IOC Votes to Keep Ban on Visiting Bid Cities

The membership of the International Olympic Committee voted Thursday to remain in ethical if somewhat begrudging denial of what had for years been the best perk of being an IOC member: Free trips to cities vying for the right to stage the Olympic Games.

By a show of hands, with only six of 114 delegates affirmatively voting to reinstate visits, the IOC decided to keep in force the ban on such visits it had enacted in 1999. The ban was put in place as a response to the worst corruption crisis in IOC history, the scandal tied to Salt Lake City’s winning bid for the 2002 Winter Games.

The vote Thursday signaled a victory for IOC President Jacques Rogge, who has long been opposed to visits. The IOC will select the site of the 2010 Winter Games next year; it will pick the 2012 Summer Games city in 2005. It decided Thursday to hold the 2005 session in Singapore. New York is in the running for the 2012 Games.

The action came on a day in which Rogge, recapping events over his first full year in office, made it plain that the IOC is now looking to “consolidate” after a “20-year period of uninterrupted growth.”

As part of the focus on downsizing, the IOC intends to vote today on whether to cut three sports -- baseball, softball and modern pentathlon -- from the Games as of 2008.

After two decades of virtually non-stop growth, Rogge said Thursday, the IOC’s financial reserves remain “strong,” at $140 million, up $27 million over the last year. But in light of terrorism concerns and the current worldwide economic downturn, he said the IOC has decided to increase its financial reserves from $140 million to $192 million “as soon as possible.” The money would keep the IOC afloat if an edition of the Games was partially or wholly canceled.

The vote Thursday on visits to bidding cities probably puts an end -- at least until 2009, the end of Rogge’s first eight-year term -- to further formal discussion on the issue, which has simmered for three years. “I think it’s dead for the time being,” longtime Canadian member Dick Pound said after the vote.

The IOC first imposed the ban on bid-city visits just months after the late 1998 eruption of the Salt Lake scandal, then affirmed the ban in December, 1999. The Salt Lake scandal was traced directly to the visits, which dominated the bid-city process from 1986 through 1998; the trips enabled bidders to forge personal contacts with IOC members. Salt Lake bidders showered members or relatives with more than $1 million in cash, gifts and other inducements; 10 IOC members resigned or were expelled in 1999.

Since 1999, the IOC has awarded the Winter Games of 2006 (to Turin, Italy) and the Summer Games of 2008 (to Beijing) without member visits. An IOC team tours the cities in the running for the Games and writes a comprehensive report, which then forms the research underlying member votes.

Some members complained Thursday that the reports aren’t comprehensive enough.

Others argued that the ban amounts to an unwarranted restriction of their dignity.

Supporters of the ban, however, argued that the visits were costly and unproductive and the risk to the IOC of reinstating visits -- both substantively and PR-wise -- remained too heavy to resume the practice.

The IOC’s ranking vice president, R. Kevan Gosper of Australia, asserted, “It was the visit process that nearly brought us down in 1999,” adding, “I would just urge you, urge you, not to step back into the past, the past that nearly killed us.”

And Tommy Sithole of Zimbabwe, a member of the policy-making executive board, made perhaps the most passionate plea. He said, “The Olympics are for the people out there. And those people want to see us put on the best show on earth -- not talk about our visiting cities.”