Tarnished Rings: The International Olympic Committee and the Salt Lake City Bid Scandal, Revised Edition

By Stephen Wenn, Robert Barney and Scott Martyn

In late 1998 and the early months of 1999, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) was an organization in crisis. Revelations of a slush fund employed by Salt Lake City officials to secure votes from a number of IOC members in support of the city’s bid for the 2002 Olympic Winter Games invited intense scrutiny of the organization by the international media. The IOC and its president, Juan Antonio Samaranch, staggered through the opening weeks of the scandal, but ultimately Samaranch and key actors such as IOC vice president Richard Pound, marketing director Michael Payne, and director-general François Carrard weathered the storm. They also safeguarded the IOC’s autonomy and subsequently spearheaded the push for reforms to the Olympic Charter, intended to better position the IOC for the twenty-first century.

In Tarnished Rings, the authors delve into this fascinating story, exploring the genesis of the scandal and charting the IOC’s efforts to bring stability to its operations. Based on extensive research and unparalleled access to primary and source material, the authors offer a behind-the-scenes account of the politics surrounding the IOC and the bidding process. Wenn, Barney, and Martyn’s potent examination of this critical episode in Olympic history and of the presidency of Samaranch, who brought sweeping changes to the Olympic Movement in the 1980s and 1990s, offers valuable lessons for those interested in the IOC, the Olympic Movement, and the broader concepts of leadership and crisis management.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Syracuse University Press
• Release date: Jun 2, 2022
• ISBN: 9780815655541

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2021950649

Manufactured in the United States of America

C. Paul Wenn (1934–2021)

A scientist by training and a high school teacher who inspired many young people in a career spanning over 30 years, Paul, and his wife of 62 years, Roberta, comprised the best team of proofreaders that any writer could envision. As parents, my Dad was, and my Mom continues to be, so much more.

Stephen Wenn is Professor and Former Chair of Kinesiology and Physical Education at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. He, along with lead author Robert Barney, and Scott Martyn, published an award-winning analysis of the transformation of the International Olympic Committee into a revenue-generating juggernaut in the latter half of the twentieth century, titled Selling the Five Rings: The International Olympic Committee and the Rise of Olympic Commercialism in 2002 (rev. ed., 2004). Stephen (and Robert) recently published The Gold in the Rings: The People and Events that Transformed the Olympic Games (2020). Then he served as President of the North American Society for Sport History (2007–9). He and his wife, Martha, and their children, Tim and Lily, live in Baden, Ontario.

Robert Barney, a native New Englander, is Professor Emeritus of Kinesiology and the Founding Director of the International Centre for Olympic Studies at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario, Canada. He published an anthology of articles that first appeared in Olympika: The International Journal of Olympic Studies titled Rethinking the Olympics: Cultural Histories of the Modern Games (2010). He has devoted a good measure of his professional life to exploring and encouraging historical research of the modern Olympic Games and received the Olympic Order in 1997. Robert, known to his peers simply as Bob or B2, and his wife, Ashleigh, live in London, Ontario.

Scott Martyn is professor of human kinetics and founding director of the International Centre for Sport and Leisure Studies at the University of Windsor in Windsor, Ontario. His PhD dissertation, titled The Struggle for Financial Autonomy: The IOC and the Historical Emergence of Corporate Sponsorship, 1896–2000, shed much light on the IOC’s embrace of the corporate sponsor community in the twentieth century. He has given many hours to past work on the executive councils of the North American Society for Sport History, the International Centre for Olympic Studies, and the International Society for Comparative Physical Education and Sport. Scott, his wife, Rebecca, and their son, William, live in Windsor, Ontario.

Contents

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

FOREWORD, Richard Pound

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INTRODUCTION

ABBREVIATIONS

1. The Man from Barcelona

2. A Gathering Storm

3. Survival Mode

4. Two Days Lausanne Stood Still

5. Managing the Crisis

6. Back from the Abyss

7. Judgment Day(s)

8. The Olympic Scene in 2011

EPILOGUE

APPENDIX. Salt Lake City Scandal Time Line, 1998–1999

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

Illustrations

1. Juan Antonio Samaranch congratulates Deedee Corradini

2. Juan Antonio Samaranch, Lord Killanin, and Mohamed Mzali

3. Richard Pound and Michael Payne

4. David D’Alessandro in his Boston office

5. Un Yong Kim

6. Richard Kevan Gosper

7. Senator John McCain

8. Phil Coles

9. Representative Fred Upton

10. Juan Antonio Samaranch

11. Juan Antonio Samaranch and Jacques Rogge

Foreword

Richard Pound

Crisis—From Inside the Bunker

It started badly and got worse.

Late in the fall of 1998, my phone rang. It was a reporter from Salt Lake City. He wanted to know if I was aware that the daughter of an International Olympic Committee (IOC) colleague from Cameroon had received full room and board at a US university from the Salt Lake City bidding committee for the 2002 Olympic Winter Games. I was not aware. He asked what I thought he should do with the story. I avoided the trap and said it was his story and that he should do whatever he believed was appropriate.

As soon as he hung up, I called Juan Antonio Samaranch, president of the IOC, and told him we had a train wreck coming.

It did not take long. At a meeting of the IOC Executive Board in December 1998, the Salt Lake City Organizing Committee reported that it had evidence that several IOC members had received improper benefits from the bidding committee prior to the IOC’s decision to award the 2002 Winter Games to Salt Lake City.

We immediately announced publicly that we had been advised of inappropriate conduct by some of our members.

A media firestorm instantly ensued, far more than anything the IOC had ever experienced and well beyond anything the IOC was equipped to manage. It was too much for a small organization like the IOC to handle. Our communications director was overwhelmed and decamped to his native country, not to be seen again during the crisis. We engaged a crisis management firm (Hill & Knowlton) for advice on how to deal with the media and to identify opportunities to get our messages in front of the right audiences. It was a crash course in media training.

The first thing we had to do was take ownership of the problem. We established an ad hoc Commission to investigate the allegations. I was then a vice president of the IOC and was appointed as chair of that commission. Even though we had little doubt that the allegations were likely true, they had nevertheless to be investigated, reported upon, and dealt with.

Preserving the Evidence

We also had to ensure that we could get access to the evidence then in the hands of the Salt Lake City Organizing Committee. The timing was not propitious, since the Christmas and New Year season was fast approaching. Our concern was that the US authorities might decide to consider criminal proceedings and seize the evidence for that purpose, thus removing our access to it. Without the evidence, we would have been powerless to impose sanctions against the members who had acted inappropriately, which would have fueled the ongoing crisis regarding concerns about inaction by the IOC. We engaged US counsel and, before any potential proceedings could intervene, I traveled to Salt Lake City with our counsel for a preliminary examination of the evidence. We made preemptive arrangements for the evidence to be sent to Lausanne, Switzerland (the headquarters of the IOC), for use in our own investigations of the implicated IOC members.

Multiple Crises

The crisis was actually several crises, each with its own particularities.

The IOC Crisis

One was the impact on the IOC itself. The inappropriate conduct had come from our members, our colleagues. It was our problem and we had, first, to acknowledge that it was our problem and to apologize, effectively to the world at large, for our organizational failure to prevent such conduct. But mere apology was insufficient. We had to make it clear that because the conduct was unacceptable, we were prepared to act quickly and firmly to deal with it.

We adopted the Tylenol as opposed to the Exxon Valdez crisis model. There was to be no institutional denial of what had happened. No excuses would be proffered in an attempt to deflect any responsibility, nor finger-pointing at individual members rather than taking on the problem as organizational, nor similar finger-pointing at members of the bidding committee for any push conduct on their part at targeted IOC members.

The Games Would Go On

Another crisis was the impact on the 2002 Olympic Winter Games in Salt Lake City. Would the Games continue there or would they be withdrawn? The answer to that question was reasonably simple. Salt Lake City had won the Games overwhelmingly and it was not the fault of the city that some IOC members had had their hands out. That was our problem. It would have been manifestly unfair to punish Salt Lake for our own ethical failure. We were able to provide immediate reassurance that the Games would not be moved and would proceed as scheduled.

Congressional Pressures

Then we had a crisis with the US Congress. US members of the IOC were summoned to hearings and publicly excoriated for the IOC failures. There was talk of inviting and, if necessary, requiring the IOC president to attend further congressional hearings. We had an intuitive reluctance to get into what would certainly have been a protracted and heavily politicized public thrashing. We said instead that we would deal with the conduct of our members and, once we had done so, we would be pleased to advise Congress on the outcomes. We had no interest in negotiating a congressionally acceptable solution to our own problem. There were mutterings about subpoenas, but good sense prevailed and none were issued.

Broadcasters and Sponsors

The crisis extended to our broadcasters, who were rightly concerned about the possible impact of the IOC conduct on their significant investments in Olympic television coverage and whether there might be a significant reduction in spectator interest. Any material reduction of interest could affect their viewership and advertising revenues.

Hand in hand with the broadcasters were the Olympic sponsors themselves, whose management and boards of directors faced questions and decisions about their continued involvement and identification with a now-tainted organization. It was essential that they be assured that we would address the problem quickly and effectively. They were, collectively, not the least bit subtle in expressing their disappointment regarding the entire situation. We had a number of uncomfortable group meetings with them as well as one-on-one discussions regarding our plans, arising from lengthy letters to us and my equally lengthy responses to them.

On the other hand, every sponsor company had experienced, at some time or other, major crises and they were realistic enough to know that such situations might arise. The key was not so much what led to the particular crisis, but how the organization responded to it. That tended to be their approach with us. I was fortunate to have enjoyed good relations with the broadcasters and sponsors as a result of chairing both the marketing and television negotiations functions and they knew that they could rely on what I said we were going to do during and after the crisis.

All of the sponsors and broadcasters were pleased with their association with the Olympics and the inherent values they represented, which was the underlying reason for their concern that we responded quickly and effectively to the crisis. We had not been blind to their concerns and had continued to gather and share with them data that showed (justifiable) disappointment with the IOC, but which also showed very strong ongoing public support for athletes who were training for the Games and for the Games themselves. This was encouraging both for us and for the sponsor group and, by extension, the broadcasters.

In addition to the daily work at the IOC headquarters in Lausanne, coordinated by our director-general François Carrard, and what I was doing from a North American base, we arranged for Samaranch to speak with the leadership of the principal sponsors to confirm his personal commitment to address the conduct of members and more general reforms. He was more effective in this role than in dealing with the media.

Athletes and the Public at Large

In addition to these constituencies, we had the larger athlete population, which needed to be reassured that, given its own failings, the IOC—the same organization which insisted on the ethical nature of sport—was still in a position to demand appropriate levels of conduct by athletes.

The athletes represented a particular, but vital, subset of the public at large. We had let down both publics and we now had to try to win back the confidence of both.

The Way Through

All of these stakeholders needed and demanded immediate attention. The stakes were enormous and, from the IOC perspective, very close to existential. Demands for the end of the IOC at the head of the Olympic Movement arrived daily from all over the world, as did similar demands for the resignation or removal of the IOC President.

As chair of the ad hoc Commission, chair of the IOC Marketing Commission, and Chair of the Television Negotiations Commission, plus being located in North America, the epicenter of the media storm, I found myself to be the default point person with respect to pretty well all inquiries and interviews. It was not a relaxing holiday season and got no better as we got into January 1999 and beyond.

I was convinced that it was important for us to continue to communicate regarding our acceptance of responsibility and to demonstrate that we were proceeding as quickly as possible with our investigations and any remedial actions that were called for in the circumstances rather than to remain silent. The public perception of the IOC during this period was uniformly negative. That perception would only have worsened if we did not continue to communicate our resolve to respond appropriately. As a strategy, that was all well and good, except that I was the designated spokesperson. Giving anywhere between twenty-five and fifty interviews per day to generally hostile media representatives was very demanding, but it was important to be as available as possible, even at the expense of a soon somewhat raspy throat.

The messaging was important. It had to be credible. I invested whatever personal credibility I possessed to assure the media that we were genuinely sorry about the improper conduct, that we were investigating it as quickly as we could, and that we would deal with the members involved as soon as the investigations were completed. Gaining that outcome is an objective achieved one reporter at a time and one step at a time. It happens only when the media come to believe that you are genuine and that you are not simply regurgitating Teflon statements crafted by some corporate communications person. And that you are prepared to answer tough questions candidly. And, even more important, that you never, ever, lie to them. There may be questions that cannot (or should not) be answered at a particular time. You can explain why they cannot and the media will understand. That may not prevent them from asking, but they will respect your reasons for not answering.

Another lesson learned from this exercise was that saying something once (whether fact, opinion, or conclusion) is not enough. It must be repeated over and over, even at times to the same audiences. I was generally uncomfortable if I knew that a single person in a room where I was speaking had heard all or even some part of what I was saying. In a crisis, do not worry about that.

Finally, if it is your message, the onus is on you to communicate it. There is no onus whatsoever on the listener or target audience to figure out what that message may be.

A mechanical technique suggested by our advisers was to schedule regular one-hour interviews to which media could call in. I would give my progress report as the introduction and then answer any questions from the media participating on the call. That was wonderful, saving dozens or more individual interviews, and it brought the additional advantage that everyone heard the same report and answers, since in one-on-one interviews there would almost always be slight differences, depending on my choice of words or the specific framing of an interviewer’s question. A particular feature of such calls (it can now be revealed) is that if there were known invincibly hostile callers, you could identify them in advance and instruct the call operator to drop them to the bottom of the list of speakers every time they worked their way to the top of the list, so that they never had a chance to intervene before the scheduled call ended.

In noncrisis times, I had developed a way of dealing with members of the media in respect of Olympic matters. I have always been accessible to the media for such purposes, since I believe firmly in the underlying principles of sport, particularly ethical sport, and am willing to express candid opinions on nonconfidential matters. I always accepted that the onus was on me to convince the media that what I thought (or when I was speaking on behalf of the IOC, that an IOC decision) was the best answer or solution in a given situation. Members of the media have advised me on many occasions that, for an IOC member, this is statistically highly unusual. I always knew as well that this might not always be possible because alternatives existed and if I failed to persuade, that was my problem. It was different, however, if the reporter misrepresented the facts or what I had said. When that happened, the next time I encountered the person, I would say that I had awarded a Yellow Card and that if it happened again, it would be replaced by a Red Card. If there was a Red Card, I said I would never take a call from the person again. He or she could then try to explain why every other journalist in the world had no difficulty getting statements from me. The technique has generally worked quite well.

As an early example of outreach initiative during the crisis period, one of the high-profile events on the sports business calendar in New York each year is the Sports Summit, held in January. With the release of the news regarding the IOC members and Salt Lake City the previous December and the carpet-bombing media coverage that followed, it was no surprise to be invited to attend the 1999 iteration to explain ourselves to the judgmental New York audience. There are risks and rewards involved. Fortunately, the reward came before the risks, since it provided an opportunity to deliver an uninterrupted keynote address prior to any interviews.

It was, in addition, a welcome public opportunity to acknowledge the disappointment of the IOC regarding the actions of certain of our members whose behavior was incompatible with everything the Olympic Movement had worked so hard to represent. We expressed our regret to athletes and volunteers and to the people and community of Salt Lake City. We indicated that the IOC Executive Board would soon receive the results and recommendations arising from our investigation and that we would be using the difficult time as an opportunity to consider reforms that would avoid any repetition of the problem. It was a start. The fact that we would be meeting in Lausanne within a week and that the first World Conference on Doping in Sport, convened by the IOC, was going to proceed during the first week of February was also an indication that the IOC was not paralyzed by the crisis.

In less than four months from the onset of the crisis (and not without some difficulties, both external and internal), we expelled or forced the resignation of ten members of the IOC and issued severe public warnings to several others. One or two fish slipped through the net, to my personal disappointment, but the institutional crisis passed. Once through the immediate crisis, we instituted an ambitious program of reforms, formally assisted by many eminent international leaders from outside the IOC itself, the effect of which was to bring the IOC governance structures up to the level of international best practices.

If the Rings had been tarnished, they had now at least been polished.

Acknowledgments

All authors understand that while their names appear on the cover, the process involved in moving a book from an idea to a reality requires many hands. We are indebted to Steven Riess, the former editor of the Sports and Entertainment series at Syracuse University Press, as well as Annelise Finegan, the press’s former acquisitions editor, and her successor, Jennika Baines, for their support and encouragement. We also appreciated Annette Wenda’s careful copyediting of the first edition, and the opportunity to work with Marcia Hough on this revised edition. We have benefited from interaction with professional colleagues who have taken an interest in our work, including Adam Berg, Doug Booth, Dick Crepeau, Austin Duckworth, Mark Dyreson, John Findling, Larry Gerlach, John Gleaves, Allen Guttmann, Thomas Hunt, Bruce Kidd, the late Karl Lennartz, Matt Llewellyn, the late John Lucas, Gordon MacDonald, Alan Metcalfe, Roland Renson, Toby Rider, Jan Todd, Kevin Wamsley, and Stephan Wassong. Ron Smith, a wonderful colleague, and even better friend, kindly reviewed a number of draft chapters and offered constructive criticism, as did Tim Elcombe and Bill McTeer, two of Stephen Wenn’s fellow professors at Wilfrid Laurier University. Martha Wenn, Jennifer Wenn, and Roberta and the late Paul Wenn volunteered their efforts as proofreaders for the first edition.

We firmly believe that one of the strengths of this book lies in the sources that inform the narrative. Central in this regard is the correspondence and archival holdings of Richard Pound, a former IOC vice president, who led the IOC’s internal investigation of allegations concerning IOC member conduct in relation to Salt Lake City’s bid for the 2002 Olympic Winter Games. Without Pound’s consent to the use of his files, we would have presented a muchdiminished manuscript devoid of an insider’s view of developing events. His records permitted us to deal extensively with the IOC’s effort to maintain communication with, and invite counsel from, executives with major Olympic corporate sponsors during the crisis. The foreword he contributed to this revised edition greatly benefits the reader and we are grateful for his effort. A visit to the IOC Archives in Lausanne yielded a number of important documents, and our research efforts in Switzerland were ably facilitated by Patricia Eckert and Ruth Beck Perrenoud. Former IOC marketing director Michael Payne agreed to sit for an extended interview that assisted us in understanding the day-to-day atmosphere in Lausanne. David D’Alessandro, John Hancock’s former president and CEO and a key actor in the Olympic corporate sponsor community in the 1990s, offered details with respect to his company’s business strategies at the time. His comments provided important context in terms of understanding his decision to accept many media interview requests during the crisis, as well as his tendency for offering, at times, harsh criticism of the IOC’s reform efforts. Our knowledge of preparations for the Welch-Johnson trial was enhanced through Robert Barney’s helpful dialogue with defense counsel Bill Taylor, Blair Brown, and Armit Mehta with Zuckerman Spaeder (Washington, DC), and Max Wheeler with Snow, Christensen, and Martineau (Salt Lake City). Many journalists whose duties included the Olympic beat in the late 1990s devoted a good deal of column space and hours to coverage of the events we have described, and we tip our hat to the collective efforts of Alan Abrahamson, the late James Christie, Linda Fantin, Mike Gorrell, Philip Hersh, Glenda Korporaal, Jere Longman, Jacquelin Magnay, Matthew Moore, Lisa Riley Roche, Larry Siddons, Glenn Stanaway, the late Randy Starkman, Stephen Wilson, and their media colleagues. Their work figured prominently in our research.

We are grateful for the financial assistance afforded by a standard research grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (Canada) and a book preparation grant awarded by the Office of Research Services at Wilfrid Laurier University which made the first edition possible. Support funds provided to all faculty at the University of Windsor, in this case, Scott Martyn, by the Office of the Provost and Vice-President, Academic, offset the cost of photo permissions in this revised edition. The International Centre for Olympic Studies at the University of Western Ontario served as the hub of operations for the production of this book, contributing both a meeting place and a wealth of resources.

And, last, to our readers, we express appreciation for your interest in our book. It is our hope that we have conveyed the ebb and flow of events in those crucial months for the IOC in 1998 and 1999 when its survival was anything but secure and that our analysis provides a deeper understanding of the festering crisis that enveloped President Juan Antonio Samaranch and other members of the IOC leadership team, as well as their efforts to effect a recovery of the tarnished Olympic brand.

Chapter 4 is a much expanded version of Two Days Lausanne Stood Still: The 108th Extraordinary IOC Session, by Stephen Wenn which first appeared in Pathways, Critiques and Discourse in Olympic Research: Proceedings of the Ninth International Symposium for Olympic Research, edited by Robert K. Barney, Michael K. Heine, Kevin B. Wamsley, and Gordon H. MacDonald (London: University of Western Ontario, 2008). Reprinted here with permission.

Part of Chapter 7 first appeared in Selling the Five Rings: The International Olympic Committee and the Rise of Olympic Commercialism, by Robert Barney, Stephen Wenn, and Scott Martyn. Rev. ed. (Salt Lake City: Univ. of Utah Press, 2004). Reprinted here with permission.

Chapter 8 contains material that first appeared in IOC/USOC Relations and the 2009 IOC Session in Copenhagen, by Stephen Wenn, which can be found in Rethinking Matters Olympic: Investigations into the Socio-Cultural Study of Modern Olympics: Proceedings of the Tenth International Symposium for Olympic Studies (London: University of Western Ontario, 2011). Reprinted here with permission.

Chapter 8 contains material that first appeared in The Olympic Movement and the Road Ahead: Status Quo or Will the IOC Tackle the Big Issues? by Stephen Wenn, in Intellectual Muscle, Globe and Mail and VANOC Podcast Series, October 2009. Reprinted here with permission.

Introduction

On a late November evening in 1998, we journeyed to Montreal to put the finishing touches on the research for our first collaborative effort, Selling the Five Rings: The International Olympic Committee and the Rise of Olympic Commercialism. The next morning we convened with International Olympic Committee vice president and chairman of the IOC Marketing Commission Richard Pound, who granted us access to IOC Session and Executive Board minutes from his personal archives. Following a brief but chilly walk from our hotel to Pound’s Stikeman Elliott law office, our future research agenda took shape even though we did not recognize immediately this reality. Upon our arrival and following an exchange of greetings, we delved into the documents. Within minutes, Pound’s fax machine signaled the arrival of a message. Peering out over his reading glasses, Pound read the text and informed us that he had serious concerns about its content. None of us, including Pound, understood the nature of the precipice that the IOC stood before at that moment. The fax provided information on a Salt Lake media report alleging that the Salt Lake City bid committee assisted Sonia Essomba, the daughter of a deceased IOC member (René Essomba, Cameroon, who died in August 1998), with tuition payments to attend American University in Washington, DC, for a period of time in advance of the 1995 vote on the host city for the 2002 Olympic Winter Games.¹

Over the course of the next four months, a media crisis gripped the IOC that threatened both its operational autonomy and its financial foundation. Intense media scrutiny and a series of investigations launched by the IOC, the United States Olympic Committee (USOC), the respective organizing committees in Sydney (SOCOG) and Salt Lake City (SLOC), the House Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, as well as the US Department of Justice unearthed disquieting details. Thomas Welch and David Johnson, the president and vice president, respectively, of the Salt Lake City bid committee (who also held the same executive positions with SLOC), authorized the use of a slush fund to curry favor with a number of IOC members through an orchestrated gift-giving program. This decision and the willingness of a number of IOC members to cash in on Salt Lake City’s largesse tarnished the Olympic brand and imperiled the IOC’s position as the guardian of the Olympic Movement. In the end, twenty of the implicated twenty-four IOC members received some form of censure, and of this number, six were expelled and four resigned.² Three were exonerated. Essomba, who surely would have faced expulsion (or submitted his resignation), had died. IOC president Juan Antonio Samaranch’s successor, Jacques Rogge, who served as a member of the IOC Executive Board in the late 1990s, referred to the scandal as a profound crisis that nearly destroyed the IOC.³

We sat transfixed by events in Lausanne in the early months of 1999, as did most Olympic observers, with emotions ranging from disappointment to disgust. Allegations rolled forth on a steady basis: Amsterdam (1992) plied some IOC members with prostitutes, jewelry, and VCRs; Nagano (1998) spent Can$33,000 on average for sixty-two IOC member visits; Quebec City (2002) bid officials reported approaches from a number of Olympic agents who pledged assistance with the city’s presentation and enhanced access to some IOC members for a fee between $20,000 and $50,000; and Atlanta (1996) conceded it gave some visiting IOC members golf clubs valued at $475 (the gift-value limit at the time was $200), sent a few others to Disney World, and on occasion provided IOC members with an additional first-class airline ticket (beyond the two tickets permitted for a member and his or her spouse) in advance of their visit to Atlanta.⁴ We can attest that the thresholds of our respective offices have never been more populated by faculty colleagues seeking our opinions on Olympic matters than they were in early 1999.

When we were not fielding questions from these office guests or working with our students, we continued our work on Selling the Five Rings. In this book we examined the IOC’s transformation from an organization that demonstrated neither a desire nor the knowledge base necessary to generate commercial revenue in the 1950s to one possessing the drive and the sophisticated understanding of negotiating practice necessary to capitalize on commercial revenue sources, largely as a result of the vision of former IOC president (and the late) Juan Antonio Samaranch. Piloted by Samaranch, the IOC sought to maximize television rights revenue while diversifying and expanding its revenue base through the establishment of a major corporate sponsorship program, The Olympic Program (TOP, now The Olympic Partners).

1. Juan Antonio Samaranch (left) congratulates Deedee Corradini, mayor of Salt Lake City (second from right), following her city’s triumph in the contest to host the 2002 Olympic Winter Games at the IOC’s 1995 Budapest Session. USOC president LeRoy Walker is seated between Samaranch and Corradini, while the USOC’s deputy secretary-general, John Krimsky, looks on happily from the right. Source: Tom Smart/Getty Images.

Published in 2002, Selling the Five Rings represented the culmination of six years of research dedicated to exploring this story from the perspective of the IOC leadership looking out to the corporate world. Our primary sources were largely IOC-generated, which encouraged us to look at debates over commercialism as they unfolded within IOC boardrooms and to chart the IOC’s negotiations with television networks and corporate sponsors from its side of the negotiating table. In 1999, while there was much writing left to bring that project to fruition, we were planning a future research initiative. It was understood that a companion manuscript, tentatively titled Buying the Five Rings: Television Networks, Corporate Sponsors, and Olympic Commercialism, investigating the parallel history from the other side of the negotiating table, represented a worthy (and necessary) future project. However, the Salt Lake City crisis proved too much of a magnet for us. Intrigued by the window through which we could further assess Samaranch’s leadership, which had been one of our central missions in Selling the Five Rings, and the manner in which the scandal reflected the high-stakes nature of the Olympic bid process that evolved during his presidency, we determined that Buying the Five Rings could wait. Over time, we learned that the private companies and their leadership teams were not keen to share this history with us.

The Salt Lake City crisis rocked the international sport community for a second time within a six-month period when it exploded in November 1998. Le Tour de Farce Comes to Sorry End read a headline in the Irish Times on August 1. Tour de France, Bloodied by Drug Scandals, Limps into Paris, echoed the International Herald Tribune on August 3. On July 8, three days prior to the opening of the Tour de France, Willy Voet, a Belgian masseur working for the Festina cycling team, attempted to transport in excess of four hundred doping products, including the red-blood-cell booster EPO (erythropoietin), across the France-Belgium border. Bruno Roussel and Erik Ryckaert, Festina’s team chief and doctor, respectively, were subsequently questioned, and Roussel confessed to Festina’s doping program. Tour officials banned Festina from the competition, six other teams subsequently withdrew, and as yellow-jersey leader Marco Pantani (who would fail a blood test at the 1999 Giro d’Italia) and the peloton cruised down the Champs-Élysées at the close of the race, the competitors numbered fewer than 100 of the 189 who started the race in Dublin on July 11.⁵ Sadly, Javier Mauleon, a member of one of the teams (ONCE of Spain) that withdrew from the tour, confirmed merely what many long suspected: You can’t ride 35,000 km a year solely on spaghetti. You have to take things.⁶ The doping scandal proved a national embarrassment for France, which anticipated another summer spectacle to add to the celebratory atmosphere engendered by its recent 3–0 triumph over the vaunted Brazilians in the FIFA World Cup soccer final in Paris.

However, the 1998 Tour de France, concluded Richard Pound, was the seminal event in terms of the genesis of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA).⁷ The IOC employed this black eye for international sport as a rallying point for pursuing the consensus necessary among national governments and international sport organizations to launch a comprehensive fight against doping. In August 1998, the IOC offered to host the World Conference on Doping in Sport (WCDS) as a means of bringing these agents together in a common cause.⁸ It was on course to score a major coup in the fight against the use of banned performance-enhancing drugs. John Kingdon, in his classic work on agenda setting and processes involved in policy formulation, Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies, classified incidents such as the 1998 Tour de France in the context of the fight against doping in sports as a focusing event. Often, observed Kingdon, a workable and necessary solution to a problem is known, but it is not translated into policy until an event occurs that pushes policy makers to take action. Stakeholders understood the need for random, unannounced drug testing on a year-round basis by an independent agency, reported Victor Lachance, the former CEO of the Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport, but what was missing was the political will and resources to implement [it]. The 1998 Tour de France had a galvanizing