A judo black belt and President of the Olympic Council of Ireland as well as Honorary President of the Irish Judo Association, the new President has longstanding experiences of NOCs, having been EOC Vice-President 1997-2001 and then Secretary General since 2001. IOC President Jacques Rogge, the President of the worldwide Association of NOCs Mario Vazquez Rana were present at the meeting attended by the 48 European NOCs and numerous guests.
IOC Honorary President for Life Juan Antonio Samaranch was to have been present too, but was but was held up at Barcelona airport by a sudden strikes. The Rome Assembly, brief but intense, also elected the new EOC Secretary General, Raffaele Pagnozzi (ITA), the current Secretary General of CONI, the NOC that has long housed and sustained the EOC’s operational Secretariat Mario Pescante, recently elected onto the IOC Executive Board, gave a last address as outgoing President with a balance of his 16 years of activity at the service of the EOC, first as its Secretary General, from 1989 to 2001, alongside President Jacques Rogge, and then as President, as of 2001. But his farewell to the delegates of the European NOCs was in effect only partial in that the Assembly also decided, and again unanimously, to modify the Statutes and elect Mario Pescante EOC Honorary President for Life.