promote tours to WMA
Championships. Despite what you might think, travel for Masters is not
all that lucrative when compared with other forms of leisure travel. If
you look at the three main U.S. TMOs of the past decade (Helen Pain’s
group, Paul Geyer’s group, and our NEM group), all have had a deep
non-monetary interest in Masters athletics. The money alone is not
sufficient incentive for most travel agents to put together a Masters
tour. That being said, it is nice but not essential to have the 10%
provision for TMOs in the WMA Contract, as it guarantees a minimum
commission from the hotel properties. (And before your rant about this,
Ken, such commissions are a standard practice in the travel
industry.) However, as travel professionals, we can certainly arrange our
own deals with hotels at WMA Championships sites, and it would be no
problem for our own company if this provision were dropped from the
Standard Contract. As for who can be a TMO, the answer is simple: any
bonded travel agent, individual, or group can be recognized as a TMO.
Finally, as for using my position on the Council to benefit my company,
those who know me know that this isn’t the case. For those who don’t, I
simply ask them to consider who is spreading these innuendos, and to draw
their own conclusions.
Tom Jordan
Now my comment:
TMOs may be an innocent, old practice, but awareness of this in WMA has been limited to only insiders for years. Disclosure of this practice has been relatively recent — with the posting of the standard contract on WMA’s Web site. No Standard Contract has been published in WMA’s biennial manual (as far as I know). Many questions remain to be answered about the design of the contract (between WMA and meet organizing committees). One is: Who besides Tom Jordan devised it? Another: If any travel agent can be a TMO, why bother to enshirine such a special category?
I remain unswayed by Tom’s defense. Dieter Massin may have something to add.