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

1. The Man from Barcelona

1 1 The Man from Barcelona Cemeteries are full of people who thought they were indispensable . I will leave. And another president will come. —Juan Antonio Samaranch, IOC president (1980–2001), July 2001 The Challenge Labeled a “revolutionary” by his biographer, Juan Antonio Samaranch was elected as the seventh president of the IOC at a particularly challenging time in the history of the Olympic Movement.1 The political problems and traumas his immediate predecessor, Lord Killanin, encountered during his eight years (1972–80) as IOC president, stole from the Irish peer much of the time he “would have preferred to have spent updating the Movement.”2 Although a potential “collapse” of the Olympic Movement, suggested by Killanin’s own predecessor, Avery Brundage (1952–72), an American business magnate and former Olympian, never materialized, issues such as international politics and terrorism left an indelible mark on the celebrations surrounding the quadrennial festival in the 1970s.3 Beset by the trials of world geopolitics, little representation in some regions of the world, fractious relations with its Olympic partners, the National Olympic Committees, and International Sport Federations, and minimal financial resources, the IOC posed a daunting leadership challenge for any individual. Richard Pound, an IOC vice president and chairman of the Marketing Commission during the Salt Lake City crisis, reflected: “In 2 | Tarnished Rings 1980, the Olympic Movement was under sustained attack from political powers and was, indeed, a virtual hostage to world tensions. It was disunited, well short of universal and had no financial resources to give it the autonomy and independence it needed to resist political pressures.”4 Michael Payne, the IOC’s former marketing director, echoed that sentiment: “Everybody was writing the Olympic obituary.”5 “Depressed” and concerned about his ability to “cope with all the demands of the job” and the significant problems that he knew existed, Samaranch even considered how he might withdraw from his newly elected position.6 Despite these misgivings, he pushed forward and, with the exception of Pierre de Coubertin, concludes University of Chicago cultural anthropologist and Olympic expert John MacAloon, emerged as “the most significant leader in modern Olympic history.”7 Time and time again, Samaranch demonstrated a unique ability to move people and groups toward supporting his goals and agenda. Samaranch, offered the Los Angeles Times’s Alan Abrahamson, proved “one of the smartest and shrewdest practitioners of backroom politics and personal diplomacy ever to grace the world stage.”8 His plans were ambitious, and not without controversy, in terms of both their goals and his methods of achieving them. “For sure,” argues Olympic historian John Lucas, throughout his presidency “one finds warts and areas to be praised. But that is the nature of humanity and that is the nature of the world we live in. It is an imperfect world of warts and unhealed wounds and also gentility and greatness.”9 Samaranch’s Background Born in Barcelona, Spain, on July 17, 1920, Juan Antonio Samaranch was the third son, in a family of six children (two girls and four boys), of Francisco Samaranch Castro, owner of a prosperous upholstery business, and Juana Torelló Malhevy, head of the Barcelona maternity hospital. Their home, situated in the San Gervasio quarter, a sophisticated upper-middle-class district of Barcelona, was located near the original headquarters and courts of the Real Club de Tenis Barcelona 1899.10 Although his father was a billiards and pelota (or jai alai) enthusiast, the Samaranch family often frequented the private tennis club or soccer matches between RCD Español and FC Barcelona . As a young student of Barcelona’s German College, where a significant focus was on gymnastics and athletics, Samaranch developed a strong sense The Man from Barcelona | 3 of camaraderie with his Spanish colleagues. Having established friendships that were often cemented by soccer allegiances during his early education, he graduated with a degree in commerce from the Higher Institute of Business Studies prior to the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War.11 In 1940, having passed a state examination qualifying him to be a perito mercantil, or accountant, Samaranch worked briefly in the family textile business . During this period he further developed his interest in sport, initially competing as a featherweight boxer under the name of “Kid Samaranch” in the Catalan Amateur Boxing Championships and then as a player-promoter of hockey sobre patinas (roller hockey).12 Intrigued by the potential in the sport of roller...