The Shadow of the Bid — The Salt Lake City Affair

Through the previous episodes, we have seen how the Olympics changed into a device that generates enormous wealth through broadcasting rights and sponsorship. Hold the Games, and television around the world will broadcast them; the money of global corporations will pour in. Standing at the gateway to that is the ‘host city’. Which city would host the Olympics was decided by the votes of the IOC’s members.

And wherever there is the power to decide the gateway to wealth, the forces that try to draw near that power also gather. In the 1990s, how each bidding city would entertain the IOC members who held votes, and how it would win their favor — that competition gradually crossed into a realm that had lost all sense of proportion. Before long, an affair that would expose this to the light of day occurred in one American city.

A balance that crumbled from a single report

The affair began at the end of 1998. A local news organization reported, it is said, that documents existed indicating that Salt Lake City’s bid committee had been covering the tuition of a family member of a certain IOC member. Triggered by this report, the reality of the cash and gifts surrounding the bid came to light one after another.

According to the reports, the Salt Lake City bid committee is said to have provided IOC members and their families with cash, scholarships, medical care, expensive gifts and other favors on a scale totaling more than a million dollars. The contents were said to range widely, from ski trips and viewing tickets to help with finding employment. Salt Lake City had been chosen as the host of the 2002 Winter Olympics back in 1995, but what had been going on behind that victory? Society was strongly shaken.

What we should pause on here is that these are facts that were ‘reported’ and ‘said to be so’. In the criminal trials that later sought to hold the parties responsible, no finding of guilt was handed down. While the giving and receiving of money and gifts itself was not denied, whether it constituted a crime to be punished under the law was contested as a separate matter.

Unprecedented expulsions, and the Olympics’ self-reform

In response to the reports, the IOC launched its own investigation. And in 1999, the IOC took the step of expelling several members. For this organization, with a history spanning more than a century, to banish its own members on such a scale was, it is said, an unprecedented event. Members who fell short of expulsion are also said to have received sanctions such as warnings.

Faced with a situation that touched the very pillars of the organization, the IOC was forced to remake the system itself. The reform proposals that were put forward are said to have included setting age and term limits for members, adding current and former athletes as members, and banning ‘the practice of members visiting bid cities directly’, which had come to be seen as a hotbed of the problem. Alongside these, measures to strengthen governance, such as establishing a committee to oversee ethics, were also introduced.

Why did the ban on visits become a pillar of reform? Inviting IOC members on-site is, in itself, originally a legitimate activity for a bid city. But the root of the problem is said to lie in how that ‘hospitality’ swelled without limit and degenerated into a competition of lavish entertainment. To cut off the very occasions for such entertainment — in this one can sense the depth of the IOC’s sense of crisis.

Why are the suspicions repeated?

The conclusion of the criminal trial arrived in 2003. On a series of charges brought against two former executives of the bid committee, the U.S. federal district court is reported to have rejected the counts, holding that the evidence supporting guilt was insufficient. The parties are said to have argued that, while admitting they had provided money and gifts, it was a necessary act to win the Olympics and one recognized by those involved. The court did not pronounce them criminals.

But even after the trial reached a milestone, a larger question remained: why are such suspicions surrounding bids repeated? As we saw in the previous episodes, the right to host the Olympics was the gateway to the enormous wealth generated by broadcasting rights and sponsorship. As long as a handful of members’ votes sway that gateway, the force that seeks to work on those who hold the votes will keep arising structurally.

Indeed, even after Salt Lake City, there have been cases reported in which suspicions of wrongdoing were raised over the bids for other Games and became the subject of investigations. That reform in response to one affair has not necessarily managed to prevent the next suspicion — that reality suggests the possibility that the problem is rooted not only in the qualities of individuals but in the very mechanism by which wealth and votes are bound together.

At the gateway where enormous money gathers, how did human greed move? The Salt Lake City affair was one of the events that reflected this most vividly. The greater the wealth grows, the stronger the pressure that bears down on the place where its distribution is decided — and this structural challenge the Olympics took upon itself does not stop at the arena of the bid alone. The money that gnawed at the bidding would, before long, bare its fangs at the fairness of the competition itself.