A Shaky Start for Olympic Reforms

The moon hung low in the southern sky, the night was warm, and the platters of free food and drinks kept coming as samba dancers entered to loud music and raucous applause.

Soon these bikinied young women were joined in a Carnival-like conga line by revelers--prominent officials of the worldwide Olympic movement.

This $100,000 bash was hosted in May by Brazil’s Olympic Committee as part of the prelude to a multimillion-dollar effort to land the Summer Games in 2012.

“You know,” observed Franklin Servan-Schreiber, the International Olympic Committee spokesman, “this could look really bad.”

Appearances mean everything as the movement struggles to rebuild its image after the Salt Lake City scandal--in which officials bidding for the 2002 Winter Games wooed IOC members with lavish favors and gifts.

Last December, the IOC enacted a 50-point reform package. But records and interviews show that the culture of privilege and excess at the heart of the scandal is still very much alive.

Cozy relationships and financial arrangements persist, raising questions about whether commitment to reform is widespread and genuine. And far too many Olympic delegates, experts said, have not yet recognized that they must avoid even the appearance of impropriety to help fully restore public confidence.

“You’re asking the old dogs to learn new tricks,” said John Hoberman, an Olympics scholar and professor at the University of Texas.

A yearlong examination by The Times found that the IOC has taken important steps toward reform but still has a long way to go:

Some IOC delegates scoff at perhaps the single-most-important provision in the reform package: a ban on visits to cities bidding for the Games.

Age limits designed to bring fresh blood into an entrenched membership may not even apply to about 80% of the delegates.

The IOC’s recently formed Ethics Commission is not wholly independent and found itself in potential conflicts of interest in two of its first cases.

“In the wake of the problems the IOC had, [members] should pay special attention to appearances as well as substance,” said former U.S. Sen. Howard Baker (R-Tenn.), the only American member of the new IOC Ethics Commission. “I think it is the big issue.”

The Preferred Perk

The IOC currently has 113 members, all serving without pay. Without question, the best perk had long been the free trips to far-flung locales, with the added allure of gifts upon arrival. Perhaps that’s why trying to rein in such trips has proved so difficult.

Before the Salt Lake City scandal erupted, the IOC had placed limits on the duration of trips and the value of gifts an IOC member could accept. But reports later concluded that the rules were widely ignored.

At the height of the scandal, IOC President Juan Antonio Samaranch convened an 82-member reform panel that included the likes of former U.S. Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger and former United Nations Secretary-General Javier Perez de Cuellar.

A ban on visits to bidding cities was part of the panel’s reform package later adopted by the full IOC, 89-10, with one abstention.

However, it was far from clear whether supporters of the ban truly believed in it or, as IOC member Mario Pescante of Italy said after the vote, were merely seeking to support Samaranch and appease critics.

At the time, a disdainful Princess Anne of Britain, an IOC member, quipped to reporters, “If you think [a ban is] going to work--huh, fine.”

The party in Rio, attended by dozens of IOC members, projected the very image of privilege the organization is trying to live down--one that stands in contrast to the struggles of Third World athletes who often do not have enough equipment, training facilities, sometimes even food.

And then there’s the substance behind the party. The Brazilians, who lost out on the 2004 Olympics and want the 2012 Games, spent nearly $3 million on a four-day visit and meeting of the IOC’s ruling Executive Board and members of Olympic committees around the world.

The new IOC rules prohibit members from visiting bid cities, but there was a loophole: Formal bidding for the 2012 Games won’t get underway until next summer.

So there was nothing to stop the Brazilians from feting hundreds of key members in the Olympic movement along the Copacabana.

And the party--with crab meat-stuffed scallops and traditional Brazilian barbecue--was one of several after-hours events, culminating in a formal, sit-down dinner at the seaside.

The president of Brazil made clear that the hospitality was designed to help pave the way to a winning Olympic bid. “It will be our turn,” said Fernando Henrique Cardoso.

Several high-ranking Olympic officials acknowledged that Brazil was sowing goodwill but said they saw nothing exceptional or untoward about the effort.

“You’re in the most riotous of party countries,” said Dick Pound, an IOC vice president from Canada. “It’s part of their culture. Impropriety? Harrumph.”

When the IOC awards the 2012 Games, predicted Jacques Rogge, an IOC Executive Board member from Belgium, “everyone will have forgotten” the parties in Rio.

Even if the Rio festivities had been an official bid visit, that apparently would not have troubled Mexico’s Mario Vazquez Rana, head of the 199-member Assn. of National Olympic Committees and arguably the most powerful IOC member in the Western Hemisphere.

“I am against, totally against, forbidding the IOC members to visit bid cities,” he said in an interview. “I can tell you . . . I’m going to violate Olympic rules because I travel around the world and I meet whomever I want to meet.”

Vazquez Rana acknowledged that one of his Rio hosts had given him a handsome watch, which he wore in place of a gold Piaget. The gift was an H. Stern watch, a brand that sells for $900 to several thousand dollars.

Current IOC rules do not include a dollar limit on gifts but say IOC members may accept gifts “of nominal value . . . as a mark of respect or friendship.” Any other gift must be passed on to the IOC.

Vazquez Rana said he intends to keep the watch and intimated that the Salt Lake City controversy had made even innocent gestures suspect. “When I get a gift, I ask [now] if it’s a bribe,” he said in Spanish. “The truth is, I have never received a gift in exchange of anything.”

Observed Victor Lachance, chief executive of the Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport: “Here’s where you have the paradox.

“You’ve got people who historically have had to be wealthy in order to spend the time to participate in the IOC. Since they care about sports, they are generous and giving, but then when they participate in the IOC, it comes across as lavishness.

“It leaves us wondering, ‘What are they doing this for? Are they doing it for the love of sport? Or for perks and royal treatment?’ ”

Many Reforms Unrealized

Samaranch, president since 1980, likes to say that the crisis afforded the IOC an opportunity to make the membership younger and more vibrant and, for the first time, to introduce up-to-date notions of openness and accountability.

The IOC appointed an ethics panel, opened its sessions to the media via closed-circuit TV and released some financial statements.

Then the committee voted to admit 15 active or recently retired athletes as members--and 10 were immediately inducted.

Samaranch said he knows of no other sports enterprise that has so welcomed athletes into management, a move he says may ultimately prove to be the most important catalyst for change.

The reforms, Samaranch said, already are helping make the organization “more professional.”

“Thanks to [the Salt Lake City] crisis, the IOC is totally different,” he added. “Much more open. Much more transparent.”

Many of the reforms, however, remain unrealized--such as a promise of full financial disclosure. Officials say it may be years until there can be a full accounting of every dollar distributed to sports organizations.

Some reforms that the IOC has adopted may ultimately prove to be without much meaning.

For example, the IOC passed a slew of new rules covering membership.

Members voted in December to give up their current appointments, which essentially guaranteed a lifetime sinecure, in exchange for eight-year terms.

But after eight years, members are free to stand for reelection by their peers.

Members also voted to lower the mandatory retirement age from 80 to 70.

The new retirement age, however, applies to new members only. According to IOC calculations, this means that, if they keep being reelected, 91 of the 113 current members can stay on until age 80.

The Netherlands’ Prince of Orange, now 33, could keep running for reelection until 2047.

The IOC reforms did not address one of the most glaring aspects of secrecy within the organization. It keeps no record of how individual members vote on the two most important matters: the selection of sites for the Games and election of the president. They cast these ballots in secret.

Some legal experts say the secret balloting would make it very difficult for investigators to find whether the votes of IOC members were influenced by favors in cases such as the Salt Lake City bid.

Ethics specialist Michael Josephson said, “It is inconceivable in any representative situation that secret balloting would be appropriate.”

“It defeats the principle of accountability,” added Josephson, whose Marina del Rey institute has advised government agencies and consulted for the U.S. Olympic Committee.

But several IOC members defend the secrecy. “The secret vote is in a way a kind of a defense against corruption,” Rogge said. “If a vote is open and a guy says, ‘Here’s $50,000, and you get the other $50,000 if you vote for me’--I think there’s more danger in that.”

Ethics Commission Stalls

For an institution long accountable only to itself, the IOC took perhaps its most radical step by creating the Ethics Commission.

The commission’s first few months of operation, however, have proved controversial.

To begin with, the commission is not fully independent--three of its eight panelists are IOC members. And the commission’s mandate is to examine complaints, not initiate investigations.

Its first, and to date only, big test underscored the tangle of personal relationships that still underpin the IOC.

An inquiry from a British journalist prompted R. Kevan Gosper, Australia’s senior IOC member, to inform the commission that his family had taken a winter vacation to Salt Lake City in 1993.

Gosper and his wife had become good friends with Tom Welch, head of the local bid committee, and Welch’s wife. The Welches invited the Gospers to Utah. Kevan Gosper didn’t make the trip, but his wife did with their two children.

Gosper said that the trip had been “private,” not Olympic business, and that he had paid for his family’s stay at an upscale condo--though at a discounted rate.

The case immediately presented a dilemma for the Ethics Commission: Gosper himself was a member--and he had personal ties to some other commission members.

After initially saying he would recuse himself, he resigned from the panel.

The chairman of the commission is IOC member Keba Mbaye of the West African nation of Senegal, whom Gosper describes in a new book as his closest friend in the IOC.

“I like Kevan very much,” Mbaye, a former judge of the World Court in The Hague, said in an interview. “But if he is guilty, I would declare him guilty without remorse.”

The day Gosper resigned, one commissioner, former U.N. chief Perez de Cuellar, all but rendered a verdict before the evidence was in. “We have a feeling Mr. Gosper is totally innocent of the allegations,” he told reporters.

Later, the commission adopted a 20-page report from a New York lawyer that exonerated Gosper.

When the decision was announced in May, Gosper said of the ethics panel members: “If you scripted their first case, they couldn’t have done a better job.”

Now on the Ethics Commission’s agenda is an examination of the Salt Lake City bid committee’s so-called geld--or money--memo. The document, listing some of the personal habits and family needs of IOC members, might have served as the blueprint for favors to them.

That case too poses the potential for conflict. Among those mentioned in the memo is ethics panel member Chiharu Igaya of Japan. He was not implicated in the scandal.

Meanwhile, the commission has not yet hired a full-time ethics officer to help enforce the IOC’s code of conduct.

“It’s a slow process,” former Sen. Baker said.

Appearance Problems

Since the Salt Lake City scandal broke almost two years ago, there have been periodic episodes that created at least the appearance of impropriety.

For instance, when the Olympic torch was lighted this spring in Greece and carried toward Sydney, who got the high honor of being the first Australian torchbearer?

An 11-year-old named Sophie Gosper, the daughter of the ranking IOC member from Australia.

Another Australian girl had flown to Greece, expecting to be the first Australian to carry the torch, but Sophie got the nod.

An international flap ensued. And Gosper has apologized repeatedly for his “lapse of judgment” in allowing his daughter to run first.

The IOC culture of personal, political and financial ties can cast a shadow on even seemingly worthwhile programs.

Over the years, the IOC has contributed $800,000 to a program called Olympafrica, which is designed to build recreation centers in Africa.

It was started and now is run by an architect in Senegal. He is Ibrahima Mbaye, the son of IOC member Keba Mbaye, a connection that raised some eyebrows at the IOC.

One of Olympafrica’s biggest benefactors on the IOC is Kim Un Yong, the influential South Korean who heads the World Taekwondo Federation. He chaired the IOC’s Olympafrica program from 1993 to 1998 and says he personally has contributed $110,000 to it.

Kim was the highest-ranking IOC member implicated in the Salt Lake City bidding scandal. It was the elder Mbaye who argued strenuously to keep the IOC from expelling Kim, two sources said.

“For me to give money to Olymp-africa doesn’t build [political] support,” Kim said. “It’s purely humanitarian.”

The younger Mbaye’s program received about $400,000 last year from DaimlerChrysler, an IOC sponsor whose liaison with Africa is IOC member Thomas Bach of Germany.

“It’s a very good project, a cultural project,” said Bach, a gold medalist in fencing in 1976, who hopes to become an IOC vice president. “It’s very well appreciated in Africa.”

Fifteen Olympafrica projects are in various stages of development in a number of African nations.

The younger Mbaye said he draws no salary for his Olympafrica work, and he makes no apologies for having access through IOC connections to money to improve conditions in Africa.

“I need strong people,” he said in an interview.

The senior Mbaye declined to discuss whether he lobbied to save Kim, saying, “My conscience says I don’t have to say what happened . . . because we worked in confidence.”

He said he “didn’t need to” arrange his son’s alliance with the IOC and has no idea whether family ties helped. “He is my son, of course, and I don’t know what he can say when I am not there,” Mbaye said. “But if he says I am his father, he says something which is right.’ ”

Leadership Question

The reality, according to IOC members and to longtime Olympic observers, is that wholesale reform won’t happen until Samaranch steps down. He plans to retire next July after two decades.

At least five longtime IOC members are jockeying for the presidency. IOC insiders say Rogge and Pound are the leading contenders. Others mentioned include Kim and Gosper. Anita DeFrantz of Los Angeles, the only female IOC Executive Board member, has also signaled her interest.

“We have to wait for the new president to lay the hammer down,” said John Lucas, a Penn State professor emeritus and Olympic historian who has attended all the Summer Games since 1956.

“It will take time,” Lucas added. “Another half-decade, even longer than that--and that’s with the new president doing good things.”

The challenge is one of the IOC’s own making, since it promotes the ideals of fair play and brotherhood.

“We are, in a way, the priests of the sports world,” Rogge said.

“We preach. If you preach, you have to be absolutely impeccable. That’s the price you have to pay.”

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Abrahamson reported from Brazil and Switzerland, Wharton from Los Angeles.

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About This Series

For decades, the Olympic movement has promoted itself as the United Nations of sport, a force for fair play. Then came reports of gift-giving and other corruption in Salt Lake City’s bid for the 2002 Winter Games. As disturbing questions swirled around the International Olympic Committee, The Times embarked on a yearlong examination of the movement: Who runs the IOC? How does the organization spend its money? How does it treat athletes? Can the IOC really change its ways?

This is the last of seven weekly reports leading to the Sydney Games.

This series is available on The Times’ Web site:

https://www.latimes.com/ioc.

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Road to Reform

Prompted by the Salt Lake City scandal the International Olympic Committee adopted 50 reforms, revising its internal structure and setting rules of conduct for members. The plan:

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Secret Balloting Survives

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Source: IOC

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Those Who Would Be President

Five longtime International Olympic Committee members are considered the leading candidates to succeed President Juan Antonio Samaranch, who retires next July.

Those Who Would Be President