Salt Lake Scandal in Mind, IOC to Choose Site for 2006 Games

Santa Claus procured an off-season gig this week, wishing a jovial hello to members of the International Olympic Committee in a seventh-floor hospitality suite tucked into one of the world’s premier luxury hotels.

More surreal was Santa’s sidekick, a gent who strapped on an accordion and blasted out Broadway show tunes.

By far the most unreal, however, was Santa’s greeting to various delegates. Without a hint of irony in his booming voice, he wished a cheery hi to, as he put it, the IOC’s “good boys and girls.”

With the Salt Lake City corruption scandal as backdrop, the IOC convened here for a weeklong session building to a Saturday vote on a site for the Winter Games in 2006.

Six European bidders are in the running. Santa was backing Helsinki. Sion, Switzerland, and Turin, Italy, are considered the favorites, however. Also vying are Klagenfurt, Austria; Poprad-Tatry, Slovakia; and Zakopane, Poland.

Because the contest involves six European entries, it has garnered little attention in the United States, unlike the 1995 vote that gave Salt Lake the 2002 Games. Because of Salt Lake, however, the 2006 contest has been like no other.

The IOC members’ primary job is in picking a site for the Games. It was apparent on Thursday, however, that a key Olympic event is still finger-pointing.

“I can assure you that the problems inherent to corruption was born from the people in Salt Lake City,” Mario Vazquez Rana, an influential Olympic official from Mexico, said Thursday.

Speaking in Spanish, his comments related in English by an IOC translator, Vazquez Rana added of his fellow IOC members, “We will always have been besmirched. . . . I’m sorry to say this, this is something that comes from that wonderful country, the United States of America.”

Retorted Anita DeFrantz, an IOC vice president from Los Angeles, “Assigning blame is useless at this point. . . . It’s time to get on with us putting on the Games.”

In the wake of the scandal, which led to the expulsion of six members and the resignation of four more amid allegations of vote-buying, the IOC thoroughly revamped its rules.

It barred gift-giving. It also prohibited bidders from playing host to IOC members or visiting them.

It also redid the selection process. In previous years, typically with four or more candidates in the contest, the entire IOC membership cast a series of ballots, the bidder with the fewest votes dropping out of each successive round. The winner won the final round.

This time, the IOC intends to appoint a 15-person “selection college” on Saturday morning. That panel will cut the contestants to the final two. The full membership will then pick the winner Saturday afternoon.

In December, an IOC reform panel is due to recommend a new, permanent process for future elections.

The one that concludes Saturday is among those under consideration. But it’s far from clear that it has worked to the benefit of the competing cities--or, for that matter, to the IOC, which maintains it wants to pick the best bid.

Demonstrating the potential and the pitfalls of technology, for instance, several of the bids opted to make CD-ROMs packed with snazzy audio and video presentations.

The audio didn’t work correctly on the CD Helsinki bidders gave The Times. The video didn’t work correctly on the CD offered by Turin. Klagenfurt’s CD required the installation of a special software program--no problem for the computer literate but not a typical challenge for the members of the IOC, many of them 60 and over.

This week, most of the bidders opted for real-live star power. Santa was tested against the likes of Italian skiing great Alberto Tomba, who touted Turin (while also managing to mention repeatedly for anyone who would listen that he was the star of a forthcoming action movie, “Alex the Ram”).

Officials of several bids sighed and said they would have much preferred the sort of relationship-building available only on a personal visit.

“Since there are no visits, we have a handicap,” said Gabriele Massarutto, an official with the Klagenfurt entry, which features a joint venture with partners in Italy and Slovenia. The women’s downhill, for instance, would start in Italy, run through Slovenia, then finish in Austria.

How could that be? It’s all the same mountain, said Massarutto. Without seeing it first-hand, he said, “It’s a paradox. And it’s more difficult to explain what really exists than [to look at drawings of] a project. The idea of our compactness does not come across.”

Several bidders also complained that the no-visit rule may have given a formidable advantage to Sion, which is bidding for the third time. Some 70 IOC members visited Sion in 1995 (when it was competing against Salt Lake for the 2002 Games). The others have undoubtedly noticed the red-and-white Sion signs in the Geneva airport while en route to IOC headquarters in Lausanne--an hour away from Sion, a small town of 26,000.

“We might have a small advantage,” said Jean-Loup Chappelet, a coordinator with the Sion bid.

An IOC report assessing each of the six bids gave highest marks to Sion and Turin--but noted that each of the six bids has a flaw.

The Swiss plan, for example, calls for bobsled and luge to be held at St. Moritz--45 minutes away by air, six hours by car.

Turin’s locales are spread out and it faces transportation woes, the report said.

Klagenfurt’s three-country concept “presents interesting aspects but also potential organizational difficulties,” what with three languages and three legal systems.

Unfortunately for Helsinki, it doesn’t have mountains nearby; its proposal calls for holding the skiing, snowboarding, bobsled and luge events in far-away Lillehammer, Norway, site of the 1994 Winter Games.

Poprad-Tatry is located in a nation trying to undo 40 years of a Communist-planned economy even as it copes with its more recent separation from the union of what was Czechoslovakia. So financing is suspect.

And as for Zakopane--the Olympics in Poland? As one Olympics-devoted newsletter related, the IOC listed reservations “under the headings [of] financing, accommodation, transport and technology.”