USOC Tells on Itself

The United States Olympic Committee directed more than $60,000 to support sports in Africa and Asia in hopes of currying favor for Salt Lake City’s bid for the 2002 Winter Olympics, according to an internal USOC report obtained Saturday by The Times.

The report, which reveals publicly for the first time just how far the USOC went in helping Salt Lake win the 2002 Games, says the USOC underwrote training costs and supplies for athletes and coaches from Sudan, Mali, Uganda and Turkey.

The USOC even gave out “pocket money,” $150 per month to each of three Sudanese athletes and a coach for four months in 1995, providing the most detailed account to date of the USOC’s role in the worst corruption scandal in the history of the Olympic movement.

Since the scandal broke about a year ago, four International Olympic Committee members have resigned and six more were expelled--each implicated in accepting some of the more than $1 million the Salt Lake Organizing Committee spent on scholarships, gifts and other inducements for IOC members or their families.

Among those expelled: Lamine Keita of Mali and Zein El Abdin Mohamed Ahmed Abdel Gadir of Sudan.

An investigation launched by the U.S. Justice Department is ongoing.

The USOC report was prepared in February by the law firm of Hogan & Hartson.

It was turned over Friday to congressional investigators--after months of resistance from the USOC, which contended it contained confidential material.

It previously had been turned over to the Justice Department and to a USOC ethics panel headed by former Sen. George Mitchell.

Mitchell’s commission subsequently suggested a wide-ranging series of rules changes aimed at increasing the USOC’s accountability--which the USOC adopted wholesale.

“We were without the oversight, clearly, and we acknowledge that,” USOC spokesman Mike Moran said Saturday, adding, “We had to change that and I think we have.”

Hogan & Hartson lawyers found that USOC oversight was lax in three distinct areas--over USOC staff, over bid-city boosters eager to promote their city as the sole U.S. candidate for the Olympic Games and, ultimately, as events in Salt Lake proved, over the U.S. city vying for IOC votes.

The report offers a slew of new details about the outside business interests of Alfredo LaMont, the USOC’s director of international relations, who resigned Jan. 14 amid allegations of conflict of interest.

It has since been widely reported that his outside interests included a company called Citius that had signed a contract with the Salt Lake bid committee to provide details about Central and South American countries’ views of the Salt Lake bid.

The report, however, reveals that LaMont consented to an interview with the Hogan & Hartson lawyers three days before he stepped down, telling them that Citius was owned by a friend, Antonio Aguilar, and that Aguilar lived in Mexico.

The report says LaMont recalled “very few” further details but did remember that the bid committee was paying Citius $2,000 per month and the checks were sent to his Colorado Springs home--because of “difficulties with the Mexican mail system.”

“Despite the fact that Mr. Aguilar purportedly was a close personal friend,” the report also says, “Mr. LaMont could not tell us where he could be located.” In a footnote, it notes that lawyers were “unable to confirm the existence of Antonio Aguilar. Indeed, no documents were found in Mr. LaMont’s office pertaining to Citius or Mr. Aguilar.”

LaMont could not be reached Saturday at his Colorado Springs home.

The report plainly faults the USOC for oversight of the process by which Salt Lake boosters won the right to woo the IOC--by lavishing members of a USOC panel with gifts at a time when Salt Lake was competing to be the USOC’s choice to host the Games.

During the USOC panel’s visit in 1989, the report says, Salt Lake organizers spent $1,518 on jackets and hats, $338 on roses, $250 on massage therapists and $721 for 14 Utah Jazz basketball tickets.

Finally, the report stresses there is “no evidence” that IOC members directly got money or “extraordinary benefits” from the USOC in connection with Salt Lake’s bid.

But the report plainly illustrates the nuanced way the process worked.

In the mid-1990s, the report says, the USOC spent about $65,000 on training and equipment for athletes from countries whose IOC members were seen as supporting the Utah bid. Salt Lake was awarded the 2002 Games in 1995.

The USOC spent about $6,300 for basketballs, volleyballs, kickboards and bicycles to be sent to Mali, about $6,850 for table tennis and team handball equipment to Uganda and $2,000 to train a Turkish figure skater.

Most of the money, about $50,000, was spent on the Sudanese in 1995 and 1996, the report said.

In a complicated--and conflicting--bit of bookkeeping, the Salt Lake Organizing Committee issued a report several months ago that said SLOC had paid more than $40,000 to train the Sudanese. The USOC report said Utah organizers reimbursed the USOC only $7,090.

The USOC report includes memos and e-mails from USOC staffers justifying the spending because they believed IOC members from all four countries supported the Salt Lake bid.