IOC Might Revisit Ban on Trips to Bid Cities

How to describe China’s political system: Totalitarian? Authoritarian? Communist?

The International Olympic Committee’s Evaluation Commission, charged with providing the 123 IOC members the straight scoop on Beijing and the four other cities hoping to stage the 2008 Summer Games, describes the political system in the world’s most populous nation as “working for China.”

The report also declared that the Beijing bid “would leave a unique legacy to China and to sport.” The report is supposed to be neutral. But it didn’t say anything about the Games being so special if they go to any of the four other candidate cities--Paris; Toronto; Istanbul, Turkey; and Osaka, Japan.

The meaningless sloganeering of “working for China” and the blatant promotion inherent in an Olympic legacy supposedly unique to China serve as evidence of precisely the sort of flaws many IOC members have warned they’d see in a process that replaced what had been the undisputed No. 1 perk of being an IOC member--all-expense paid trips to cities around the world hoping to host the Games.

In the wake of the Salt Lake City corruption scandal, which erupted as a direct consequence of numerous member visits to Salt Lake City, the IOC in December 1999 voted to ban such visits. In its place: the evaluation report. The report is supposed to serve as the central reference for the IOC when members select the 2008 Games city, in a vote July 13 in Moscow.

Instead, it has sparked considerable agitation within the IOC for a return to the past, with many key members saying after the report was issued last week: Bring back the trips!

“I think,” Guy Drut of France said, “it could be better to reestablish the visits of the members in the candidate cities but in an organized system.”

Kim Un Yong of South Korea said IOC members “don’t want to be humiliated as suspects and they can’t judge which [city] is best by reading a few papers prepared by just a few people.”

The trips have emerged as a central campaign issue in the IOC’s intensifying presidential race, which is going on simultaneously with the jockeying for the 2008 Games site. A new president will be elected July 16 in Moscow, taking over from Juan Antonio Samaranch of Spain, IOC president since 1980.

Samaranch was fully behind the bid-city trip ban in 1999. He remains adamantly against the trips. “Strongly no,” is how he put it in an interview in his office at IOC headquarters by Lake Geneva.

The issue is thus likely to serve as a referendum on Samaranch’s authority and influence as he prepares to leave office, one final test of his legendary ability to get things done his way. During his 21 years atop the IOC, the number of votes he has lost on issues he truly cared about can be counted on one hand, maybe two, Olympic insiders say.

One of Kim’s campaign planks, however, is a call for the trips to resume. He says reform is “an ongoing process” and declares in what he calls his “Olympic Action Plan” that, if he’s elected, members “will have the right to visit, at IOC expense, cities bidding to organize the Olympic Games.”

Five IOC members have announced they’re running for president. Kim is widely considered one of three leading contenders, along with Belgium’s Jacques Rogge and Canada’s Dick Pound. Anita DeFrantz of Los Angeles and Hungary’s Pal Schmitt are also in the race.

Schmidt said he is in favor of keeping things the way they are now. “We have to trust in our colleagues,” he said. DeFrantz, an outspoken opponent in 1999 of bid-city trips, said, “We have to wait for the process to fulfill itself.”

Pound and Rogge, meantime, said they already want the IOC’s process of selecting a city to be reviewed thoroughly after July. Neither flatly declared opposition to trips, signaling at the least a willingness to consider reinstating the visits.

“Reinstating the bid visits would be one extreme,” Pound said. “There are a lot of intermediate measures.”

“This is our first experiment without visits,” Rogge said, meaning the first Summer Games selection since the scandal broke. Until the 1980s, members selected the Games site without visits. “We’ll have to evaluate: Have we made good choices?”

Rogge added, “If we wish IOC members to visit, we should never forget it was the visits that brought us these problems.”

As part of a concerted campaign to win the 2002 Games, Salt Lake officials squired IOC members around Utah and showered delegates and their families with more than $1 million in cash, gifts and other inducements. Salt Lake won the 2002 Games in 1995.

Tom Welch, who led the bid, and Dave Johnson, his chief lieutenant, were indicted last year by a federal grand jury on fraud and other charges relating to the bid. Their trial is due to begin July 16 in Salt Lake.

“Without visits there would be no scandal,” Samaranch said.

As far back as 1991, officials in Toronto--which tried unsuccessfully for the 1996 Games that went to Atlanta--presented a report to the IOC that called the trips the “Achilles’ heel of the bid process.” The report said the trips presented the “greatest risk” to the IOC of “its image being tarnished and its integrity eroded.”

The then-president of the Toronto bid, Paul Henderson, said the IOC ought not to ban trips. But, he said in the report, the IOC ought to collect $500,000 (or some “other suitable amount”) from each city, deposit it in an account and then use the money to organize, run and monitor trips in which members visited in groups, not individually.

Henderson, now an IOC member, said last week, “I still believe that’s right.”

So did one of several inquiry commissions formed after the scandal, a five-member panel headed by George Mitchell, a former U.S. Senator from Maine.

The commission’s report, issued in March 1999, said IOC members “should be permitted to visit candidate cities during the selection process, provided that all expenses of such visits are borne by the IOC or by the IOC member personally.”

In December 1999, by a vote of 89-10 with one abstention, the IOC instead voted to ban the visits outright.

From almost the moment the ban was enacted, it has been dismissed, even ridiculed, by many influential IOC members. In one of the more memorable comments in recent IOC history, Princess Anne of Britain, an IOC member since 1988, said just moments after the vote, “If you think it’s going to work--huh, fine.”

In many respects, the ban is completely unenforceable. Any number of IOC members travel extensively in their business or professional lives, and it’s not unusual for them to be in, say, Paris on a project unrelated to the IOC.

The ban has created some almost-comic scenarios. Israel’s Alex Gilady, for instance, was flying recently in the Far East when his plane was unexpectedly diverted to Beijing. Upon landing, he called Samaranch to say he wasn’t in Beijing intentionally and wasn’t trying to go around the rules.

The ban also has sparked considerable resentment because anyone else interested in the Olympic movement is free to visit the 2008 candidates to assess a bid--several reporters have done so--but IOC members can’t. Reporters don’t vote; IOC members do. “We know less than you,” one member complained to a reporter last week.

The Evaluation Commission report was supposed to provide a thorough assessment of each city’s strengths and risks. The 14-member commission, led by Hein Verbruggen of the Netherlands, head of the international cycling federation, visited each of the five cities in February and March, producing a 107-page report that summarizes finance, transport, technology and the other logistical concerns that figure into staging the Games. It does not address human rights or other issues.

According to its critics, the report suffers not only from what’s in it--the reference to “working for China,” for instance, which Verbruggen said was supplied by Chinese officials in the Beijing bid book--but from what’s not.

“We are not entitled to visit China,” one senior IOC member said, speaking on condition of anonymity. “I am unable to identify and assess these allegations about human rights.”

Addressing a reporter, the member said, “We have to rely on what--what you write? On the evaluation report? No.”

A senior official with one of the five bids, asking to remain unnamed, said the betting is that perhaps one in three IOC members will actually read all 107 pages of the evaluation report.

Those who produced the report stand by it.

“This system works much better than the previous one” because the commission visited only those cities that the IOC already had deemed possibly capable of hosting the Games, Verbruggen said. Last year, it trimmed a long list of candidates to five.

Staunch supporters of the ban also say the system works.

To reinstate visits, said R. Kevan Gosper of Australia, would “reverse” gains made through the reforms, expose the IOC to “costs we don’t need” and “expose ourselves to all those things again.”

Without naming names but clearly referring to Kim, Gosper said, “Anyone talking about that,” meaning bringing visits back, “I don’t understand.”

Kim, however, is equally adamant.

“The IOC shouldn’t destroy our human relations, which is the base of our volunteer service,” he said.

Kim has long been one of Samaranch’s closest allies. On this issue, however, the two have parted ways.

The mounting intrigue is what that means come July, and thereafter--not just for Kim’s presidential aspirations but for the process by which the IOC conducts one of its central missions and the way the public perceives the IOC’s commitment to reform.

Samaranch, speaking to a handful of reporters last week at the Olympic Museum here, said that a candidate in any election promises “many things.” His voice scratchy from the latest in a lingering series of colds, Samaranch, 80 years old, said he was reminded of the tale of a candidate in his native Spain who kept promising voters he would build a bridge.

This went on, Samaranch said, until one prospective voter said to the candidate, “You have a bridge. But,” and here Samaranch smiled wryly, “we have not a river.”