Scandal shadows Salt Lake Olympics

SALT LAKE CITY— Almost since skiing great Alf Engen and his rowdy World War II mountaineers strapped wooden slats to their boots and romped in Utah’s pristine powder, Salt Lake City has wanted an Olympics.

After 30 years and five heartbreaking losses, the city finally prevailed and was awarded the 2002 Winter Games.

But now the event that residents had hoped would be a showcase has been smudged by scandal.

“I think if we won that way, then we shouldn’t have won,” said, Natalie Monger, a 23-year-old Salt Lake hairdresser. Many residents were dismayed at the news.

“The response we’re getting has been mixed, but I’d say there’s a sense of shame out there,” said Shelley Thomas, a spokeswoman for the Salt Lake Organizing Committee.

The International Olympic Committee has begun an investigation into admissions by Salt Lake officials that the now-disbanded bid committee, separate from the organizing committee, gave scholarships to relatives of IOC members and may have paid hundreds of thousands of. dollars in cash to agents professing to sell blocs of IOC votes.

Directors of the organizing committee will meet Friday to start an internal ethics investigation.

“It’s pretty appalling,” sighed organizing committee member Randy Dryer.

The scandal broke three weeks ago when a local television station learned the bid committee had paid thousands of dollars for a.scholarship for Sonia Essomba, daughter of the late Rene Essomba, an IOC member from Cameroon.

SLOC first insisted the scholarship was “humanitarian aid,” even though the senior Essomba was a wealthy and well-connected professor of surgery, in addition to being secretary general of the National Olympic Committees of Africa.

An audit revealed the bid committee had spent $400,000 on 13 scholarships — six to relatives of IOC members, most from Africa.

Overall, the city’s bid committee spent just under $13 million. Since it was all private money, there has been no public accounting of where it went.

Organizing committee president Frank Joklik — even as he seeks distance from the bid committee he once chaired — has continued to insist the scholarships were humanitarian.

But a senior IOC member, Swiss lawyer Marc Hodler, was having none of it.

Hodler on Saturday revealed what he said has been systematic buying and selling of the Olympics, saying some IOC members were little more than international grifters.

“To my knowledge, there has always, always, been a certain part of the vote given to corruption,” he said.

Hodler has described the Salt Lake scholarship fund as a bribe, although he said the city deserved the Games and was more a victim of blackmail than criminally complicit.

Hodler also said that shadowy “agents” — including at least one IOC member — promised blocs of votes for cash payments. One such agent, Hodler said, may have received $100,000 in cash and free treatment for hepatitis after moving to Salt Lake while the city was seeking the bid.

The scandal has produced immense disappointment in Utah.

The first Winter Olympics of the new millennium offered the opportunity to prove that Utah had outgrown its cloistered, small-town parochialism.

Engen, widely considered the grandfather of Utah skiing, founded one of the first and most popular of Utah’s ski resorts. He died last year at 88.

Salt Lake’s bid slogan was “The World is Welcome Here,” and it was a point of pride among the 70 percent Mormon population that they had already enlisted more than 10,000 volunteers.

It’s been no secret that the IOC members who visited Salt Lake through the years have been royally feted, fed and fawned over.

“But this is different,” Dryer said of the scandal. “This is corrupt.”

Associated Press