Richard W. Pound has been a member of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) for 25 years. He has served on the IOC Executive Board, and in 1987 was elected vice-president for a four-year term and served a second term from 1996 to 2000. During the 2000 Summer Games in Sydney, he was acting president, and in 2001 ran unsuccessfully in the election to replace Juan antonio Samaranch as the eighth president of the IOC.
Pound is founding chair of the World Anti-Doping Agency, which was established in 1999. He was also Chairman of the IOC Television Negotiation Committee [1983-2001], and Chairman of the IOC Marketing Committee until 2001. Pound served as the Chair of the Coordination Commission for the 1996 Olympic Games, and as a director of the Organizing Committee for the 1998 Olympic Winter Games in Calgary, Alberta. It was partly because of Pound's investigation of the recent Salt Lake City bribery scandal that new regulations and an ethics watchdog to oversee interaction between IOC members and bidding cities were created. he is a past president, director, and executive committee member of the Canadian Olympic Committee.
Born in Canada in 1942, Pound began his athletic career as a competitive swimmer. At the 1960 Olympic Games in Rome, he was a double Olympic finalist, finishing fourth in the 400 meter medley relay and sixth in the 100 meter freestyle. He went on to win four medals — a gold, a bronze, and two silvers — at the 1962 Commonwealth Games in Australia.
Pound was educated in Montreal, receiving degrees in commerce and law from McGill. He is currently a partner in the law firm Stikeman Elliott. In 1999, he was made the seventeenth chancellor of McGill University.