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Coles may be connected to Atlanta
Posted: Friday May 07, 1999 08:14 AM
SYDNEY, Australia (AP) -- Australian Olympic official Phil Coles, a prominent figure in the Salt Lake City Games bribes scandal, also may have played a role in Atlanta's successful bid. Coles was officially thanked for "help and advice" given to the Atlanta bid team before the IOC chose the city for the 1996 Summer Games, a Sydney newspaper reported Thursday. At the time, Coles was a member of the bid team for Atlanta's Australian rival, Melbourne. Among documents released by Atlanta last week was a letter from the Atlanta Organizing Committee to Coles thanking him for making time to meet the team in Seoul in 1988, The Sydney Morning Herald said. "On behalf of Billy Payne, Charlie Battle and the rest of our Atlanta group, thanks again for your help and advice," Atlanta executive board member Horace Sibley wrote. Ron Walker, a member of Melbourne's bid, said that the "heat" Coles is feeling is justice for his "dalliance with Atlanta." "It's just a pity that so many of us spent so much time pursuing the games for 1996 for Melbourne and we find that one of our number chose to help the other side," Walker said. His Melbourne critics previously cited telephone records which showed that Coles made 44 private calls to the Atlanta bid committee. Coles, one of two Australian IOC members, has resisted against calls he should resign from the Sydney Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games (SOCOG) for links to scandals that organizers say are seriously damaging sponsorship and threaten to hurt the pending ticket sales campaign. SOCOG chief executive Sandy Hollway said today that many existing games sponsors had been "treading water" while the controversies continued, but they now want "the decks cleared." "I'm the person charged with bringing off the biggest peacetime event on earth, I'm trying to raise $160 million in additional sponsorships, I've got tickets going on sale at the end of this month, I've got volunteers around the country being recruited," Hollway told Australian Broadcasting Corp. radio. "I just don't need day after day of front page and other news stories that are clouding what we should be thinking about, which is the sport, the athletes, the magnificence of this event for Sydney." SOCOG has blamed the IOC votes-for-bribes scandal in part for a sponsorship shortfall of around $110 million. David D'Alessandro, chief of major Olympics sponsor John Hancock, renewed calls for Coles to resign and said the IOC was allowing the Sydney games to be damaged by not bringing the crisis to an end. "Apparently the IOC doesn't care ... they seem to say, this man is part of our inner circle, we stand with him and he stands for what we expect out of our IOC members and if you can't raise the money because of it, too bad," D'Allessandro told ABC radio. The IOC executive board, the organization's highest body, this week deferred a decision on allegations Coles accepted excessive gifts from someone associated with the 1996 Athens bid. New allegations surfaced Tuesday that dossiers on IOC members compiled by Coles for Sydney bidders were given to members of the bidding team for the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Games. The board is expected to decide Coles's fate in mid-June. Coles received the most severe reprimand short of expulsion from the IOC after its investigation into the votes-for-bribes scandal surrounding the Salt Lake bid found he accepted hospitality beyond IOC rules. Coles claims there is a conspiracy against him and vowed not to quit. He has previously said some disenchanted members of Melbourne's failed 1996 bid might be plotting to bring him down. "I'm not going to walk away until I look my accusers in the face and say, 'You were wrong,'" Coles told commercial TV. "If I'm wrong, then I will have to go, but I'm not wrong." The Herald also reported that Dick Ebersol, head of NBC Sports, one of the biggest underwriters of the games, added his voice to calls for Coles' resignation. "He should certainly leave SOCOG," Ebersol was quoted as saying. "This issue clearly slows sponsorship sales." But senior IOC member Jacques Rogge said Coles should be able to defend himself. "His rights as a defendant is to explain his defense. We'll make a judgment and I'll comment only after that," Rogge said. In Atlanta, the group that initiated the city's bid for the 1996 Olympics is suing to stop the state from forcing it to open thousands of additional boxes of records to the public. The Georgia Amateur Athletic Foundation filed suit late Wednesday after receiving a letter from Georgia Attorney General Thurbert Baker, who threatened legal action if the files were not opened. Baker's letter said the files should be made public because of the "overwhelmingly public nature of the 1996 Olympics [and] the inextricable link between private interests and government entities in the pursuit" of the games.
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