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As Warren implies, Salt Lake City played along. Maybe not happily, maybe grudgingly, but Salt Lake City played along. The bid committee found the limos and the NordicTrak. It arranged for the room.
And it lost out again. So it upped the ante once more. Past officials of Salt Lake's 2002 bid committee now admit that the munificence extended toward I.O.C. members in the form of contributions, scholarships and health care was worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Furthermore, the Salt Lake Tribune reported that the committee spent nearly $10,000 on six shotguns and rifles that went to Olympic officials, including Samaranch. (The president said it's O.K., because he doesn't vote for the host city. But even his deputy, I.O.C. vice president Dick Pound, has said Samaranch possesses "the loudest nonvote anyone can imagine.") Governor Leavitt's office confirmed that an internal ethics panel of the S.L.O.C. was investigating allegations of prostitution, including whether some committee members' credit cards were used to pay for escort services for visiting I.O.C. members. And sources close to the S.L.O.C. probe say only about 2% of the bid committee's spending has been analyzed.
The former S.L.O.C. and bid-team members who have admitted to the payments have had a harder time admitting to wrongdoing. Their attitude is, "Quid pro quo? Nah--we're humanitarians." Thomas Welch, the leader of the bid and organizing committees who resigned after pleading no contest to a spousal-abuse charge in 1997, told the Salt Lake Tribune he and other boosters did nothing wrong in their pursuit of Olympic glory. "Never, not once in all that time, seven years, did an I.O.C. member offer a vote for money," he insisted. "I never offered anything to get anyone to vote for us... If you measure our conduct the way people in this city do business, it's no different. You support your friends and their causes, and that's what we tried to do."
David Johnson, former senior S.L.O.C. vice president, was more direct and equally eloquent in responding to the charges. When a TV crew showed up at his door last Monday to ask about his resignation from the committee, Johnson yelled at the woman reporter, grabbed her microphone, kicked the male cameraman and seized his camera. Which is to say, No comment.
City councilwoman Deeda Seed sees corruption, not humanitarianism, in the S.L.O.C.'s behavior. "They basically operated in secret, in executive sessions. Where were the tough questions that should have been asked? We're a very naive place," she says. "Things went wrong because in our cultural orientation, hard questions aren't asked about accountability. It's impolite."
Hard questions are being asked today by those who stand to lose almost as much as Salt Lake if this mess isn't cleaned up. "If I were a corporate sponsor, I'd want this resolved quickly," says Seed. Rest assured: the sponsors want it resolved more quickly than that. US West briefly withheld a payment of $5 million to the S.L.O.C., and if the committee is unable to raise $242 million more in the next year, it will face a shortfall on its $1.4 billion budget. The buzzards are circling. Innsbruck and Calgary, both former Winter Games sites, have cheerfully announced that they stand ready to be host of the '02 Games, should their dear friends in Salt Lake be unable.