It mattered little that Romney lacked any Olympic experience. A week earlier, he had received "a 101 course in the Olympics" from Andy Baldwin, then vice president of the U.S. Olympic Committee. Romney learned about the three factions that had been created to serve the world's finest athletes: the USOC, the International Olympic Committee, and the local organizing committee. The groups had all but destroyed one another in a convulsion of territorial infighting.

Much of the damage seemed to stem from decisions made by two previous executives on the Salt Lake City organizing committee, chief executive Thomas K. Welch and vice president David P. Johnson, who embraced the tacit form of influence peddling that greased the international selection process former Olympic sites.

After Salt Lake City lost its bid for the 1998 Games to Nagano, Japan, Welch and Johnson concluded they had failed to lavish enough largess on members of the IOC, which chooses host cities. While Nagano had plied IOC members with about $540,000 worth of souvenirs, including laptop computers, Salt Lake City had handed out little more than cowboy hats.

Vowing not to be defeated again, Welch and Johnson funneled through the committee more than $1 million in gifts to numerous IOC delegates for the 2002 Games — a stunning trove of booty that included cash, college tuition, medical-care payments, jobs, lodging, beds and bedding, bathroom fixtures, Indian rugs, draperies, doorknobs, dogs, leather boots and belts, perfume, Nintendo games, Lego toys, shotguns, a violin and trips to ski resorts, Las Vegas and a Super Bowl in Miami. Almost no request from an IOC member went unmet.

Then came the comeuppance. After Salt Lake City won its bid for the Games, a local ABC affiliate received a news tip about college tuition payments the organizing committee had made for the daughter of an IOC delegate from Cameroon. Soon, investigations were launched by the U.S. Justice Department, Congress, Utah's attorney general, the USOC, the IOC and the Salt Lake committee.

Shamed by the scandal — in which 10 members of the International Olympic Committee would resign or be expelled for accepting gifts, the Olympics chiefs wanted a Salt Lake CEO wise in the ways of business, the law and Mormonism.

They fast settled on Romney, whose ties to the state ran deeper than his ancestral roots. Romney had visited Utah as a child, married his wife, Ann, at the great LDS temple in Salt Lake City, and attended Brigham Young University in Provo, where two of his sons were enrolled at the time. Ann, struggling with her recently diagnosed multiple sclerosis, was finding some relief in the mountain air of Park City, Utah, where she and Mitt had just built a magnificent vacation home, now assessed at $5.2 million.