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Smooth sailing Samaranch: Rough seas are behind us
Posted: Sunday June 20, 1999 01:09 PM
SEOUL (Reuters) -- For Juan Antonio Samaranch, the worst is over in the corruption crisis besetting the International Olympic Committee. "It's like the difference between a rough sea and a calm lake," the veteran IOC president said on Sunday of a turbulent six months for the guardians of the Olympic rings. But eight days of IOC meetings in the former Olympic city of Seoul showed clearly that the ripples of the Salt Lake City vote-buying scandal are still being felt -- and the sharks are circling beneath the tranquil surface of Samaranch's lake. The most important decision made by the IOC's 109th session was to award the 2006 Winter Games to the north Italian city of Turin, best known as the home of the Fiat car company. The decision, by 53 votes to 36, came as a shock and a bitter blow to Swiss runner-up Sion, whose bid team arrived in Seoul with the praise of the IOC's evaluation experts ringing in their ears but without the political clout to lift the glittering prize. The IOC will have to live with its decision back home in Switzerland, where anger erupted. It was Sion's third bid and once again the Lausanne-based IOC had rejected their Swiss hosts. The Swiss blamed it on an anti-Swiss backlash by the IOC targeted at Marc Hodler, the veteran member who blew the whistle on the Salt Lake City vote-buying scandal last year and brought down 10 IOC members. One Berne minister said the vote only served to prove Hodler right about IOC corruption. But IOC members dismissed the accusation. "It wasn't about Hodler at all," said one. "Simply, we wanted Turin and they guaranteed us an excellent Olympics." The IOC also took action against Australian Phil Coles, already warned for accepting free holidays in Salt Lake City, and forced him off the board of the Sydney 2000 organizing committee for passing on indiscreet personal files on IOC members. Coles will spend the next two years as virtually a second-class IOC member, unable to sit on any of the working groups or commissions that set IOC policy. Not that IOC members can expect all the luxury they have become accustomed to. Both Sydney and Salt Lake City told the IOC they would be cutting back on some of the perks given IOC members during the Games. In the wake of the Salt Lake City scandal, the IOC promised to reform itself. An 80-strong reform commission including personalities such as former U.N. chief Boutros Boutros-Ghali and, controversially, Turin-based Fiat boss Giovanni Agnelli, is due to deliver a reform blueprint by the end of the year. But the Salt Lake scandal has not shaken the IOC's power men, such as Turin-born world athletics boss Primo Nebiolo -- who rose on Saturday to claim his share of the credit for Turin's win. Another power player back on form was South Korean Kim Un-yong, also seriously reprimanded over the Salt Lake City scandal because some of his son's employment costs had been paid for by the bid team. That reprimand was meant to have dashed Kim's hopes of succeeding Samaranch, but Kim's influence was felt everywhere in his native Seoul. Kim has been much criticized for encouraging bidding cities to organize concerts for his piano-playing daughter, but she played again in Seoul at the grandiose opening ceremony for the session. In an interview published in Seoul's two English language newspapers, Kim took ill-concealed swipes at his various rivals in the succession race, chief among them the IOC's Canadian marketing head Dick Pound, who chaired the inquiry panel that led to Kim's reprimand. And IOC sources said Kim had helped deliver the votes for Turin, showing he was still the IOC's most influential power-broker. With his lieutenants jockeying for position in the succession race -- including Pound, Australian Kevan Gosper and Belgian Jacques Rogge -- Samaranch moved to quash rumors that he would retire early, before his term ends in 2001. "In any organization like ours we have to be used to the rumors, but rumors are rumors," said the 78-year-old. "I am not leaving; I will stay to 2001 if I am healthy enough."
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