All the principals in the Salt Lake City bid scandal were guilty of lack of oversight or willful blindness toward abuses in the system, according to a report by an investigative commission headed by former Sen. George Mitchell.
Mitchell’s Special Bid Oversight Committee, created by the U.S. Olympic Committee, issued a 70-page report Monday that excoriated the International Olympic Committee and found fault with Salt Lake City bid committee boards and with the USOC for letting violations go unchecked.
“The IOC’s willingness to turn a blind eye to the receipt of things of value by a large number of its members tolerated an improper gift-giving culture in which some candidate cities participated,” the report said.
The number of members implicated in the Salt Lake scandal has reached 30, according to new information provided Monday by Richard Pound, head of the IOC commission investigating the scandal. That would be more than a third of the members who voted in 1995, when Salt Lake City was chosen as host of the 2002 Winter Games.
Pound’s commission met Saturday and Sunday in Switzerland to consider nearly 20 cases. They included three that remained open after the Jan. 24 recommendation to expel nine members, four of whom have resigned; 10 names first mentioned in the Feb. 9 report of the Salt Lake City Organizing Committee ethics board; and “six or seven” other cases referred to as possibly linked to IOC members who were not named by the ethics board.
Pound said the IOC could announce by the end of the week whether it will recommend more expulsions, which would require two-thirds approval of the entire IOC membership when it meets in special session March 17-18.
“The 10 new cases are not of such an obviously serious nature as those we saw in the first slice (of 13),” Pound said, “but there is some aspect of those members’ conduct that needs explanation.”
The Mitchell report insisted that the IOC should have been asking for such explanations long ago.
Mitchell cited a 1991 report to the IOC by officials of Toronto’s failed bid for the 1996 Summer Olympics, won by Atlanta. That report proposed sweeping reforms in the bid city selection process and found that 26 IOC members broke “established rules.”
“Cities began to feel the personal benefits to IOC members and what flowed to them became as important as what kind of games the city would put on,” Mitchell said at a press conference Monday in New York.
Admitting the “gift tradition has been there,” Pound said, “at the time this was happening, our focus may have been on other things, and we may have let this slip by more than we should. We are paying for that judgment at the moment.”
The Toronto report wasn’t the only overlooked warning. On April 8, 1988, according to the Italian daily La Gazzetta dello Sport, IOC member Mario Pescante of Italy wrote IOC President Juan Antonio Samaranch to say IOC members had asked the Rome 2004 bid committee for favors similar to those provided by Salt Lake City. Rome was runner-up to Athens in the vote for 2004.
Samaranch has defended his refusal to act on such allegations by saying the IOC never had hard evidence of unethical behavior before the Salt Lake City disclosures. The Mitchell report said Salt Lake spent $4 million to $7 million in 1,375 expenditures on IOC members; more than half that amount may have been in gifts, favors or direct cash payments that violated IOC guidelines.
With worldwide media calls for his resignation, Samaranch has blamed the media for “very exaggerated” criticism of the IOC. He has removed half the responsibility for improper behavior from the members who accepted more than allowed under IOC guidelines.
In an interview published Saturday in the Spanish newspaper El Periodico, Samaranch implied that the U.S. media have carried on a campaign of discredit against the IOC since the first accusations of corruption surfaced in November.
“I can accept, at most, 50 percent of the responsibility for the IOC,” Samaranch said. “The other 50 percent belongs with those who offered these gifts and scholarships to people like the African (members), for whom at times it is difficult to say no.”
Pound said there was evidence of bid cities’ pressuring IOC members, apparently to accept gifts.
“If President Samaranch and the entire IOC leadership resigned tomorrow and there were no other changes, the IOC’s problems would continue,” Mitchell said. “We believe the emphasis should be on changing the system, not on individuals.”
Pound said there was agreement with the IOC “to have the captain of the aircraft at the controls going through the turbulence,” but he left open the possibility of Samaranch resigning before his term ends in 2001. “In the short to medium term, probably the balance of this year, I don’t see that happening,” he said.
Like the European and U.S. government officials who used the recent IOC-sponsored World Conference on Doping in Sport to suggest IOC reforms, the Mitchell report called for overhaul of the self-governing, self-overseeing Olympic body and its host city selection process.
Those changes include elections and term limits for IOC members, currently appointed to their position until age 80. The report called for a ban on gifts of more than nominal value from bid cities.
The report noted that several anonymous USOC officials had taken gifts of more than nominal level from Salt Lake City’s bid committee during the campaigns to be designated U.S. candidate city for both the 1998 and 2002 Winter Games. It also cited the USOC for abusing its International Assistance Fund to win IOC votes for Salt Lake City.
