A Cloud Over the Games

For good or ill, the international Olympic movement’s dirty laundry may be aired for all to see in the criminal courts during the 2000 Summer Games in Sydney, even dragging on toward the 2002 Winter Games in Utah. It could cast an unfortunate pall over the performance of the athletes and the hard work of thousands of volunteers.

But some good may also come of the expected federal trial of the Utah Games’ key organizers. Tom Welch and Dave Johnson were indicted last week on a broad array of charges related to Salt Lake City’s efforts to get the 2002 Games. The criminal case keeps pressure on the International Olympic Committee to remove the cloak of secrecy from its multibillion-dollar business operations. As Alan Abrahamson and David Wharton reported in Sunday’s Times in the second of a seven-part series on the Olympic movement, the IOC is as much about big business as it is sports, having taken in more than $3.5 billion in 1997-2000, mostly from television rights and corporate sponsorships, and disbursing it to Olympic organizing committees, national committees and international sports federations.

If the IOC is ever to rebuild its credibility in the wake of the Utah scandal, it must turn its promises of openness into full disclosure of its revenue and spending. The same applies to affiliated organizations such as the U.S. Olympic Committee and those in other nations, the international sports federations and the Olympic organizing committees.

The scandal erupted in December 1998 when it was disclosed that Utah officials wooed IOC members with more than $1 million in cash payments, gifts and other inducements in their successful effort to win the Winter Games for Utah.

The IOC under President Juan Antonio Samaranch subsequently launched a series of reforms. The key ones were promises to make its financial operations “transparent” and to ban IOC members from visiting candidate Olympic sites. Ten IOC members either resigned or were expelled for accepting favors from Utah.

Welch and Johnson claim they are innocent, and they are likely to get a sympathetic hearing from some quarters in Utah. Indeed, winning cities in the past showered gifts on IOC members, although perhaps not so lavishly or blatantly. Some IOC members made it clear they expected such royal treatment. But should Welch and Johnson, if guilty as charged, have known better? Absolutely.

Still, the root problem is the IOC’s private culture. Even with Samaranch’s pledges, the IOC books made available to Abrahamson and Wharton do not show where all the money goes. If Samaranch is sincere about reforming an organization he has shaped in his own aloof, aristocratic image, he and his allies will incorporate the committee as a public entity subject to periodic audits by a reputable accounting firm. That’s what this country demands of any nonprofit agency, and it is what the IOC owes to the world athletic community.