Lillehammer bid clean
Posted: Friday March 12, 1999 03:12 PM
OSLO, Norway (AP) -- The town of Lillehammer's bid for the Winter
Olympics was coldly calculating -- even enlisting Norwegian
diplomats to help -- but apparently clean, Norwegian news media
reported Friday.
The reports came a day after the town made available some 20,000
documents relating to its bids for the 1992 Games, which it lost to
Albertville, France, and for its successful bid two years later.
Lillehammer is proud of the success of its games, which are
regarded by many as the in the history of Winter Olympics, and took
the unusual step of releasing the documents in an attempt to
preserve the town's image amid the growing Olympics bribery
scandals.
Major Norwegian news media sent teams of reporters to
Lillehammer to begin sifting through the documents Thursday, and
reported Friday that there was no evidence so far of bribery and
vote-buying.
But they also found evidence of behavior that offends
Norwegians' generally high sense of propriety, notably the use of
Norway's diplomatic corps to compile background files on
International Olympic Committee members ahead of their visits to
Lillehammer.
The files contain such information as the member's health,
alcohol consumption, ethnic origins, families, hobbies and other
preferences. One dossier included the note that a member's wife
"was very interested in shopping."
"Every member has a vote. These were our customers, and a
customer has to be taken care of," Petter Ronningen, a Lillehammer
games top manager, was quoted as telling the newspaper Aftenposten.
"We had to find out what each one liked."
But the newspaper Dagbladet characterized the files as exposing
"how the city's Olympic bosses, with help from the foreign
service, cynically evaluated the 90 powerful men of the
International Olympic Committee."
Officials of the Foreign Ministry could not immediately be
reached for comment on whether Norway's diplomats had overstepped
their bounds by helping prepare such dossiers.
According to Aftenposten, one document give the bid committee
the following advice from a Norwegian ambassador: "Africans can
well be bribed and Norwegians are usually too honest and lose."
The Lillehammer documents give details of IOC members' clear
wish to be pampered.
The bid committee sent a tourist class ticket to Mali's IOC
member Lamine Keita so he could visit Lillehammer. Aftenposten said
Keita, who was ousted from the IOC in January, replied that "As
you know, IOC members travel first class. I am returning the ticket
for rebooking."
Lillehammer lavished attention and first-class treatment on IOC
members, but the newspapers said there was so far no evidence of
outright corruption. Gifts to IOC members were modest, such as
sweaters, crystal figurines, silver salt and pepper shakers.
Amid Lillehammer's efforts to keep its image shiny by releasing
the documents, some media wondered whether the full truth would
come out.
The Norwegian news agency NTB said 27 documents were withheld as
confidential under national law, two files were missing and
Ronningen had removed two boxes of files as personal property.
Kaci Kullmann Five, a former leader of the Conservative Party
and member of the bid committee, said she was shocked that
Lillehammer had released the dossiers.
"It is terrible that information that was given in the greatest
confidence has now been made public," she said.
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