How The Olympics Were Bought

  • June 16, 1995: It's announced that Salt Lake City has won the right to be host of the 2002 Olympic Winter Games. Grumbling from press row. "Trouble ahead," says a grizzled veteran of the Games with a sigh. "Mormon morals--that'll bring 'em down."

    "Yeah," says his buddy. "I hear the bars close at 11!" How can you hold an Olympics in such circumstances?

    What wasn't presaged by even the most knowing, most inside, most keen-nosed Olympics hound was that, more than three years before any torch lighting, the head of the Salt Lake Organizing Committee--a fine Mormon he was--would be brought down by a spousal-abuse charge, and his successor and others would fall in a huge, still widening bribery scandal. Salt Lake City wanted to hot up its image for the Olympics, and today it has no worries.

    In that regard, at least. On other matters--whether it can put together an untainted administration to oversee the Games, whether it can raise enough money to support the Games, whether its reputation as an oasis of virtue in a desert of iniquity is forever forfeit--Salt Lake has nothing but woe. "We are stunned and bruised," said Utah Governor Mike Leavitt, who along with Salt Lake mayor Deedee Corradini controlled appointments to the S.L.O.C.'s board of trustees. "This does not represent the values of this community."

    "People are saying, 'How could it happen here, with our high moral standards?'" echoed Corradini, who had lobbied hard and glamorously for the Olympics, and had joyously accepted the five-ring flag during closing ceremonies at last year's Games in Nagano, Japan. "It has tarnished our reputation." Hers, not least. Last week she announced that she would not run for a third term in 2000, though she had dearly wanted to preside over the Olympic festival.

    After the instinct to lament passed, the instinct to point fingers took over. "We revolt at being associated with them," Leavitt said of a Salt Lake bid committee that had, in the years preceding the International Olympic Committee's vote on the 2002 site, crossed the palms of I.O.C. members with silver, scholarships for their kids, fancy guns, cowboy hats, skis and other booty that reportedly included call girls. While acknowledging bribery, Leavitt also implied extortion, by way of a "sinister and dark corner of corruption." Robert Garff, a local car dealer and now, gamely, third at bat as S.L.O.C. czar, said, "I can't say our hands are clean, but the system has been flawed for years. So in some sense we're victims." Of whom? Fingers pointed at an I.O.C. that allegedly demands favors for favoritism.

    Who's to blame is being sorted out by five separate investigations--the S.L.O.C.'s own; the U.S. Olympic Committee's, chaired by gadfly troubleshooter George Mitchell; the Justice Department's; a U.S. House of Representatives inquiry into whether laws prohibiting the bribing of foreign officials have been broken; and the I.O.C.'s, which could result in the resignation or expulsion of as many as nine of the body's 114 members, plus sanctions for four others. These reports, due to be issued during the next several weeks, will depict a system so systematically corrupt that it might easily have blinded the good folk of Salt Lake to reality. Whether the disclosures will be enough to deprive Salt Lake of the Games or topple the autocratic--some say dictatorial--18-year regime of I.O.C. head Juan Antonio Samaranch is doubtful. But the investigations will reveal certain things: that the leaders of S.L.O.C. were not present-day saints, that Samaranch is either delusionary or hypocritical to a Clintonesque degree, and that the relationship between the Olympic movement and the U.S. involves good measures of fear and loathing--fear that the money will go away, loathing for the other guy's values.

    All the problems began in America--not in Salt Lake, but in Los Angeles. The 1976 Montreal Games had dutifully lost millions of dollars, and the 1980 Moscow Games, boycotted by the U.S., didn't make a ruble. The Winter Games, always staged in nice little Currier & Ives villages, had seldom turned a profit. Therefore, naturally, no sane city wanted to play host to the Games. Then, in 1984, Peter Ueberroth and his Los Angeles organizing committee put on a splashy, TV-friendly, penny-squeezing Olympics that netted $220 million. Suddenly suitors were turning handsprings before the I.O.C., each performing citius, altius, fortius than the last. Two cities had asked for the '84 Games, but in 1985 a dozen came begging for the '92 Winter Games, and six vied for the summer events. What they were willing to do, and what it all might lead to, was evident from the get-go. Brisbane flew lobsters, kiwi fruit and its mayor from Australia to East Berlin for a 1985 I.O.C. meeting, then hired a hotel staff from across the Wall to cater. The lunch tab was $1.9 million. Sofia's bidders, who had put out a meager $50,000 buffet, trudged glumly back to Bulgaria. (As if even Brisbane had a chance! The competition that season included Barcelona, Samaranch's hometown. Guess who won.)

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