Juan Antonio Samaranch

Juan Antonio Samaranch came up through Spanish sports administration under Franco, serving the regime from 1973 to 1977. In 1980 he took the helm of the International Olympic Committee as its seventh president. Over the next two decades he steered the organization through a transformation that redrew the economics and scale of the Games themselves. By the time he stepped down in 2001, the Olympics had become something entirely different from what he'd inherited. He died in April 2010.