WORLD SPORTS SCENE : Salt Lake City Making a Run for ’98 Games

After Atlanta won the International Olympic Committee’s approval last fall to organize the 1996 Summer Olympics, conventional wisdom said that Salt Lake City had little chance in this summer’s IOC vote to select a host for the 1998 Winter Games.

But conventional wisdom spoke too soon.

“A number of my colleagues on the IOC have told me that, if we’re supposed to vote on the basis of the best city, they’ll choose Salt Lake City,” U.S. Olympic Committee President Robert Helmick said at last week’s International Sports Summit in Beverly Hills.

Among other cities bidding, Oestersund, Sweden, and Nagano, Japan, have the most support, although one IOC source said Nagano will be hurt by a pending report from the committee’s site-inspection team.

Geographically, Oestersund has a worse problem than Salt Lake City. The Swedish city is closer to the site of the 1994 Winter Games, Lillehammer, Norway, than Salt Lake City is to Atlanta.

Oestersund’s advantage is that it is not part of the United States.

Attempting to build on anti-U.S. sentiment that emerged after Atlanta’s victory, Salt Lake City’s competitors lobbied for the IOC to open its balloting. They believed that many of the IOC’s 92 members would be reluctant to vote for a U.S. city if they were accountable. But as a member of the IOC’s executive board, Helmick was influential in persuading his colleagues to retain the secret ballot.

After 1992, the Winter Games will move into their own four-year rotation, starting in ‘94, so that the Winter and Summer Olympics will not be held in the same years.

IOC Vice President Richard Pound of Canada, initially skeptical about Salt Lake City’s chances, said last week it has become one of the favorites. But he said it would not be a contest if the USOC had remained with Anchorage as its candidate instead of switching to Salt Lake City in 1989.

“Anchorage was pretty much a sure thing,” Pound said. “They’d been to the IOC twice with a bid (for 1992 and 1994) and made a really good showing. The IOC members were ready to go for it.

“Also, Anchorage is a long way from Atlanta. And anyplace else.”

On the day after Turner Broadcasting System officials announced that they extended invitations to 33 U.S. and Canadian cities to bid for the 1998 Goodwill Games, they received an inquiry from another potential candidate--a combined entry from Seoul, South Korea, and Pyongyang, North Korea.

After Goodwill Games President Jack Kelly met last Wednesday at the International Sport Summit with the man who is trying to unite the Korean capitals for the bid, he said he was intrigued.

“I can see a scenario in which that could happen,” Kelly said. “What better way would there be to celebrate good will?”

Efforts to unite the Korean teams for Saturday’s opening ceremony at the Winter World University Games in Sapporo, Japan, failed. . . . The United States sent 84 athletes in four sports to those games, which are for either full-time university students or recent graduates. . . . The Summer World University Games are scheduled for Sheffield, England. In a documentary entitled “Twenty Years of Hard Labor,” the BBC reported that those games are in such financial distress that each Sheffield citizen will be required to pay the equivalent of $200 a year in taxes until 2011 to erase the debt.

“There’s no way that the testing is going to catch up to the athletes. The athletes are too far ahead. They’ve got blocking agents, masking agents. . . . I’d have to say everyone’s using something, and I’m not excluding myself from that.”

That was a quotation from Fallbrook shotputter Jim Doehring in a Times story less than two years ago.

The Athletics Congress, which governs track and field in the United States, informed Doehring last month that he has been suspended for two years after a random test revealed he had an excess level of the male hormone testosterone in his system. He plans to appeal.

Algerian Noureddine Morceli’s indoor 1,500-meter world record of 3:34.16 last week in Seville, Spain, came as no surprise to those who saw him run the week before in New York. He was on a pace to break Eamonn Coghlan’s indoor mile record before slowing in the final quarter. Morceli said he would have gone all out had meet organizers offered bonus money for a world record. . . . Morceli returns to the fast track at Seville this weekend for the world indoor track and field championships.

L.A. track and field promoter Al Franken said he is almost resigned to canceling his outdoor meet this summer at UCLA because he cannot find a sponsor. He said he is more optimistic for 1992 because it is an Olympic year.

In the most detailed survey of U.S. tastes in spectator sports, conducted by the Sports Marketing Group of Dallas, the Winter Olympics finished third and Summer Olympics were fourth behind the NFL and college football. In the eighth through 11th places were women’s figure skating, pairs figure skating, ice dancing and men’s figure skating.

Favorite sports among men were football, baseball, basketball and boxing. Among women, they were figure skating and gymnastics. World Cup soccer fell somewhere between mild interest and general indifference.

Interviews were conducted with 2,060 people at homes in 175 key census areas.

Note for those figure skating fans: After jaw surgery, Japan’s Midori Ito is back on the ice and will compete in the World Championships March 10-16.

The decision last week by South Africa’s black and white rugby federations to merge was hailed as a “step in the right direction” by IOC President Juan Antonio Samaranch, who said the country’s admission to the Olympic movement is “very close.”

Although rugby is not part of the Olympic program, Samaranch said he expects sports included to follow its lead. He has appointed a panel to visit South Africa this month and report to the IOC at its June session.

The 1998 Goodwill Games for Johannesburg?