Opinion ID: 165233
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Chief Medical Officer

Text: 23 Plaintiff next argues that he was promised that a position of Chief Medical Officer would be established at the USOC and that he would be given the job, but that this promise was never fulfilled. He acknowledges that such a job did not exist at the USOC during his tenure there. Indeed, there is no evidence in the record that the USOC had considered anyone for such a position. 24 Plaintiff has not shown that he was treated less favorably than others with respect to not receiving the Chief Medical Officer position-the USOC did not hire or consider anyone for that job. Accordingly, we hold that Plaintiff has failed to establish a prima facie case of discrimination as to this claim. See Kendrick, 220 F.3d at 1229 (a prima facie case requires that the position in question remained open); see also McDonnell Douglas, 411 U.S. at 802, 93 S.Ct. 1817 (in the failure to hire context, a prima facie case requires that the plaintiff applied for and was qualified for a job for which the employer was seeking applicants  and that the employer continued to seek applicants after rejecting him or her) (emphasis added); Stone v. Autoliv ASP, Inc., 210 F.3d 1132, 1138 (10th Cir.2000) (a prima facie case eliminates the most common nondiscriminatory reasons for the employer's action, including the absence of a vacancy for the job). An employer's failure to promote a plaintiff to a non-existent position is not enough to support a presumption of intentional racial discrimination. 25 Plaintiff's claim mirrors the failure to promote claim we rejected in Sprague v. Thorn Americas, Inc., 129 F.3d 1355 (10th Cir.1997). In that case, the plaintiff was a market analyst in the defendant's jewelry department who claimed that she should have been promoted to a position of assistant product manager. Id. at 1359-60. There was no such position in the defendant's jewelry department at the time. Id. at 1362. We held that these facts could not support an inference of gender discrimination. Id. We explained: It is indeed difficult for us to understand how [the plaintiff] can maintain that she was the victim of discrimination due to [the defendant's] refusal to promote her to the position of assistant manager of jewelry when such a position did not even exist. Id. 26 Accordingly, Plaintiff has failed to establish a prima facie case with respect to his claim that he was not promoted to the position of Chief Medical Officer at the USOC on account of his race. 27