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Which slowed the flow of largesse not even a little. The situation reached its apex--or nadir, if you prefer--in the bidding for last year's Winter Games, won by Nagano. By 1991 Salt Lake City, always a suitable site and now represented by a savvy bid team, had grown to be an odds-on choice. But Yoshiaki Tsutsumi, then one of the world's richest men, had a dream: an Olympics in Nagano. "When I speak, 100 politicians jump" was his calling card. When he said he wanted to be president of Japan's Olympic committee, that group said sure. When he said he wanted to bring the Olympics to Nagano, many said, "But we've got no facilities. We've got lousy snow. Are you kidding?"
Tsutsumi doesn't kid. He met with Samaranch at a Tokyo hotel and discussed the I.O.C. head's pet project: an Olympic museum on the banks of Lake Geneva in Lausanne. Tsutsumi lined up 19 Japanese corporations, and together they contributed $20 million to build Samaranch's hall of fame. Tsutsumi was awarded the Gold Olympic Order, and Nagano was eventually awarded the Games, by four votes out of 88 total. On 60 Minutes, Helmick said of the Tsutsumi tsunami, "There's nothing wrong with Japanese industrialists donating millions of dollars to Samaranch's project. There is something wrong with Samaranch or someone else on the I.O.C.--and I'm not saying it happened--turning around and voting for Nagano because of it." Samaranch, as is his habit, said money spent to lure the Olympics had nothing to do with him: "Nobody's pushing them to spend this fortune or not to spend this fortune."
To which Salt Lake organizers would answer, Baloney. After they'd lost to Anchorage, they were ticked. Now they were seriously, seriously p.o.'d. It wasn't just the end-around with an Olympic museum; it was allegations that Nagano organizers had secured the services of agents who promised to deliver votes for huge fees. In 1994 a citizen's group in Japan filed a criminal complaint against Nagano's mayor and the prefecture's governor for allegedly destroying documents said to detail how $18 million in public and private funds were used in Nagano's bid. The case was thrown out, but last week a former Nagano committee official disclosed that a 90-volume financial record of the bid process had been destroyed in 1992 because it contained "secret information." And Nagano mayor Tasuku Tsukada reversed previous denials and admitted to TIME that Nagano's campaign had paid $363,000 to a Swiss-based agency run by Goran Takacs, son of Samaranch's friend Artur Takacs. Tsukada insisted the agent was retained only to act as liaison with I.O.C. officials, "not to collect votes, as people are saying happened in Salt Lake City."
"We just knew Nagano wasn't playing it straight," says Kim Warren, international relations coordinator for the Salt Lake Olympic bid committee in 1990 and '91. "You can't believe the crap they were pulling. We were giving out saltwater taffy and cowboy hats; they were giving out computers." She is harsh on Samaranch. "He had to fly in on a private jet. He had to stay in the presidential suite--it had to be the finest room in the city. There was a particular type of NordicTrak he works out on, so we had to get that piece of equipment. We had to have limousines for him--Lincoln Town Cars weren't good enough. That was the example he set."