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Salt Lake City was already a player in this transitional era, and was learning, painfully, how the game was changing. In 1984 and '85, Mayor Ted Wilson oversaw Salt Lake's effort to become America's bid city (the U.S. Olympic Committee designates one town to be the U.S. contender before the I.O.C. picks a winner). The two finalists were Salt Lake and Anchorage, which frankly didn't have a snowball's chance of ultimately being chosen by the I.O.C. "We did very little entertaining because we had been told not even to contact U.S.O.C. members," Wilson recalls. "So we go to Indianapolis in June of 1985, and we lose." He was baffled. "Anchorage is dark, doesn't have any venues, doesn't have nearly the culture we did." Back in Salt Lake, Wilson started hearing about fishing trips to Alaska by U.S.O.C. delegates, hunting trips, helicopter rides. "Whether those were rumors or not, we said, 'We screwed up. Anchorage schmoozed and we lost. Next round, we're going to schmooze big time.'"
Anchorage, meanwhile, was learning that courtship with the U.S.O.C. was kiss-on-the-cheek stuff compared to a tango with the worldly, rouge-lipped, fire-breathing I.O.C. Rick Nerland, an advertising executive who served as the Anchorage bid's executive vice president, said last week that he was approached twice by agents who asked up to $30,000 for a bloc of I.O.C. votes. "I was disappointed that the person was intimating that that went on," he said. "We dismissed it on the spot." Also resistant were officials from Toronto and Amsterdam, who reported similar shakedowns in the 1980s, as well as a Swedish hospitality hostess who alleged that she had been asked to have sex with an I.O.C. member--for the good of her country.
Not everyone said no, and soon reports were rife in the Olympic community of five-star boondoggles and outright fraud. You just weren't a self-respecting I.O.C. member if you weren't demanding first-class travel. You were something of a boob if you weren't cashing in those tickets, buying coach and keeping the change. Where once Killy gave out pens, suitor cities now offered furs, jewelry and fine wines. Robert Helmick, a former I.O.C. member and U.S.O.C. president who resigned in 1991 when it was alleged that he had violated U.S.O.C. conflict-of-interest guidelines by representing clients linked to the Olympics (he later was cleared of any wrongdoing), remembered keepsakes suddenly escalating from "nice things to exorbitant things." At I.O.C. confabs, members were seen rolling dollies laden with gifts to their hotel rooms; at one meeting a makeshift parcel-post office was set up to wrap and ship "souvenirs" to delegates' homes. Helmick's wife surveyed the scene and termed it "legal bribery." Helmick told TIME that his wife saw I.O.C. delegates from the East bloc returning from shopping trips with bid officials, laden with Escada clothing and other $500 purchases. The I.O.C. could no longer claim such solicitation was "just rumor." In 1986 the committee put a $150 limit on gifts and insisted that travel tickets be nonrefundable.