Mitt used Games role for political impetus

Wary of appearing to dominate the Games, church leaders asked Romney to scale back his requests for aid, which he did. They also curbed their ambitions to use the Games to promote awareness of Mormonism — with a few exceptions, among them a book one of the church's publishing companies released for the Games, "Why I Believe," in which the Romneys joined about 50 other prominent Mormons in expressing their religious faith.

"It all worked out beautifully after the church backed off and the prophet (Hinckley) said we won't have any missionaries on the streets proselytizing," Garff said.

Crunching numbers

Behind Romney's funding request to the church was a larger concern about the budget for the Games.

Three years shy of the opening ceremonies at the University of Utah's hillside stadium, Romney inherited a $1.45 billion budget. Then Romney crunched the numbers and concluded that the trustees needed to raise more than $400 million to cover the budget. He cast the challenge as a monumental crisis, one that would require extraordinary efforts from everyone involved.

"We could be liquidated by our creditors and shamed," Romney told then-Gov. Michael Leavitt, according to Romney's memoir, "Turnaround: Crisis, Leadership, and the Olympic Games."

Fund-raising had stalled as companies feared becoming enmeshed in the scandal. Sponsors had retreated, scared off in part by D'Alessandro, who told reporters that any chief executive who signed sponsorships without reforms in the Olympic movement "should be fired."

"The best way I can describe what (Romney) faced is, trying to rebuild an airplane while it's flying," D'Alessandro said.

Romney trimmed the budget to $1.32 billion, launched marketing campaigns and established an austerity program whose symbolic features included abolishing free lunches for the trustees. In lieu of grand buffets, Romney ordered Domino's pizza and required board members to pay $1 a slice, plus 25 cents per soda.

While Romney's moves energized the committee, some people familiar with the budget insist his dire forecasts were overstated. A Globe review of archived records showed the organizing committee already had secured commitments of nearly $1 billion in revenues, including $445 million as its share of the NBC contract and nearly $450 million in contracts for sponsorships, before Romney arrived.

In addition, the Utah Legislature already had loaned $59 million in sales tax revenue to the Games and Congress was prepared to provide hundreds of millions in direct support. Direct federal aid for the Games ultimately totaled $382 million.