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

6. Back from the Abyss

104 6 Back from the Abyss The Storm Clouds Part Media coverage of the IOC and its activities improved in the wake of the 108th Extraordinary IOC Session in March, and the genesis of the IOC Ethics and 2000 Commissions secured some breathing room for the IOC to craft its reform proposals; however, there was a clear need to follow through with the reform process pledged to the athletes, sponsors, and general public. During the summer months of 1999, IOC leaders forged ahead with this mission despite a number of distractions. Their efforts ultimately yielded passage of fifty reform measures to the Olympic Charter at the IOC’s 110th Session in Lausanne in December. Within days of the Session, Juan Antonio Samaranch skillfully defended the IOC’s interests in the US market before the House Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations headed by Fred Upton (R-MI). Samaranch’s calm, adroit performance signaled that the IOC had stepped back from the abyss. John Hancock’s decision to renew its TOP sponsorship deal for the 2001–4 quadrennium (TOP V), formally announced in February 2000 but first revealed to the IOC a week after Samaranch’s Washington visit, and the optics of David D’Alessandro’s return to the Olympic tent, prompted a collective sigh of relief in Lausanne. The IOC’s focus could rest squarely on Sydney in anticipation of the gathering of the world’s Olympians later in the year. The IOC’s Reform Proposals Take Shape One albatross for both the IOC and Sydney organizers who labored to meet sponsorship targets in advance of the 2000 Summer Olympics was Phil Coles. Back from the Abyss | 105 Coles’s case continued to draw attention in June 1999. Olympics minister Michael Knight, Australian Olympic Committee president John Coates, and Sydney Organizing Committee CEO Sandy Hollway were lined up against him and considered him an impediment to their efforts to guide the city’s effort to stage a successful Olympics.1 Knight was greatly perturbed that Coles retained a position on SOCOG’s board as a result of his IOC membership despite having been issued a “most severe warning” for his acceptance of excessive hospitality from Salt Lake City.2 Coles’s survival in March provided the prima facie evidence for the likes of John Hancock’s David D’Alessandro and the IOC’s media critics of a double standard in how the organization meted out justice. They judged Coles’s actions as serious as the activities of Jean-Claude Ganga, Lamine Keita, Sergio Santander Fantini, and the others, and they complained that he was spared the ignominious dispatch experienced by his six IOC colleagues because of his high-profile status and likable nature. Subsequent revelations concerning the preparation of dossiers on some seventy IOC members by Coles and his partner, Patricia Rosenbrock, and their possession by Salt Lake City bidders, forced the IOC to review its earlier decision.3 Word that Coles also breached IOC policy by taking two companions (rather than the permitted one) on a trip to Atlanta in July 1989, during that city’s candidature for the 1996 Olympics (at an expense of $13,053 to Atlanta bidders), compounded his predicament.4 A three-person investigative committee composed of IOC Executive Board members Kéba Mbaye, Anita DeFrantz, and Marc Hodler determined in early June that Coles’s conduct merited expulsion; however, they filed no written recommendation when it became clear that other members of the Executive Board, specifically Richard Pound and Un Yong Kim, did not concur with the assessment. Mbaye, DeFrantz, and Hodler did not wish to propose an action that would divide the Executive Board, so they worked to find a compromise approach.5 The IOC Executive Board did not recommend Coles’s expulsion at its June meeting in Seoul, but did move to squelch the damaging and persistent media coverage of Coles’s situation in the Australian press and mollify Michael Knight, who considered his continuing membership on SOCOG’s board untenable. The Executive Board, through the IOC’s director-general, François Carrard, issued him an ultimatum on June 11: he could resign his 106 | Tarnished Rings seat on SOCOG’s board or face expulsion from the IOC. The Executive Board concluded that Coles was guilty of serious negligence, not for having generated the files on his IOC colleagues but for having not ensured their security.6 He kept his...