Games People Play

Combining the traditional disciplines of biathlon and the marathon, the newest Olympic sport currently sweeping the globe involves firing bribery allegations at anything that moves and then clocking the targets as they run for cover.

It has been open season since Marc Hodler, the 80-year-old loose cannon on the International Olympic Committee’s executive board declared last weekend that the IOC’s system of site selection for the Olympic Games is rife with corruption and prey to furtive influence-peddling “agents.” These agents offer to deliver precious IOC votes to bidding cities for money, college scholarships, medical services and other assorted special favors.

“To my knowledge, there has always, always been a certain part of the vote given to corruption,” Hodler announced at last week’s IOC meeting in Lausanne, Switzerland. He stopped short of naming names, but did name cities he believed were unable to resist the devilish allure of the dark side of the process:

* Salt Lake City, site of the 2002 Winter Olympics.

* Sydney, winner of the 2000 Summer Games.

* Nagano, host of the 1998 Winter Games.

* Atlanta, site of the 1996 Summer Games.

None of them, Hodler charged, waged bid campaigns that were entirely aboveboard.

Within seconds, IOC President Juan Antonio Samaranch was in front of the microphone, disassociating his organization from Hodler’s comments, slapping his longtime lieutenant with a gag order and ordering a “special inquiry” into the matter.

Result?

Instant Olympic McCarthyism, where everyone is suspect and no one is innocent until proved--by investigative commission and independent audit--not legally guilty.

Beijing accused Sydney of buying the election for the 2000 Olympics.

Melbourne was charged with trying to buy the 1996 Olympics.

Manchester blamed its two failed Olympic bids on other cities outmaneuvering them with cash to go.

Quebec City and Lillehammer said they were approached by agents offering blocks of votes for expensive “gifts”--asserting, of course, that they had rebuffed all such sordid advances.

In the meantime, Salt Lake Organizing Committee officials have been issuing graven-faced mea culpas over the $500,000 “humanitarian aid” fund that set this avalanche in motion. And officials of the Games in Atlanta, Nagano and Sydney shout out vehement denials almost by the hour.

“Apparently, [Hodler] felt something was happening there that needed to see the light of day,” says John Argue, who headed the bid to bring the 1984 Summer Games to Los Angeles and is chairing the city’s bid for the 2012 Games. “He certainly gave us the light of day, didn’t he?”

Hodler says he spoke out to force a radical reform of the Olympic selection procedure.

Radical?

The IOC, which so thoroughly abhors change that it keeps repealing automatic-retirement regulations to keep Samaranch, now 78, in power presumably into his 90s?

IOC vice president Anita DeFrantz says, “An easy solution would be to say that a discrete group, either the executive board or some other group elected by the IOC, serve as the site selection committee. . . .

“That is what we do in the noble sport of rowing. [DeFrantz was a bronze medalist in rowing at the 1976 Olympics.] With the World Championships, we have a small group of about 18 who receive all the bids and they select the site. Other sports do it this way too. The International Ski Federation lets its executive board do the whole thing.”

The idea has obvious merit: Fewer voters mean fewer options to poison the process. But all 115 IOC members participate in the Olympic selection procedure. Limit the vote to a specially appointed committee and suddenly, 100 IOC members are left with nothing to do but book semiannual flights to Lausanne. “Look at what the IOC does,” Argue says. “They don’t run an Olympic Games--the organizing committee does. They don’t conduct the athletic contests--the federations do. They don’t send the teams--the national Olympic committees do.

“So what do they do? One of their primary functions is to choose a site. That’s one of the reasons for their existence.

“Is Congress going to delegate all its power to a committee? I don’t think so. I think they want a vote.

“If I was an IOC member, I’d like to have my vote count as much as the next guy’s in terms of where the Olympic Games go.”

Hodler takes a more radical stand on the issue. He believes the IOC membership should delegate its voting privileges to a small committee without so much as flinching--and anyone who doesn’t sign “admits he is a crook.”

Another option, suggested by David Simon, president of the Los Angeles 2012 bid committee and member of the U.S. Olympic Committee:

Keep the current system in place but make each bid city sign a contract that says “if something like this is brought to light, you understand that one of the penalties is that you lose the Games,” Simon says. “That might at least make the people on the bid committees think twice before they would consider something like that.”

But at some point, a violation would have to be definitely proved before sanctions could be rendered--a monumental, if not impossible, burden for the IOC, Simon believes.

“How do you monitor private conversations with a third party?” he says. “It’s a difficult thing to police, it seems to me. We do it at the government level here--lobbyists have to register and report their contributions and so on and so forth. I’m not sure how you do that internationally.”

DeFrantz wonders how vote buyers can be certain about what they’re paying for since, as she points out, Olympic site selection is conducted by secret ballot.

“How do you know whether someone has committed or not?” DeFrantz says. “You don’t. The ballots are secret. If a city is spending a lot of money with agents, thinking they’re going to seal deals, I think that city has made a pretty bad investment.”

In Salt Lake City’s case, six scholarships were provided for relatives of IOC members. Six potential IOC votes. Enough to swing an election?

Not in 1995, when Salt Lake City won the bid for the 2002 Games in a landslide.

“Salt Lake City won by 54 votes,” DeFrantz says with a laugh. “Six out of 54? Even without them, they were still 45 votes ahead of the next city.

“You look at the outcome and obviously, [any possible influence related to the six scholarships] was tiny. And that’s if you assume the votes were based on the [financial] support given. Which you can’t, because they are secret ballots.”

Simon considers those six scholarships and muses, “Who knows, maybe those scholarships were for people who were then in law school and are now able to represent the Salt Lake Committee in this legal matter. In that case, it was a good investment.”

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Marc Hodler at at Glance

* Born: Oct. 26, 1918, in Bern, Switzerland.

* Profession: Head of a law firm.

* IOC position: Senior member of the executive board. Chairman of the coordination commission for the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics.

* Olympic career: President of the Federation Internationale de Ski (FIS) for 47 years (1951-1998), retired shortly after the 1998 Winter Olympics. Member of the International Olympic Committee since 1963, making him and Brazil’s Joao Havelange the IOC’s longest-serving members. Served as IOC vice president from 1993-1997.

* In brief: Along with current vice presidents Dick Pound of Canada and Anita DeFrantz of the U.S., one of the most influential IOC officials behind President Juan Antonio Samaranch. Highly outspoken. As FIS president, he feuded with Nagano organizers for three years over the length of the men’s downhill ski course before a compromise course was drawn--still “not of world-class caliber,” Hodler asserted. He called last weekend’s IOC meeting in Lausanne--where he made his bribery allegations against the cities of Salt Lake City, Sydney, Nagano and Atlanta--”the worst three days I have spent in my long period in sport.” Why? “Because for a time I thought that those I trusted were trying to push things under the carpet and might put all the blame on Salt Lake City.” As chairman of the IOC’s Salt Lake City coordination commission, he is overseeing Salt Lake City’s preparations for the 2002 Games and was disturbed to see Salt Lake City being made “a scapegoat” for what he claims is widespread systematic vote buying, which is why he said he came forward with his allegations. “We should be grateful to Salt Lake City that this evidence was found,” he says. Hodler feared he might be expelled from the IOC for his explosive remarks, but Samaranch, a longtime ally, said that would “never, never” happen.