| Salt Lake City |
 |
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| GER |
12 |
16 |
7 |
35 |
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| USA |
10 |
13 |
11 |
34 |
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| NOR |
11 |
7 |
6 |
24 |
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| CAN |
6 |
3 |
8 |
17 |
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| RUS |
6 |
6 |
4 |
16 |
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| AUT |
2 |
4 |
10 |
16 |
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| ITA |
4 |
4 |
4 |
12 |
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| FRA |
4 |
5 |
2 |
11 |
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| SUI |
3 |
2 |
6 |
11 |
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| NED |
3 |
5 |
0 |
8 |
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Schmoozer makes Olympic comeback
By Peter Waldman
The Wall Street Journal
For off-the-field Olympic comebacks, the story of Sead Dizdarevic may be unparalleled.
Dizdarevic is the official corporate-hospitality sponsor of the Olympic Winter Games, a title that hardly does justice to a picaresque career. After the closing ceremonies this Sunday, his company, Jet Set Sports, will have shuffled 16,000 visitors through Salt Lake City, filled 18,000 hotel beds, provided 132,000 meals and hawked $23 million worth of Games tickets. Jet Set's Olympics-related sales, including those to its blue-chip schmoozing clients like ChevronTexaco, AOL Time Warner, Merrill Lynch and McDonald's, could top $80 million, he says.
Not bad for an immigrant from Bosnia who in 1999 told a federal judge in Brooklyn, N.Y., that his company had an unlisted phone number, didn't advertise and didn't even own a checkbook since it dealt mostly in foreign currency. Later, he told U.S. prosecutors he had given $131,000 in cash to the leaders of Salt Lake's Olympic bid committee, dispensing the notes by hand at hotels and airports in 1994 and 1995. The allegations, which might have ended Dizdarevic's Olympics affiliation, anchored the government's 15-count indictment of the bid group's top two officers for racketeering and fraud, dismissed last year by a U.S. district judge here.
Dizdarevic says his brush with scandal is ancient history now. The plucky 51-year-old New Jersey resident, through his sponsorship agreement with the Salt Lake Organizing Committee and the U.S. Olympic Committee, holds a virtual monopoly on the U.S. Olympic tickets-package market. In exchange for roughly $20 million in fees, spread out over three Olympic Games through Athens in 2004, Dizdarevic enjoys guaranteed access to large allotments of premium-grade tickets and hotel rooms, which he resells in packages at steeply marked-up prices to eager corporate buyers. He also owns the rights to resell scads of second-tier events tickets, which he bundles with two- and three-star hotel rooms for sale to the public at large.
"His corporate clients think the world of him," says Dick Schultz, who ran the USOC in the late 1990s when Dizdarevic was one of several authorized ticket re-sellers who had to scramble to nail down access. "Sead's taken a cottage industry and turned it into a real blockbuster."
The Salt Lake Games are an example. Dizdarevic used the sponsorship agreement, which he signed in 1999, to help lock up 30 percent of the city's hotel capacity and more than 10 percent of the Games' tickets. He booked three of the area's best restaurants for the entire 17-day Olympics, and leased 124 SUVs and 24 buses to take VIPs around. Most corporate packages sell for $20,000 to $30,000 for a three-day stay, all inclusive but airfare. He sold out last spring.
"He's always years ahead of everybody else," says Don Barr, a former publisher of Sports Illustrated, which has sent thousands of guests to the past several Games with Dizdarevic. "He delivers."
Dizdarevic is among those who say the Olympic movement needed the 1998 Salt Lake bid scandal to clean up its act. In that imbroglio, two Olympics organizers were accused of giving $1 million in payoffs to International Olympic Committee members to curry favor for Salt Lake's bid. The IOC ousted 10 of its members for accepting lavish gifts.
Dizdarevic received immunity from prosecution for cooperating with the government in the case. Today he says the scandal was the best thing that ever happened to the Olympics. "Now we have rules," he says. "We need one more (scandal), then the Olympic movement will be a true Olympic movement again."
Dizdarevic was no slacker under the old rules, either. He acknowledges making cash "contributions" over the years to Olympics organizers whose access to tickets, hotel rooms and the like he needed to run his business. Stan Parrish, who ran Utah's economic-development office in the late 1980s, once wrote a report after meeting Dizdarevic in Europe. The topic: strategies to win the Games.
"Sead had some interesting thoughts about . . . the mechanics of the (IOC) voting process," Parrish wrote in the 1989 memo. "He also said he spent $500,000 on the Sofia bid and felt he learned some interesting lessons in the process. He feels some political commitments are made with trade-offs."
Dizdarevic confirms giving "tens of thousands" of dollars to Bulgaria's failed Olympics bid, in his role as official agent of the Bulgaria Olympic Committee. "It was my honor, my privilege," he says. Dizdarevic also had a penchant for striking up business ties with wives, daughters and girlfriends of people with influence over the Games — a practice he never meant "as anything dishonorable," he says.
In one business venture outlined in court filings in the Salt Lake federal fraud case, Dizdarevic was linked in the early 1990s to Susan Krimsky, wife of the USOC's chief marketer at the time, John Krimsky. The court document, filed by defense lawyers based on Dizdarevic's testimony to a federal grand jury, labels the tie-up "a classic kickback scheme," which ended in Dizdarevic's paying Susan Krimsky $225,000 for a company "then of little worth," the filing says.
Dizdarevic, citing the court matter, declines to comment, except to say it was nothing improper. Susan Krimsky could not be reached for comment; her husband declined to answer questions about Dizdarevic.
Before the 2000 Sydney Olympics, Dizdarevic says, he hired the girlfriend of a local Olympics organizing executive to book hotel rooms for the Australia Games, never realizing how awkward it might look, he says. Likewise, in Salt Lake, Dizdarevic says he commissioned Utah travel agent Cathy Barnes to assemble Olympic tour packages for Jet Set's individual clients starting in 1999 — not realizing Barnes is the daughter of Gordon B. Hinckley, president and prophet of the The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. (Barnes has no connection to SLOC or the IOC, though her husband, Alan, worked as SLOC's office manager until his death last year. She has since sold her agency and didn't return messages left with former colleagues in Salt Lake.)
"Now I realize how some people zero in on perceptions," says Dizdarevic.
Raised in a prosperous Muslim family outside Sarajevo, Dizdarevic fled the former Yugoslavia at age 20, dropping out of a military academy to play club soccer in West Germany. He immigrated to Staten Island, N.Y., in the early 1970s and founded a travel agency specializing in discount flights to Yugoslavia. His business boomed as he arranged tickets for amateur sports teams traveling between the United States and Eastern bloc, connections he would parlay into his first Olympics break: handling tickets and hospitality for Americans traveling to the 1984 Winter Games in Sarajevo.
Short of comfortable hotel rooms, he converted the Sarajevo villa of the late Yugoslav dictator Marshal Tito into corporate suites. He also persuaded Yugoslav military officers and others to host Americans in their own homes, and to serve them tea or whiskey once a day as a special treat. Faced with the same problem in Lillehammer, Norway, in 1992, Dizdarevic persuaded a farmer to rent his field for a 183-room temporary hotel he had built in the middle of town. He lost money on the deal, but it was the best investment he ever made, Dizdarevic says.
"Even Olympic people who don't know my name know that hotel," he says.
After Salt Lake, it's off to the 2004 Summer Games in Athens, where Dizdarevic is negotiating with the local organizing committee to be the official corporate-hospitality sponsor there as well. Seven of his nine major corporate clients have already committed to sending guests. Two luxury cruise ships and 600 four-star hotel rooms have been nailed down, as well as 1,100 less-pricey rooms for noncorporate guests.
Then come the 2006 Winter Games in Turino, Italy; Dizdarevic says he expects to sign a sponsorship letter of intent this week. He has booked 550 high-end beds and 750 consumer rooms.
For Beijing, 2008, he and the organizers have held introductory meetings. Dizdarevic says corporations are jumping at China; he predicts corporate attendance will be 2 1/2 times what it is in Salt Lake, reaching 40,000 guests. "A lot of them don't want to wait six years," Dizdarevic says. "They'd like to jump from here to Beijing."
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February 22, 2002
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