Games People Play

Peter Ueberroth, president of the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee, alleged in his 1985 autobiography that bidders from Seoul for the subsequent Summer Games gave two round-trip, first-class airline tickets to each International Olympic Committee member.

“The tickets were easily redeemed for cash; many were,” Ueberroth wrote.

IOC members were deeply offended, inspiring a joke among cynical journalists that the lords of the rings didn’t appreciate the suggestion that their votes could be bought so cheaply.

It was, however, no laughing matter for a majority of IOC members, who, despite President Juan Antonio Samaranch’s campaigning on Ueberroth’s behalf, twice within the next decade exacted revenge by refusing to elect him to their exclusive club.

But when the venerable Marc Hodler, 80, a Swiss lawyer who has been an IOC member for 35 years, made more extensive bribery claims last Saturday, going so far as to suggest Olympic bid cities have lists of IOC members who can be bought, there was little his colleagues could do except request that he not repeat his allegations on Sunday.

Reluctantly, he complied.

“By presidential order, I have been muzzled,” he said on the final day of IOC executive board meetings in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Samaranch’s public reaction was much like Capt. Louis Renault’s in “Casablanca” when, after being forced by the Germans to shut Rick’s Cafe, he said, “I am shocked, shocked, to find that gambling is going on here.”

Samaranch said that the IOC now faces a crisis on the same scale as those after the U.S. and Soviet-led boycotts of 1980 and ’84 and the Ben Johnson steroid scandal of 1988.

In fact, this one is more threatening to the IOC because it questions whether the body entrusted with the high ideals of the Olympic movement can be trusted.

For many, the suspicion that the IOC is an old boys’ club comprising the highly privileged and easily corruptible has been confirmed.

Ann Peel, a former race walker from Canada, made such claims in an impassioned speech during a drug conference hosted last spring by Los Angeles’ Amateur Athletic Foundation, which was endowed by profits from the 1984 Summer Olympics. The thrust of her attack was that IOC members were less committed to the concept of “swifter, higher, stronger” than “more, more, more.”

Sitting next to me was Anita DeFrantz, who fidgeted uncomfortably. The AAF president and first woman to be elected as an IOC vice president had difficulty listening to Peel’s remarks and not only because DeFrantz had just arrived in Los Angeles from a meeting in Australia.

DeFrantz, a bronze medalist in rowing in 1976, was elected to the IOC in 1986 not because she is heir to a fortune or a crown--she is not--but because of her commitment to athletes and the values represented by the Olympics.

No matter what critics might believe, DeFrantz is the rule and not the exception among IOC members. However, there are exceptions. If Diogenes could not find one honest man, imagine the IOC’s problem in trying to assemble 115.

The IOC has never expelled a member, but it probably would have in 1991 if Robert Helmick of the United States had not resigned first. The Des Moines, Iowa, lawyer and former president of the U.S. Olympic Committee became embroiled in conflict-of-interest charges after it was revealed that he had business dealings with groups that sought associations with the IOC and the USOC.

The IOC must be equally vigilant in its investigation of Hodler’s charges, which were made after last week’s disclosure of Salt Lake City’s “humanitarian aid” program that benefited at least six IOC members during the city’s successful bid for the 2002 Winter Games.

It is probably too late to take the Games from Salt Lake City, and besides, as Hodler emphasized, the bid cities are victims of extortion and should not be faulted as much as the IOC members who have their hands out.

Those members and any others who have accepted such aid from bid committees should be expelled, in the same manner the IOC expels athletes such as Ben Johnson who violate doping rules.

“Just as we expect integrity from the athletes, we should expect integrity from the IOC members and we should expect integrity from the bid cities,” DeFrantz said this week.

But the investigation, which will be headed by IOC vice president Richard Pound of Canada, should not be confined to members who accepted bribes. It also should extend to those who knew about them and failed to speak out.

That could reach to the top of the organization. Despite his protests to the contrary, it’s difficult to believe that Samaranch, who has been a hands-on IOC president for 18 years, could be less aware of scandal within the Olympic bid process than Hodler.

All Samaranch had to do is read the 1992 book, “Dishonored Games: Corruption, Money & Greed at the Olympics,” particularly Chapter 19 dealing with bribery.

According to the expose written by two British journalists, bid cities at the 1991 IOC session in Birmingham, England, bestowed so many gifts on members that the young women assigned to deliver them to hotel rooms complained.

“Not to worry,” the authors wrote. “Extra suitcases are on order for the IOC members to carry their harvest away.”

That should have given Samaranch ample reason to investigate. Instead, the IOC sued the authors for libel.

Now that the IOC has been forced to investigate, I would like to think that Samaranch would welcome an inquiry into how much he knew and when he knew it.

If he is going to attack U.S. professional sports, particularly baseball, for a laissez faire attitude toward steroids, as he did again in a speech last week, it would be nice to know that he is speaking with the moral authority he presumes.

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Randy Harvey can be reached at randy.harvey@latimes.com.