WinterSports2002.com, Monday, December 21, 1998

Has S.L. changed bids, IOC forever?

Once seen as a squeaky clean campaigner, Salt Lake City is now the catalyst to overhaul how the International Olympic Committee chooses where the Games will go.

"After this scandal, I believe that the IOC as a whole must accept that the system needs to change and that we can't continue like this," IOC President Juan Antonio Samaranch told a Swiss newspaper Sunday.

Samaranch has pushed for years to turn over the selection of sites for the Summer and Winter Games to the 11-member IOC Executive Board, which he heads. Now all 115 members of the IOC have a vote.

They were never expected to be willing to give up that power. Then Salt Lake acknowledged making payments to six relatives of IOC members during the bid for the 2002 Winter Games.

That admission, along with allegations from a prominent IOC member that blocs of votes are being sold by mysterious "agents" for $5 million or more, could end up changing the bid process forever.

The irony is that Salt Lake City wasn't supposed to have to stoop to such tactics. The city was pitched for both the 1998 and 2002 Winter Games as the best choice based on technical merit.

Yet the bid committee and the organizing committee that followed it paid out $400,000 in scholarships for 13 people, mostly from Africa, to study and train in the United States.

Six relatives of IOC members shared in the scholarship program, started in 1991 after the IOC sent the 1998 Winter Games to Nagano, Japan. The program did not end until October of this year.

Samaranch is seizing the opportunity. "We are going to react in a strong way and clean up," he told Le Matin, a French-language newspaper published in Switzerland.

The IOC president has already promised that any members found guilty of taking bribes would be ousted. He said Sunday the IOC investigation of Salt Lake City would be completed by Jan. 23 and would be discussed at a meeting that day.

When Samaranch first learned of the scholarship scandal earlier this month, the matter was sent to a standing committee that didn't have time to consider it until sometime in 1999.

But at the IOC Executive Board's quarterly meeting just over a week ago, what was starting to receive attention from the world media was bounced to a newly created investigative panel.

It was at the meeting that Marc Hodler, a respected longtime member of the IOC from Switzerland, unloaded a long list of allegations about the bid process that included calling Salt Lake's scholarships bribes.

He also described, for the first time, claims made by Olympic "agents" who earn a living selling blocs of IOC votes to bid cities for a price that can exceed $5 million.

Hodler said 5 percent to 7 percent of IOC members are willing to sell their votes. Many of the accusations are aimed at IOC members from Africa, where there is little interest in the Winter Games.

Hodler, head of the IOC commission overseeing preparations for the 2002 Olympics, said he came forward to help Salt Lake. He said the city was blackmailed by agents.

Hodler also said he wants to change the system for selecting Olympic cities.

The allegations have taken their toll on the Salt Lake Organizing Committee.

In a matter of days, SLOC leaders went from labeling the scholarship program "humanitarian aid" to making a humiliating apology in front of the glare of camera crews crammed into the IOC's posh Swiss headquarters.

Since returning home in midweek, they've been bombarded with questions about everything from why the scholarships weren't declared on past tax returns to why no one's been fired yet.

There's also been detailed accounts of free surgery and other medical care for IOC members visiting Salt Lake City and of the son of an IOC member working in City Hall.

New allegations about irregularities in the 2002 bid continue to surface, something that the organizing committee no doubt hopes will stop now that three separate investigations are under way.

That may be asking too much. The IOC continues to dig, and the organizing committee's own Board of Ethics isn't expected to finish its own investigation until February.

And it's anybody's guess what will happen with the U.S. Justice Department's criminal division review announced last Thursday by U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno in Washington, D.C.

The tax returns are being examined by SLOC's tax counsel, who'll also have to explain why the bid committee's tax return for 1994 details a $58,000 fee paid to a man identified by Hodler as an agent, Mahmoud El-Farnawani of Canada, as well as another $57,600 to Mutaleb Ahmad of Kuwait.

Both men are described on the tax return as "marketing consultants."

SLOC has said that lobbyists were hired to help facilitate social contact with IOC members.

They have steadfastly denied there was any attempt to buy votes.

Whether anyone at SLOC will be fired over the controversy is yet to be seen. SLOC Chairman Bob Garff said Friday it's inappropriate to speculate until the ethics board report is finished.

At least two SLOC officials who played prominent roles in the bid committee may be vulnerable. Chief Executive Officer Frank Joklik was the bid chairman and SLOC Senior Vice President Dave Johnson was over international relations.

Both know it wasn't cheap to court the IOC. More than $14 million was raised from the business community to fund Salt Lake City's bids for the 1998 and 2002 Winter Games.

The money went to buy IOC members everything from Stetsons, shotguns and skis to specially selected gifts such as a rare, out-of-print Polish book about World War II. And, of course, to send their children to school in the United States.

It was because a 1996 letter describing a $10,000-plus payment to the daughter of an IOC member was leaked to the media that SLOC leaders had to acknowledge money went to six IOC relatives.

So far, the only recipients identified are Sonia Essomba, the daughter of the late IOC member from Cameroon, and Suhel Attarabulsi, the son of Libyan IOC member Bashir Attarabulsi.

Attarabulsi, 26, told the Deseret News the money spent to send him to school in Utah was not a bribe to buy his father's vote. "There was no deal," he said. "It was just an offer with good intentions."

Former Olympic boss Tom Welch says Salt Lake City didn't do anything that other bid cities haven't done. But Welch stopped short of saying it's unfair to single out Salt Lake's bids for scrutiny.

"The unfairness is the misinformation and allegations out there," said Welch, now a consultant with SLOC. "It's very difficult to respond to it . . . It's going to take some time."

Welch, who drove the bid effort for a decade before he stepped down last year after being charged with spouse abuse, has said he is cooperating with the ongoing investigations.

Others involved with the Olympics are frustrated the spotlight is being shone on Salt Lake and the IOC members who are known to have accepted the bid committee's hospitality.

"I'm concerned that the finger is being pointed at a few IOC members. My observation is that all IOC members receive gifts in excess of $150 (the IOC's self-imposed limit)," one source said.

"Their hotel rooms were filled with gifts. It's my recollection that some of them received skis, some of them received golf paraphernalia. It's likely all of them received a coat."

But George Killian, who served as an IOC member from the United States for about two years, said he was surprised by both the allegation that IOC votes are for sale and that Salt Lake City may have tried to buy them.

"This comes as quite a shock to me, that anyone would come (on behalf of) the IOC with their hand out," Killian said from Colorado Springs. "You hear rumors . . . I didn't think it existed."

He said he was not approached before last year's IOC selection of Athens as host of the 2004 Summer Games. "Nobody offered me anything for my vote, and I wouldn't expect them to," Killian said.

Killian served on the IOC and the SLOC Board of Trustees as president of the International Basketball Federation. When his term as president ended in August, he lost both the IOC and SLOC positions.

"During my short time on the (SLOC) board, I was very impressed," Killian said. He especially liked Johnson. "I found him to be a real gentleman, one who had real insight into what it takes to put on the Olympic Games."

© 1998 Deseret News Publishing Company