| Salt Lake City |
 |
 |
| GER |
12 |
16 |
7 |
35 |
 |
| USA |
10 |
13 |
11 |
34 |
|
| NOR |
11 |
7 |
6 |
24 |
|
| CAN |
6 |
3 |
8 |
17 |
|
| RUS |
6 |
6 |
4 |
16 |
|
| AUT |
2 |
4 |
10 |
16 |
|
| ITA |
4 |
4 |
4 |
12 |
|
| FRA |
4 |
5 |
2 |
11 |
|
| SUI |
3 |
2 |
6 |
11 |
|
| NED |
3 |
5 |
0 |
8 |
|
|
|
|
Scandal predated S.L. bid
Deseret News Archives - November 24, 1999
Today marks the one-year anniversary of the Salt Lake Olympic scandal, right?
Not so fast. Yes, it was on Nov. 24, 1998, that local television station KTVX aired a story about Salt Lake bidders paying more than $10,000 in tuition for the daughter of an African member of the International Olympic Committee.
And yes, that story and subsequent revelations about more than $1 million in cash, gifts, trips and other scholarships handed out during the bid to IOC members and their families focused worldwide attention on Salt Lake City.
But there are longtime critics of the IOC who don't think Salt Lake City deserves to be burdened with all of the responsibility for the scandal. Much of the blame, they say, really belongs with the self-appointed guardians of the Games.
Calling the mess the "Salt Lake scandal," then, is wrong.
"I call it the IOC scandal. Salt Lake just bumped into it. Some of us know it's been going on forever," said Andrew Jennings, the British author who has made a career lambasting the members of the Swiss-based organization, whom he describes as "The Lords of the Rings," the title of one of his books.
Jennings was offering examples of misdeeds by the government officials, business leaders and royalty who make up the IOC long before Salt Lake City did what it did to win the 2002 Winter Games. Now he's working on a new book that he promises will provide even more evidence the IOC is, in his words, corrupt.
Still, Jennings said, Salt Lake's bid team could have reacted differently to the demands from IOC members. He noted that the Utahns involved already knew what to expect after losing their bid for the 1998 Winter Games to Nagano, Japan.
"Salt Lake found itself in a scandalous position. Not all of the people in Salt Lake responded as well as they could have," Jennings said. "They could have said, 'This does not fit the values of our society. We're going home.' "
Making public what he termed the "shakedown put on them by the IOC" might have helped put the brakes on bid-buying. That's not going to happen anytime soon, according to Jennings, despite the pressure put on the IOC during the past year.
A University of Toronto sociology professor agrees that Salt Lake City just did what other bid cities had done.
"They all fell in line with whatever demands IOC members were making," said Helen Jefferson Lenskyj, who looked at bids by Atlanta, Sydney and Toronto along with Salt Lake City for her recently completed book, "Inside the Olympic Industry," that, like Jennings', is scheduled for publication next year.
Lenskyj said that while Salt Lake City might have set what she sarcastically termed "the gold standard" in terms of the amount of money spent to influence the International Olympic Committee's decision, all of the cities she studied engaged in ethically questionable behavior.
"Salt Lake has come to symbolize the dominos starting to fall. I'm hoping after people read my book, they'll see not quite an international conspiracy but an international network. All these same people were wheeling and dealing all over the globe," she said.
But it's Salt Lake City that's likely to be stuck with the scandal label.
"Mud sticks," Jennings said. "Utah will have the image of being where the corruption was. That isn't entirely fair, because most of the bad image should be on the IOC."
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