BY BRADEN CARTWRIGHT
Daily Post Staff Writer
Parks Commissioner Anne Cribbs, who is running for council, doesn’t like talking about an ethics investigation that found she misrepresented her status as an Olympic gold medalist for decades, but she answered some questions about the controversy yesterday.
Cribbs, 79, said she’s consistently told people that she swam in qualifiers but not the final gold-winning race in the 1960 Rome Olympics.
“I’ve been very clear,” Cribbs said in an interview.
Cribbs is described as a gold medalist online by the Bay Area Sports Hall of Fame, the Northern California Jewish Sports Hall of Fame and the San Jose Sports Hall of Fame.
“People have made assumptions over the years,” Cribbs said.
In November 2019, the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee launched an investigation into USA Table Tennis — an organization that Cribbs led as board chair.
A year later, the committee declared Cribbs ineligible to hold office with the U.S. Olympian and Paralympian Association, an influential alumni group.
The committee found that Cribbs “is not eligible to be a USOPA officer based on the representations she made about her medal status,” the Orange County Register reported in November 2020.
As yesterday’s interview went on, Cribbs revealed that she said she won gold in a video inviting people to a Sister Cities conference in San Jose.
Cribbs said the video producer told her to say she was a gold medalist before one of the takes.
“He said, ‘Well just say you’re a gold medalist.’ And I said, ‘Well not really.’ But we were goofing around, and I said that. That film got on the internet,” Cribbs said yesterday.
Cribbs said she didn’t appeal the committee’s investigation because Congress was talking about the Olympics at the time, and she didn’t want to bring any bad press or bad feelings to that discussion.
“Clearly it’s very painful to me. You can tell when I talk about it. I’ve tried my best to move on and stand on what I do on a daily basis,” Cribbs said.
Cribbs said her plaques at the SAP Center in San Jose and the Bay Area Sports Hall of Fame don’t mention anything about gold medals.
The rules for relays were changed before the 1992 Olympics, so swimmers in qualifying events get medals now.
Cribbs is running for one of four open seats in November.
Cribbs moved to Palo Alto in 1964 and graduated from Stanford before the school had a women’s swim team. She used to work for the city of Palo Alto, organizing events from the community services department.
Cribbs is the board president for a new nonprofit that’s fundraising for a city-owned gym, called Friends of the Palo Alto Recreation and Wellness Center.
She wants to see through more ideas in the city’s parks plan, like dog parks, a skateboard park and bathrooms.
Cribbs has been on the Parks and Recreation Commission for three four-year terms.
She says she’s been “very clear” that she didn’t win the gold medal. But when she got the Athena award in 2013, they called her a gold medal winner and the Palo Alto Weekly reported that in a November 6, 2013 article by Jocelyn Dong. The Post doesn’t allow links, but on the Weekly’s website search for the headline: “Anne Warner Cribbs receives Athena Award.” You’ve got to wonder why she didn’t correct this inaccuracy if she was concerned about being “very clear”? In 2020, Cribbs was investigated in a scandal by the high profile US Olympian and Paralympian Assoc.(USOPC) for misrepresenting that she won an Olympic medal 50 years earlier. She did not and has no Olympic medals. Cribbs swam in an earlier heat while others on the U.S. swim team won the relay Gold for themselves. As a result of her misrepresentation, USOPC removed her from a prestigious committee. You can find stories about this in the archives of the Mercury News, Orange County Register, Swimmers World and SwimSwam.
Is this the level of integrity we want in a city council person?