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.