Crumbling Of An Ideal

It has been called the boondoggle of all boondoggles, nice work if you can get it, life as a virtual head of state without the attendant crush of paparazzi or the periodic unpleasantness of public insurrections.

It’s good to be the king, that much is true, but if you ask the king, the gig truly worth having is a seat on the International Olympic Committee.

Or at least was until December 1998.

Membership in the 115- person IOC has its privileges: first-class air travel, chauffeured limousine service, accommodation in five-star hotels, dining in some of the world’s finest restaurants, gifts and special services upon arrival wherever you may roam.

And for a select few who have been summoned for inquisition at IOC headquarters this weekend in Lausanne, Switzerland, there were also these: college scholarships for their children, free medical care, free cosmetic surgery, under-the-table assistance in securing a sweetheart land deal, even flat-out cash payments.

Whichever city they visit on IOC business, the overriding concern for their hosts is to make them happy and keep them happy, whatever it takes, at least until they have spelled your city’s name correctly on that colored sheet of paper.

That is what is at stake-- nothing more than a handwriting sample, really. Just a bit of scrawled ink on a blank scrap of paper that is then folded, collected and counted by IOC “scrutineers” once every two years.

On that slip of paper is an IOC member’s reason for being--his or her vote to determine which city will host the Olympic Games seven years hence. Each scribble can be worth millions of dollars to the winning city, as the five Olympic rings have become a most coveted brass ring--possibly a billion-dollar proposition to the eventual victor.

It is a prize whose worth has steadily ballooned since Los Angeles showed in 1984 that it was not only possible to host an Olympics without crippling the local economy (see Montreal, 1976) but even turn a profit in the process.

For years the Olympics had scraped by in the red or barely breaking even. Only a scant few--notably, the 1932 Los Angeles Summer Games and the 1952 Oslo Winter Games--produced even a modest surplus. But the ’84 Games, the first to be privately financed since the inaugural Games of 1896, turned a then-unthinkable profit of $223 million.

Money changes everything, of course. With more and more of it to be had by landing the Olympic account, the clamor for the Games has become deafening. Wining, dining and wooing of IOC voters has replaced the 100-meter sprint as the glamour event of the Olympic Games, a competition so intense that its excesses are now being played out daily under bold headlines in newspapers around the world.

Salt Lake City, which was picked as host of the 2002 Winter Olympics in 1995, has become the lightning rod in a bribery scandal that initially knocked casual observers back on their heels, but surprised virtually no one associated with the manner in which the IOC conducts business.

So Salt Lake City, four times a bridesmaid in the Olympic-bid scrums, left nothing to chance in Round 5, lavishing scholarships, free medical care, expensive firearms and cash-filled envelopes on selected IOC voters?

So?

The biggest news here was that Salt Lake City got caught.

“I’m certainly not surprised by the type of activities going on in Salt Lake City,” says Robert Helmick, former U.S. Olympic Committee president and IOC member. “Because they’ve been going on for years.”

George Killian, former president of the International Basketball Federation and an IOC member from 1996-1998, says that although he’s “very discouraged to hear some of the things that went on in Salt Lake City,” anyone who has “been around international athletics any length of time knows that there are things given away on a daily basis in order to have people believe in what you’re doing.

“And I don’t know how you stop that. I don’t think all the investigations, all the things they’re about to do, will ever stop that. It’s the way they do business around the world.”

Anita DeFrantz, one of four IOC vice presidents, describes the Olympic bid process among competing cities as a frenetic game of “one-upmanship with the intent of getting the IOC members to know them and believe in them,” a process that has been laughingly referred to by some IOC members as “the big birthday.”

In the 1980s, before the current $150 limit on gifts had been adopted by the IOC, “cities were really out of control,” DeFrantz says. The bidding for the 1992 Summer Olympics between Paris and eventual winner Barcelona was particularly crazed.

“Cities were sending some amazing gifts,” DeFrantz says. “I heard of people spending weeks at Le Clarion, which is the top hotel in Paris. I mean, it costs $100 to breathe the air in the lobby. It’s a very exclusive hotel. There were some enormous enticements, and some enormous abuses going on.”

Such as the great caterers’ war of ‘85, during which bid cities had the finest examples of their native cuisine flown to Berlin, where the IOC was meeting. Paris flew in some of the richest pastries and sauces its world-renowned chefs could muster. Brisbane, Australia, countered with lobster and kiwi fruit at a cost of nearly $2 million.

Obscene?

No, merely a sharp game plan, according to an admiring member of the Atlanta 1996 bid committee.

“You play your best card,” says Charlie Battle, who coordinated international relations for the Atlanta bid committee. “If you’re from Paris, you’ve got great chefs, so, yeah, come in and provide a wonderful experience.”

Eventually, the excesses of the ’92 bid campaign embarrassed even the IOC, which finally adopted its first cap on gifts--$200 per gift, later reduced to $150.

But those limits were little more than speed bumps in the escalating race to take the Olympics away from the other guy.

“Relationships are the key,” Battle says, and relationships are built through hospitality, which in many cases can be more accurately defined as bribery.

“The system is corrupt,” Helmick says. “I think what’s happened since Los Angeles is that more and more money is involved. Much more cash is available, so you start out with every bid city giving every IOC member a first-class ticket to visit your city, and another ticket for his wife.

“That’s $10,000 to $12,000 right there, and then one of them says, ‘I have a son. Can he come too?’ And you say, yes. And the son says, ‘Gee, I’d like to go to college here. Can you help me get into college?’ Oh, sure. You’d help him get into college, wouldn’t you? ‘Would you like a scholarship?’

“Suddenly, you look back and you say, ‘My gosh, this is tantamount to giving them money. Each step of the way we were just taking them a little step further.’

“I think that’s what happened with Salt Lake. They were playing the game by the rules that the IOC implicitly required.”

Salt Lake City played the game more clumsily than most, though, which is why the Salt Lake Organizing Committee has been under siege since the first allegations of bribery surfaced in early December, resulting in the resignations earlier this month of the committee’s top two officials, President Frank Joklik and Senior Vice President Dave Johnson.

More resignations are expected this weekend in Lausanne, when the IOC questions 12 of its members about alleged improprieties during the Salt Lake City campaign. One member, Pirjo Haggman of Finland, already has announced she is stepping aside.

Reform in the bid process will also be called for, but Helmick, among others, doubts that any change of consequence will be implemented.

“Forcing those members to resign is a meaningless gesture,” Helmick says. “It’s really a scapegoating. I think it’ll have no lasting effect whatsoever.

“What it will do is divert attention. And then everyone will go back to their first-class seats and drink their champagne.”

Schmooze Till You Lose

The cities and the cultures may be wildly divergent, but the IOC junkets generally adhere to a universal itinerary.

“You’re invited to come up,” Helmick says. “It almost feels like an obligation--you have to.

“You’re met at the airport by limousine, or if it’s several people, there might be a van. They take you to a hotel. Generally there will be flowers and fruit and wine in your hotel room.

“And then you go through one or two days of a whirlwind tour of the city and cultural events and usually dinner parties.”

Then there are the gifts.

Usually they are waiting for the IOC member in his or her hotel room. During her first years with the IOC, DeFrantz says, “There were a lot of ties. Which I didn’t really have a lot of use for. Now it’s more normal to have women as IOC members.”

Now, DeFrantz is occasionally greeted by a piece of jewelry or a box of candy. She claims she leaves many gifts in her room.

“One I gave back was a necklace,” she says. “It could have been gold. I wrote a very nice note saying how deeply I appreciated the gesture but I could not accept the necklace. . . .

“Sometimes it will be a briefcase. If I think it’s over the limit, I’ll tell someone [with the bid committee], ‘This was in my room, I trust you’ll take care of it.’ It upsets some people, but it doesn’t bother me.”

DeFrantz laughs.

“Except chocolate,” she says. “Chocolate rarely stays in the room, I will confess.”

Helmick spent more than six years with the IOC before resigning in 1991 amid allegations of conflict of interest. Looking back on his trips to bid cities during those years, he calls the cornucopia of freebies available at some sites “almost embarrassing.”

“My wife is a journalist and she would travel with me,” Helmick says. “I remember specifically we were in Athens one time and she came back from jewelry shopping. They have very special jewelry there, and I saw she didn’t have any. I said, ‘I’m a lucky man.’

“Then she asked me, ‘Can we go back tomorrow?’ I asked why. She said, ‘I couldn’t say that I liked it, because I thought they would buy it for me.’ ”

Atlanta’s selection in 1990 as host of the 1996 Summer Games ranks among the greatest upsets of the modern Olympic movement. Never mind U.S. hockey’s “Miracle On Ice” in 1980--Atlanta over Athens to host the Centennial Games was an absolute shocker.

Atlanta had no Olympic heritage, no international sporting reputation beyond Hank Aaron, no lasting contribution to global culture beyond Coca-Cola.

So how did it work the upset?

The big schmooze.

“We knew we were up against a real nonrecognition factor,” Battle says. “ ‘Who are you people? Nobody’s ever heard of you. We don’t know anything about your city.’ We were a real unknown quantity.

“However corny it may sound, I think we believed in Southern hospitality. We really believed the people of Atlanta could make [IOC members] feel welcome in a hospitable way that would be helpful, that would help us facilitate the process.”

This included extensive background research on each IOC member to determine personal likes and dislikes.

“We tried to say, ‘Well, what is this person interested in?’ ” Battle says. “Sometimes it’s a sport they’re interested in. Or, you know, they’re interested in dog breeding, so let’s take them down to some farm and show them where they’re breeding dogs. Whatever.”

Battle cites a few more examples:

* “Some guy was interested in horse racing. We got him an autographed picture of Citation from Calumet Farms or something.”

* “We got Prince Albert a lithograph of Amherst that was autographed by the [college] president, because he went to Amherst.”

* “I’d gone to Western Samoa. I’d gone swimming with the [IOC member] there at the place where they filmed ‘South Pacific.’ He wanted to get a copy of that movie. And I was able to get that from the Turner organization, just a video.”

All within the rules, such as they are, Billy Payne, president of the Atlanta ’96 organizing committee, maintains.

“We were not perfect,” Payne says. “We certainly are not saints. We operated under a set of rules that were in place and we did not bribe anybody. . . .

“I’m not saying we agreed with those rules or had they allowed us to make the rules we would have done the same, which is the subject matter they’re looking at right now.

“But from a legalistic or ethical or moralistic perspective, the restriction on those gifts and what you were permitted to do, while it allowed you to wine and dine and cause you to go to great lengths to try to show your city in the best light, there was not this sense that you were doing something wrong. You were living within a set of rules that they gave you.”

Battle concedes that “the gift-giving gets a little crazy.” And it climaxes when the IOC congregates to vote, with members deluged with gifts from the cities still in the running.

“Sometimes they have to have a steamer trunk to take the stuff [home],” Battle says. “Say there’s five cities bidding. Every one of them is giving [IOC members] something. And they end up with a room full of everything that they could not carry back. . . . The chambermaids are the happiest people there because they probably leave half of it.

“You know, you don’t want to not do it, because you sort of feel like that’s one of the things [other cities] may have to do.”

And yet here is the catch:

Because the IOC vote is conducted via secret ballot--just a blank sheet of paper, on which the IOC member writes his or her choice--the cities have no exact way of gauging how much bang, if any, they’re getting for their bucks.

That’s a lot of Beluga caviar to spread around for who-can-really-say-what?

“It’s a secret ballot. How do you know whether someone has committed to your city or not?” DeFrantz says. “You don’t.

“If a city is spending a lot of money . . . thinking they’re going to seal deals, I think that city has made a pretty bad investment.”

Rebuild or Retool

This weekend, the IOC meets in Lausanne to consider the spillage seeping out of Salt Lake City and what should be done about cleanup.

Resignations will be recommended. Nine IOC members are to be questioned about charges of serious violations, IOC President Juan Antonio Samaranch has said, with four others facing reprimands for lesser violations.

New policy concerning the bid process will almost certainly be adopted. A ban on IOC members visiting bid cities is one option on the table. Another is to remove the vote from the membership and turn it over to an 11-person executive panel.

Some outside the IOC are calling for Samaranch to step down. Samaranch, however, has said repeatedly that he will not resign, vowing to serve out his term, which ends in 2001, “to the last minute.” And any groundswell movement among IOC members to force Samaranch’s resignation is unlikely as well, considering Samaranch personally selected most of them.

“[Samaranch] used to brag to me that at one point, over half the membership were his appointees--selected while he was president,” Helmick says. “How would you like that--an organization where you choose the members who reelect you?”

(Twice already during his presidency, Samaranch has persuaded the membership to raise the IOC mandatory retirement age--first from 72 to 75, then from 75 to 80--whenever Samaranch found himself nearing the magic number. Samaranch turns 80 in July 2000.)

Andrew Jennings, a British investigative reporter who wrote two books in the last seven years detailing IOC corruption, believes this is the crux of the problem within the organization.

“I would urge anybody to step back and actually look at the nature of the organization,” Jennings says. “It’s self-selecting. I have to stop and think at that point.

“Self-selecting? Are you serious? ‘Hello, my name is Bill Clinton, I’ve decided to stay president forever. . . . I’m going to be president of America until I’m 900.’ And Anita [DeFrantz] will be going, ‘I agree, because that’s how we do it at the IOC.’ ”

So, what can be done to revamp the system?

Killian proposes turning the site selection over to a committee comprising international sports federation presidents and the IOC executive board.

“There are IOC members who make visits to bid cities [and] if they were looking at a basketball, they don’t know a basketball from a volleyball,” Killian says. “I would like to see [a system] where the committee was made up of the president of each of the federations, who know what their sports need for an Olympic competition, plus the executive committee of the IOC. Then, we wouldn’t need to fool around.”

Helmick suggests a process through which IOC members are elected by their respective countries and subject to term limits. He argues that taking the vote away from the IOC membership at large and turning it over to a small panel is “exactly the opposite of what they should do.

“You and I grew up in a democratic country where, when we face a problem, we want more openness and want more representation. Samaranch grew up in a fascist nation [Spain, during the Franco regime]. There the rule is when you have a problem, you centralize control and authority. . . . The response that 115 can’t do this, let’s have 14 do it instead--that’s not a democratic response, that’s a fascist response.”

Jennings goes a step further and proposes the complete dismantling of the IOC.

“We need a detached body to sequester their bank accounts and all their assets--all of which has been made off sport,” Jennings says. “Send them packing. Check their wallets and credits to make sure they’re not taking anything.

“And then we need a body in place for the new century that is transparent and democratic.”

In any event, the current crisis has spawned unprecedented introspection within the Olympic movement.

“Los Angeles, to me, is going to end up maybe both a blessing and a curse for the Olympic Games,” Battle says. “I think it was a blessing in the sense of showing that you could do it privately and everything. I also think it introduced this whole business thing to a point [where] they’ve taken that platform to places maybe we wish it hadn’t gone.”

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