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From Times Online
April 22, 2010
The man who stole the Olympics’ innocence
Juan Antonio Samaranch presided over the transformation of the Games’ fortunes and the death of their ideals
Matthew Syed
If you want to understand the evolution of institutionalised corruption, a good place to start is not at the Palace of Westminster or the City of London, but a palatial building in the Swiss town of Lausanne. It was here that Juan Antonio Samaranch, who died yesterday, masterminded the modern Olympic movement for more than two decades, transforming an amateur sporting organisation into a corporate colossus.
In 1980, when Samaranch first became President of the International Olympic Committee, the organisation received television and sponsorship income measured in the tens of millions of dollars. By the time of his departure in 2001 it had billions in its coffers. The Olympic rings, once a symbol of the hopes and aspirations of athletes from five continents, were now among the most lucrative corporate symbols on the planet, protected by copyright and exploited by an army of salesmen.
None of this commercialism need have mattered, and may even have been a force for good, except for one simple — and fatal — fact. As cash poured into the IOC and the world marvelled at the transformation in the Games, the organisation itself continued to languish in the dark ages. There were no checks or balances, no scrutiny. And, very soon, with poetic inevitability, no inhibition among IOC members when it came to accepting bribes on a scale that makes the MPs’ expenses scandal seem quaint.
Samaranch altered the rules so that members of the IOC no longer had to pay their own travel costs, insisting on first-class flights, five-star hotels and luxury on a scale that left athletes gasping for breath. The Spaniard reserved the greatest extravagance for himself, demanding the presidential suite in the grandest hotel in whichever city he happened to be visiting, a chauffeur-driven limousine and the title “your excellency”. He also billed the IOC for the use of a suite in the Palace Hotel in Lausanne whenever he was visiting Olympic headquarters.
Over time, and in the time-honoured manner of the cancer known as sleaze, the sense of entitlement among IOC members reached ever more grotesque proportions. As early as 1991, seven years before the defining Salt Lake City scandal, members were lavished with so many gifts from cities bidding for the 1998 Winter Olympics that the IOC had to set up a parcel post station in the Hyatt Regency hotel to help delegates to send their swag home.
“You’re treated like royalty, with limousines, wining and dining, a hotel suite,” Robert Helmick, a former US Olympic Committee President, would say later. “My wife would be afraid to go out on shopping trips. She found if she said she liked something, the next day it would show up in her room. Pearl brooches, five-ring pendants. And nothing is done to discourage it. You start thinking you deserve this. What you have is a group of good people caught up in a system that has become corrupt.”
Journalists started to sound the alarm bells and whistleblowers began to emerge from within bidding organisations, but Samaranch continued to turn a blind eye. The IOC membership was a self-selecting elite, with many members owing their elevation to the patronage of the President, and the Spaniard was not in the business of alienating his powerbase by removing their perks. As Andrew Jennings, co-author of Lords of the Rings, put it: “Corruption became the lubrication of his Olympic industry.”
Only after the Salt Lake City scandal broke in 1998 — with allegations of millions of dollars being paid to corrupt IOC members — did Samaranch act. An investigation led to the expulsion of six members and the resignation of four others, although it exonerated the President. New rules, including the outlawing of gifts and the banning of visits to bidding cities, were put in place. Whether they are sufficient to ensure that an organisation that continues to grow in wealth stays on the straight and narrow remains to be seen.
The untrammelled power of Samaranch over the organisation that he ruled for 21 years was perhaps most graphically illustrated in the final days of his administration. In the summer of 2001, as the Olympic movement prepared to anoint his successor, Samaranch nominated his own son Juan Antonio Junior, a Madrid-based businessman and a vice-president of the International Modern Pentathlon Federation, to join the exalted ranks of the IOC. The vote was won by an overwhelming 71-27 majority.
Samaranch, who would continue to move prominently in Olympic circles for many years to come as an honorary IOC President-for-Life, kissed his son on both cheeks and squeezed his arm during the formal swearing-in ceremony in Moscow. Accused of nepotism, the outgoing President demonstrated serene indifference. “I proposed my son with the agreement of the executive board of the IOC because I think my son can be a good member of the IOC,” he said. “This is not so important.”
All around the world youngsters dream of Olympic gold. From the plains of Africa to the dusty streets of Rio, from Manchester to Manila, budding athletes aspire to climb the fabled podium and to inhabit the imagination of the world. The tenure of Samaranch was not a betrayal of the vested interests that continue to cling to the Olympic movement; it was a betrayal of dreams. It was as if the collective endeavour of the athletes of the world — the men and women the Olympics are supposed to be about — were merely grist to the mill of executive corruption.
In the early part of the last century, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the aristocratic founder of the modern Olympic movement, offered the following musing: “The day when a sportsman stops thinking of the happiness in his own effort and the intoxication of the power and physical balance he derives from it, the day when he lets considerations of vanity or interest take over, on this day his ideal will die.”
Little did the Frenchman realise that his words would prove to be prophetic, describing with chilling accuracy the ruinous path taken by the organisation he strove so hard to create.
April 22, 2010
The man who stole the Olympics’ innocence
Juan Antonio Samaranch presided over the transformation of the Games’ fortunes and the death of their ideals
Matthew Syed
If you want to understand the evolution of institutionalised corruption, a good place to start is not at the Palace of Westminster or the City of London, but a palatial building in the Swiss town of Lausanne. It was here that Juan Antonio Samaranch, who died yesterday, masterminded the modern Olympic movement for more than two decades, transforming an amateur sporting organisation into a corporate colossus.
In 1980, when Samaranch first became President of the International Olympic Committee, the organisation received television and sponsorship income measured in the tens of millions of dollars. By the time of his departure in 2001 it had billions in its coffers. The Olympic rings, once a symbol of the hopes and aspirations of athletes from five continents, were now among the most lucrative corporate symbols on the planet, protected by copyright and exploited by an army of salesmen.
None of this commercialism need have mattered, and may even have been a force for good, except for one simple — and fatal — fact. As cash poured into the IOC and the world marvelled at the transformation in the Games, the organisation itself continued to languish in the dark ages. There were no checks or balances, no scrutiny. And, very soon, with poetic inevitability, no inhibition among IOC members when it came to accepting bribes on a scale that makes the MPs’ expenses scandal seem quaint.
Samaranch altered the rules so that members of the IOC no longer had to pay their own travel costs, insisting on first-class flights, five-star hotels and luxury on a scale that left athletes gasping for breath. The Spaniard reserved the greatest extravagance for himself, demanding the presidential suite in the grandest hotel in whichever city he happened to be visiting, a chauffeur-driven limousine and the title “your excellency”. He also billed the IOC for the use of a suite in the Palace Hotel in Lausanne whenever he was visiting Olympic headquarters.
Over time, and in the time-honoured manner of the cancer known as sleaze, the sense of entitlement among IOC members reached ever more grotesque proportions. As early as 1991, seven years before the defining Salt Lake City scandal, members were lavished with so many gifts from cities bidding for the 1998 Winter Olympics that the IOC had to set up a parcel post station in the Hyatt Regency hotel to help delegates to send their swag home.
“You’re treated like royalty, with limousines, wining and dining, a hotel suite,” Robert Helmick, a former US Olympic Committee President, would say later. “My wife would be afraid to go out on shopping trips. She found if she said she liked something, the next day it would show up in her room. Pearl brooches, five-ring pendants. And nothing is done to discourage it. You start thinking you deserve this. What you have is a group of good people caught up in a system that has become corrupt.”
Journalists started to sound the alarm bells and whistleblowers began to emerge from within bidding organisations, but Samaranch continued to turn a blind eye. The IOC membership was a self-selecting elite, with many members owing their elevation to the patronage of the President, and the Spaniard was not in the business of alienating his powerbase by removing their perks. As Andrew Jennings, co-author of Lords of the Rings, put it: “Corruption became the lubrication of his Olympic industry.”
Only after the Salt Lake City scandal broke in 1998 — with allegations of millions of dollars being paid to corrupt IOC members — did Samaranch act. An investigation led to the expulsion of six members and the resignation of four others, although it exonerated the President. New rules, including the outlawing of gifts and the banning of visits to bidding cities, were put in place. Whether they are sufficient to ensure that an organisation that continues to grow in wealth stays on the straight and narrow remains to be seen.
The untrammelled power of Samaranch over the organisation that he ruled for 21 years was perhaps most graphically illustrated in the final days of his administration. In the summer of 2001, as the Olympic movement prepared to anoint his successor, Samaranch nominated his own son Juan Antonio Junior, a Madrid-based businessman and a vice-president of the International Modern Pentathlon Federation, to join the exalted ranks of the IOC. The vote was won by an overwhelming 71-27 majority.
Samaranch, who would continue to move prominently in Olympic circles for many years to come as an honorary IOC President-for-Life, kissed his son on both cheeks and squeezed his arm during the formal swearing-in ceremony in Moscow. Accused of nepotism, the outgoing President demonstrated serene indifference. “I proposed my son with the agreement of the executive board of the IOC because I think my son can be a good member of the IOC,” he said. “This is not so important.”
All around the world youngsters dream of Olympic gold. From the plains of Africa to the dusty streets of Rio, from Manchester to Manila, budding athletes aspire to climb the fabled podium and to inhabit the imagination of the world. The tenure of Samaranch was not a betrayal of the vested interests that continue to cling to the Olympic movement; it was a betrayal of dreams. It was as if the collective endeavour of the athletes of the world — the men and women the Olympics are supposed to be about — were merely grist to the mill of executive corruption.
In the early part of the last century, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the aristocratic founder of the modern Olympic movement, offered the following musing: “The day when a sportsman stops thinking of the happiness in his own effort and the intoxication of the power and physical balance he derives from it, the day when he lets considerations of vanity or interest take over, on this day his ideal will die.”
Little did the Frenchman realise that his words would prove to be prophetic, describing with chilling accuracy the ruinous path taken by the organisation he strove so hard to create.
A nasty piece of work indeed. Makes you wonder why cities bother bidding for the Olympics anymore. All you get is huge debts and mothballed buildings.
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