Turin Awarded Games

The International Olympic Committee, still wrestling with the fallout from the Salt Lake City corruption scandal, on Saturday awarded the 2006 Winter Games to Turin, Italy.

Sion, Switzerland, had been considered the favorite, but Turin prevailed, 53-36, setting off a mad celebration in a posh hotel lobby by 80 cell-phone-toting, Dom Perignon-drinking Italians.

The decision sends the Winter Games back to Ialy for the first time since 1956. It also makes clear that the full impact of the Salt Lake scandal, the worst in the IOC’s 105-year history, has yet to run its course.

IOC officials had hoped the balloting would mark a return to a semblance of normalcy after six months of being consumed by events in Salt Lake.

The selection of Turin laid bare the lingering anger by some IOC members over the role of Marc Hodler, the longtime IOC member from Switzerland who blew the whistle last December on Olympic corruption. Hodler, aware of the sentiment, had protested earlier in the week, “Some people want to blame me. That always happens.”

The vote also came at the end of a weeklong meeting that left it unclear whether key elements in the IOC, from President Juan Antonio Samaranch on down, are genuinely committed to reform--or remain more interested in the odious task of assigning blame for the scandal.

In interviews and in telling remarks delivered from the floor of otherwise routine sessions, IOC leaders also offered a glimpse of a mounting resentment among its 103 members toward its critics as well as signs of an anti-American backlash.

IOC Vice President Anita DeFrantz of Los Angeles said such emotions may be a reflection of basic human nature. Referring to the other IOC members, she said, “People are tired of hearing that the IOC is evil. Some members did wrong. And those members did wrong at the behest of other people.

“The whole world knows that. Now what else do they know about the IOC? There’s so much more to us than this horrible, horrible thing that happened.”

Prompted by disclosures that Salt Lake bidders offered IOC members or their relatives more than $1 million in cash, gifts and other inducements to win the 2002 Winter Games, the IOC earlier this year expelled six members and vowed to undertake a new course of accountability and openness.

It banned gift-giving. It barred officials of cities bidding for the Games from playing host to IOC members or visiting them.

It issued a series of financial statements.

It opened its general sessions, such as the one this week, to the press. Reporters watched on a closed-circuit television feed.

Perhaps most important, the IOC launched an ethics commission and created a panel, dubbed IOC 2000, charged with reviewing and restructuring its structure and operations. A number of IOC 2000 reports are due in December.

The final results, however, are far from in. IOC 2000, originally envisioned as a 24-member panel, has swollen to 80 members. Critics say it’s unwieldy.

Moreover, the financial statements are virtually unintelligible.

And meetings of the IOC’s ruling executive board, where the real power in the institution is concentrated, remain closed.

In opening this week’s session, Samaranch said, “We have admitted to the errors committed and accepted our responsibilities.” But a close reading of what he said immediately before that suggests that blame is also on the agenda:

“It is no secret,” he said, “that the [IOC] has faced a crisis which arose from the election of Salt Lake City to organize the XIX Olympic Winter Games in 2002, and which was followed by an unprecedented worldwide media campaign.”

On Thursday, senior IOC member Mario Vazquez Rana, who also serves as president of the 200-member Assn. of National Olympic Committees, declared: “I can assure you the problems inherent to corruption was born from the people in Salt Lake City.”

Speaking in Spanish, with his remarks delivered in English by an IOC translator, he added, “We will always have been besmirched. I’m sorry to say this, but this is something that comes from that wonderful country that is the United States of America.”

Meanwhile, Kim Un Yong of South Korea, who was reprimanded for his role in the Salt Lake scandal, laid the blame on a “group of Anglo-Saxons in the IOC.”

In an interview with the English-language Korea Times, Kim also said the scandal was “greatly blown out of proportion.”

It was against this simmering stew of politics and resentment that the IOC turned its attention Saturday to the 2006 Games.

An IOC evaluation report earlier this year had rated Sion and Turin highest. Also in the race were Helsinki; Klagenfurt, Austria; Poprad-Tatry, Slovakia; and Zakopane, Poland.

The winner was selected by secret ballot among the full IOC membership after a 15-member committee narrowed the bidders to the two finalists.

It was little wonder that Helsinki didn’t make the final cut. Its bid chairman, Martin Saarikangas, had told the members, “It is now time for reform within the Olympic movement. . . . Let us all face it and act accordingly.”