Longshot Lillehammer Wins Winter Bid : Stunned Silence Greets the Awarding of ’94 Games to Norwegian City

Conventional wisdom joined Sofia, Bulgaria; Oestersund, Sweden, and Anchorage as the losers Thursday, when the International Olympic Committee selected Lillehammer, Norway, as the site of the 1994 Winter Games.

Lillehammer, in the likely case that it needs an introduction, is a summer and winter tourist resort with a population of 22,000 in southern Norway, 110 miles north of Oslo.

When IOC President Juan Antonio Samaranch made the announcement during a ceremony in the lavish garden of the Shilla Hotel, a stunned silence fell over the crowd until the members of the Lillehammer bid committee pinched themselves and began to celebrate.

“The people next to us were as surprised as we were,” said Dave Baumeister, president of the Anchorage bid committee, whose delegation sat beside the Lillehammer committee during the ceremony.

They were not alone. Richard Pound, an IOC vice president from Montreal, said last week that the two perceived front-runners, Sofia and Oestersund, couldn’t be caught.

“One thing I’ve learned in 10 years on the IOC is that nothing is a surprise because everything can be,” Pound said Thursday. “I think you could have made a lot of money betting on Lillehammer.”

In numerous interviews with IOC members this week, none had many good things to say about Lillehammer. But then, none had many bad things to say about Lillehammer, either. The members of its bid committee might not have even been noticed had it not been for their bright red blazers.

But they didn’t suffer from a lack of attention Thursday, receiving solid support from the first ballot on. Of the 87 IOC members in attendance, 84 voted on the first and third ballots and 85 on the second. One candidate is eliminated on each ballot until a city receives a majority.

No one would have guessed that Sofia would be the first candidate eliminated. The favorite since finishing second to Albertville, France, in the voting two years ago for the 1992 Winter Games, its most conspicuous campaigner, Bulgarian IOC member Ivan Slavkov, was confident of victory. Like virtually, everyone else, he dismissed Lillehammer as the fourth choice.

“Lillehammer is good for a ski vacation, not the Winter Olympics,” he said.

Instead, Sofia finished fourth. And Anchorage, which less than a year ago figured to win if Sofia didn’t, was the second candidate eliminated.

On the third ballot, Lillehammer won over Oestersund, its Scandinavian neighbor, 45-39.

“When you’re talking Winter Games, it’s not a bad thing to decide between two Scandinavian sites,” Pound said.

Even then, however, conventional wisdom sided with Oestersund.

After the success of the Winter Games last February in Calgary, Samaranch and Marc Hodler, president of the International Skiing Federation, indicated that larger cities were preferable to the smaller, more remote villages that have played host to so many Winter Olympics. With a population of 65,000, Oestersund is no metropolis, but it is larger than Lillehammer.

Oestersund also is only an hour’s drive from one of the world’s best areas for Alpine skiing, Are; the mountains near Lillehammer are merely suitable, according to Ken Read, former Canadian ski champion and IOC athletes commission member.

Sentiment also favored Oestersund because Swedish cities have bid eight times for the Winter Games without winning, although this was Oestersund’s first attempt. Oslo staged the Winter Games in 1952.

Yet, Lillehammer won.

Robert Helmick, U.S. Olympic Committee president and one of two IOC members from the United States, said there might have been as many reasons as there were voters.

“There were 84 people with their own criteria that they had to balance,” he said. “It’s that simple, and it’s that complicated.”

Even though both cities are Scandinavian, some close observers of IOC politics said that voting broke down along East-West lines. It appears as if representatives from Western countries voted for their ally, Norway, and the representatives from Eastern Bloc countries favored neutral Sweden.

Said Chris Persson, executive president of Oestersund’s sponsorship committee: “Norway belongs to the same bloc as most of the Western countries, NATO.”

But the analysts also suggested that Oestersund didn’t have full support of the Eastern Bloc because of Sweden’s tenuous relationship with the Soviet Union. On at least two occasions in this decade, the Swedes have gleefully announced the discovery of Soviet submarines in their waters. So perhaps the Soviets finally torpedoed the Swedes.

That is highly speculative, though, because the Soviet Bloc was so difficult to figure here. Representatives of some countries decided in a meeting Wednesday night to vote independently.

Bulgaria’s IOC member, Ivan Slavkov, blamed Sofia’s dismal showing on Western capitalists. He said they didn’t want to do business in Bulgaria. “Finances rule the IOC right now,” he said.

Asked if he believes that it will be difficult for Soviet Bloc countries to win a bid for the Games in that atmosphere, he said, “That is surely correct.”

But it also was clear from the number of votes that Sofia received on the first ballot, 17, that it didn’t have the entire Soviet Bloc on its side. Two years ago, Sofia received 25 votes on the first ballot.

The fatal blow to Sofia’s bid, however, was delivered by the representatives of African nations, who withdrew their commitments to the Bulgarian capital. One U.S. source with close contacts among the Africans said that they switched to Lillehammer after the Soviet Bloc representatives failed to support Rene Essomba of Cameroon in a vote earlier Thursday for a place on the IOC’s executive committee. Dr. Kim Un Yong of South Korea and Gunther Ericsson of Sweden were elected.

But another factor, one that probably received too little attention before the vote, was that most IOC members, many of whom are accustomed to the finer things in life, didn’t look forward to going to Sofia.

“I think they didn’t want to spend three weeks in a city where the elevators don’t work,” said Edward Derwinski, U.S. under-secretary of state.

Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee (LAOOC) officials will not be surprised to hear that derogatory remark, since they believe that Derwinski placed obstacles in front of the communist nations that contributed to the 1984 boycott by most Soviet Bloc nations.

A few of the former LAOOC officials who are in Seoul as official observers of these Games expressed surprise that Derwinski was one of the most visible members here of the Anchorage delegation. He came to assure IOC members that countries wouldn’t have visa problems if they sent their athletes to the United States in 1994.

It must have worked because IOC members from some of the South and Central American countries that were most concerned about the issue apparently voted for Anchorage.

A Chilean shooter was denied a visa to the 1987 Pan American Games in Indianapolis because the State Department alleged that he was a former military officer who was involved in murders of anti-government demonstrators. Anchorage finished with a respectable 23 votes on the first ballot and 22 on the second.

Pound said that he believes Anchorage’s chances were damaged by its location. “Probably the most difficult mental hurdle for Anchorage was the fact that six months ago we had the Winter Games in Calgary,” he said. “Although there’s been another set of Games awarded (to Albertville), people looked at the map and saw that the closest place to Calgary among the bidders was Anchorage.”

Since the 1998 Winter Games are likely to return to North America after two turns in Europe, Anchorage would appear to be the front-runner. The 1998 host city will be determined in 1991. But Anchorage must first persuade U.S. Olympic Committee members that it should remain the designated bid city. Salt Lake City, Reno-Tahoe, Portland, Ore., and Denver also have expressed interest.

Both U.S. members of the IOC, Helmick and Anita DeFrantz, said that they believe Anchorage will be the country’s strongest candidate for the 1998 Winter Games. “We need to go back and see how the people of Anchorage feel about this,” said Rick Mystrom, general director of the Anchorage committee. “We think they’ll want to bid again, but you can’t ask them about it 10 minutes after this vote is over.”

The members of Lillehammer’s committee were ecstatic, once they had recovered from the shock.

“This brings the Winter Olympics backs to the cradle of Olympic winter sports,” said the committee chairman, Ole Sjetne , claiming that Alpine skiing was first practiced in Norway. Norway has won more Winter Games medals than any country other than the Soviet Union. “We have ideal conditions for the Winter Games from the point of the athletes,” he said. “Maybe that was the reason we won.”