By CHRISTOPHER MANION
Ice cream and cake. Motherhood and apple pie. Hamburger and fries. Olympics and corruption.
Twenty years ago this week, the Salt Lake City Winter Olympic Games headed out of town, leaving a trail of bribes, scandals, and federal investigations.
As we ponder the disaster of Communist China’s “Genocide Games” this past month, it might be useful to recall the man who planted the seed of corruption that has threatened the games ever since: Juan Antonio Samaranch.
Lots of people didn’t like Samaranch because he had been a minor functionary in the government of Spanish Caudillo Francisco Franco. But at least Franco saved Spain from Communism. During the1950s, he told Eisenhower’s personal emissary, Vernon Walters, that he promised Eisenhower a Spain that would have a restored monarchy, a strong middle class, and a military that would be subject to the civilian government. He delivered on all three.
Samaranch had no such lofty designs. Like thousands of third-raters who found roles to fill in Franco’s bureaucracy, he merely liked the power and the prestige. In 1966, he ran the Spanish government’s sports programs, and was appointed to the IOC. In 1977, two years after Franco’s death, Spain’s new government appointed him as Spain’s first ambassador in years to the Soviet Union. He arrived just in time to enjoy the waning of Brezhnev’s rule and the dawning of the age of Andropov and Chernenko.
Wedged between such fossils of corruption and decadence, anyone with even a whiff of Franco’s mettle would have raucously razzed the commies at every opportunity. Ever since Stalin, Moscow had hated Franco’s Spain, the only country to defeat Communism since Lenin started keeping score. Ambassador Samaranch could have lit up the Moscow nights, taunting the apparatchiks with his very presence by constantly reminding them of their worst enemy, “El Jefe.”
No such luck. Samaranch was a consummate apparatchik himself. He burrowed in and befriended the Soviet-bloc mid-level bureaucrats in Moscow whose view of public service pretty well paralleled his own.
In the Soviet Union, he learned to wink, nod, and relish the thought of those fantastic dachas enjoyed by the party elite in the People’s Paradise. By all accounts, the relationships he forged in Moscow provided the margin of votes he needed to be elected head of the IOC in 1980.
An Honored Tradition, Soiled
Even though the Soviet bloc always cheated, the IOC itself was remarkably untainted by scandal in 1980. Under Avery Brundage, the American who headed the U.S. Olympic Committee from 1929 to 1953 and the IOC from 1952 to 1972, the Olympic tradition was polished to a luster admired throughout the world (which is why the Soviet bloc cheated so much to win those coveted gold medals). Profiteering and corporate exploitation was strictly forbidden in Brundage’s IOC.
Samaranch considered all this concern about ethics and exploitation to be an obstacle to his ambition and expensive tastes. He immediately expanded the IOC membership and recruited a gaggle of fawning supporters, many of whom were thoroughly corrupt (several ex-Stasi members and one of Idi Amin’s generals made the grade).
Samaranch opened the floodgates to financing (with little accountability) by corporate sponsors, host governments, and millions of dollars in unadulterated graft. The corrupt among IOC members caught on quickly, eager for graft as they traveled the world under Samaranch’s new all-expenses-paid regime.
Some of their colleagues were from the old school — drawn from European royalty and, here and there, great figures in amateur athletics — but Samaranch made sure he polluted the membership enough to maintain his power.
Indeed, Samaranch and his IOC cronies turned the Olympics into a cash cow, and a sacred one at that: He insisted on being treated like a head of state, and allowed his sycophants to build for him a regal headquarters in Switzerland, with expense accounts and trappings worthy of the head of a minor principality.
Matching the greed of his also-ran toadies with his own lust for power and glory, he exploited the squeaky-clean image of the young athletes who competed every two years, summer and winter, and built himself a tidy little empire. In doing so, the increasingly sordid character spreading in the IOC inexorably flowed over into every aspect of the games.
Samaranch made it perfectly clear that ethics were not his strong suit; he once awarded the highest Olympic award to a troika of degenerates so base that it seems a parody: Nicolae Ceausescu of Romania, Erich Honecker of East Germany, and Todor Zhivkov of Bulgaria (whose son-in-law, Ivan Slavkov, Samaranch appointed to the IOC in 1987). Samaranch made these awards instead of barring the countries from the games because of rampant doping and cheating.
With such a crop of world-class representatives of the Olympic ideal, how could any remaining sane IOC members have expected anything other than a future filled with corruption and abuse?
Samaranch often insisted on being treated as a gentleman member of the nobility, but his notion of chivalry wasn’t exactly right out of Don Quixote. In fact, he left his dying wife in Spain so he wouldn’t miss the opening of the 2000 summer games in Sydney, which were designed to immortalize him. Upon arriving, according to the AP, he invited Dawn Fraser, Australia’s most famous Olympic swimmer, “as his personal guest and stand-in as Olympics first lady” for Friday’s opening ceremony. When his wife interrupted his little parade by dying, he briefly left in a private jet to attend her funeral in Madrid, and then jetted back to Sydney.
As the uproar over corruption at the Salt Lake games in 2000 roiled the IOC, Samaranch calmly planned his last IOC meeting — in Moscow, for which he had acquired such a warm fondness. From the protection of that bastion of sportsmanship, where no one writes about corruption for very long, he proclaimed Communist China as the site of the 2008 summer games. We can be assured, of course, that corruption was not involved.
Beijing Was A New Low
This time around, “China Joe” Biden should have boycotted the Beijing games, but of course his paymasters wouldn’t let him. So what if the Chinese Communist Party threatened athletes who might dare to criticize the ChiComs abysmal human rights record? Well, the whole charade was a dismal flop and few even bothered to notice.
“Oslo, Norway, the initial leading candidate to host the 2022 Winter Games, backed out because the Norwegians could not stomach the ridiculous demands of the International Olympic Committee (IOC),” writes Ilya Somin at Reason.com. He points to Sam Borden’s revealing ESPN report earlier in February about what might have been:
“[A]bout six months before the final vote, Oslo backed out. In addition to financial concerns about actually staging the Games, Norwegian politicians (and their constituents) were put off by, among other things, the IOC’s alleged demands for perks during the Olympics. The IOC’s requirements included an audience with Norway’s king and a cocktail party for IOC executives with the Norwegian royal family (paid for by the Norwegian government) as well as ‘seasonal fruit and cakes’ in members’ hotel rooms, mandatory smiles for all arriving IOC members from hotel employees, extended hours for hotel bars and service of only Coca-Cola products. The IOC also requested that local schools be canceled during the Games and residents be encouraged to go away on vacation.
“ ‘Norway is a rich country, but we don’t want to spend money on wrong things, like satisfying the crazy demands from IOC apparatchiks,’ wrote Frithjof Jacobsen, chief political commentator for the newspaper VG. ‘These insane demands that they should be treated like the king of Saudi Arabia just won’t fly with the Norwegian public’.”
The stench of Samaranch lives on.
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