RIO DE JANEIRO (AFP)
Joao Havelange, the legendary former president of world football
governing body FIFA, has been admitted to a Rio hospital
following a serious infection, a spokesman for the medical
institution said Monday.
"Havelange was hospitalized late Sunday with a serious infection
and is undergoing exams to determine the source of the
infection," the spokesman for Samaritano hospital said.
A treating physician, Joao Mansur Filho, described the
95-year-old Havelange's condition as "serious" in a statement
released by the hospital.
The former FIFA boss was put in a coronary care unit and was
receiving intravenous antibiotic treatment.
Havelange is the former father-in-law of Ricardo Teixeira, who
last week resigned as head of Brazilian football and as chief of
Brazil's organizing committee for the 2014 World Cup following a
spate of corruption allegations.
In December, Havelange himself resigned as a member of the
International Olympic Committee after 48 years just days before
an ethics hearing into allegations of corruption.
He was under investigation for his links with FIFA's former
marketing agency, International Sport and Leisure (ISL), which
went bankrupt in 2001 with debts of around $300 million.
Havelange, who competed at two Olympic Games in 1936 in Berlin as
a swimmer and then in the 1952 edition in Helsinki as a member of
the water polo team, is credited with turning football in
modernising the sport into the moneymaking industry it is today.
He was also instrumental in bringing the 2016 Olympics to Rio de
Janeiro and to South America for the first time when the IOC
elected the city as the host in 2009 in Copenhagen.
