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Year: 2000
Attempting to lay bare the dark secrets of Olympic sports in an era of rapid growth of wealth and power, the author Andrew Jennings with assistance from Clare Sambrook, who contributed three of the 21 chapters, faces perhaps his biggest challenge in the trenches from the most powerful man in the Olympic family — Juan Antonio Samaranch, now late.
The 390-page book of non-stop intrigue, drama, satire, politics, sex, drugs, money laundering, secret services and presidential meetings, bribes and media spin doctoring, Jennings scoured files of the FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigations) and KGB (Russian spy equivalent of FBI) to unearth a cocktail of shocking transcontinental transactions. So shocking were some of the findings that even governments were at risk from the burgeoning tentacles of the International Olympic Committee with details such as how a close IOC associate of Samaranch, Andre Guelfi, channelled in excess of US$40 million from then French President Francois Mitterrand to Germany’s Chancellor Helmut Kohl in a bid to ensure the Seoul Games 88 were awarded to South Korea.
That journalists have since Sydney 2000 Olympics outnumbered athletes by two to one have become accomplices in crime in exchange for tickets to cover the games and IOC events makes Jennings such a compelling, if brave journalist. His expose of government officials, IOC members and sponsors’ involvement in the running of the multi-billion dollar Olympics is classic.
Political chicanery and financial doping, association with the world’s richest politicians, oligarchies and monarchs make the Olympic family as impenetrable as the women’s undergarment. But Jennings, with the help of Roman Catholic nuns in Nagano (Japan), secretaries of the IOC membership and politicians managed to lay bare debauchery in sports by the Lausanne-based organisation, leading to the appearance of Samaranch before the US Congress at the behest of Republican congressmen John McCain in 1999 to answer charges of corruption, bribery and financial doping.
Jennings had exposed the Salt Lake City scandal in which billions of dollars had exchanged hands for the right to host the games in 1996. The detail was shocking as to draw the attention of even armchair critics and the style he delivered it was deliberate for its accuracy, thanks to his knowledge of sports politics.
The US Congress took particular interest in the matter because it involved public funds and that 70 percent of the IOC billions come from American corporates — from Coca Cola to Visa Mastercard.
The appearance of Samaranch before Senator John McCain was a classic example of investigative success by any journalist in sport. But what would excite the newspaper editors the most is how he weaved his story from Europe to the Americas through Africa to Asia via the middle East exposing some corrupt officials that include those from Zimbabwe, Swaziland, Congo, Uganda, Senegal, Botswana and Kenya.
But no story reads better than that of David Sibandze, a member of the Olympic committee from Swaziland whose eight children had all their college fees paid for by US officials canvassing for votes to win the right to host the games. “Tom and Dave (a mafia-like team with a task to oil and grease all the hands that will bring Salt Lake City the 1996 Winter Games) had heard all about David Sibandze, a Don King lookalike from Swaziland who had spent years encouraging bidding cities to share their wealth with him.
“He flew into Salk Lake and brought his son Sibu along. They headed straight for the facility they wanted to inspect. Not an ice rink or a ski-jump, not a sports facility at all: the Sibandzes were most interested in the University of Utah’s business school. Sibandze does not want to pay for his children’s education if someone else can write a cheque. He bombarded Tom with faxes until Sibu had a university place”. After the expose he was pushed off the Olympic gravy train, but crucially the Tom and Dave mafia were also sent packing for their troubles.
What I find outstanding in this book is that the author sets out to untangle the web of organisations sworn to secrecy, money, the wealthy and powerful, governments and world politicians. The confusion that usually comes from sporting bodies saying they do not need government intervention in sport was proven beyond doubt that it is both a myth and a fallacy.
Actually, sports need governments more and without it cannot function. The Australian government issued a US$140 million bail-out for IOC for the Sydney Olympics after the Local Organising Committee sent an SOS. It is strange that Samaranch, himself a former politician and key figure in General Francisco Franco’s government until its fall in 1975, after which he became Spain’s ambassador to Moscow from whence he succeeded Lord Killanin as IOC president in 1980 would say that. The late Samaranch, who breathed his last at the age of 89 in April 2010, had joined IOC in 1966 weeks after England won their only football World Cup title on home soil, at the time he was key minister in the former Spanish dictator’s government which he had joined in 1955 at the age of 25.
The book that acts as a sequeal to The Lord of the Rings, gives few details of Samaranch outside the Olympics but exposes everything from his nocturnal visits to Moscow to grease former president Boris Yeltsin to secret emissaries to the White House (President Bill Clinton meeting in the Oval office) and Capitol Hill to save the billions American companies pour into the games in the aftermath of the Salt Lakes scandal. His patronising of the monarchies is legendary — the Prince of Orange (Holland), the youngest ever member having been born in 1967, a year after Samaranch joined the IOC, will be in the Olympic family marquee hall until 2047.
Thanks to Samaranch who fought hard to put the cut-off date in the IOC to 80 years, after which a member retires, the wealthy prince will be the longest serving member in the Olympics family and breeding ground for collusion. But he broke that constitutional rule to stay a year longer in power to ensure that he bullied members to award the Olympic Games in 2008 to Beijing after they lost out by just two votes to Australia seven years before.
The book did not bother to explain why Samaranch badly wanted to still be president beyond his 80th birthday, but information in the same tells of millions he had received from the Chinese to win the bid for the first time. It was payback time after Beijing helped him save the Los Angeles Games from further embarrassment by returning to the Olympics for the first time since 1932, ironically in the same US city.
China had mitigated the boycott by USSR and its Eastern block friends in retaliation to US snub of the Moscow Games in 1980 in protest of Russia’ invasion of Afghanistan. The Moscow Games made another loss, which followed quick on the heels of the Montreal Games of 1976 that had also suffered a boycott by Africans who protested against New Zealand sending a rugby team to play against South Africa during the apartheid regime. With Samaranch desperate to break the boycott streak he leaned to China for millions and oligarchies and tycoons such as Horst Dassler, the (German’s Adidas kingmaker), Guelfi (A French tycoon with a surfeit of political and business connections) and the world’s powerful politicians, opening himself to corruption in the process.
Crucially for him he needed the world media on his side to gloss over the ills of his shenanigans including his Indonesian IOC ally, Bob Hasan’s questioning by government investigators on how he had amassed a fortune in excess of US$3 billion in 1999. Jennings traced the treasure trove to deposed dictator Suharto, an ethical problem for the IOC. Suharto is now dead.
His media team for the task managed and arranged press conferences to ensure information is managed and sanitised to protect their behemoth. Samaranch even had a long-standing agreement with NBC Television, a media house that had right for the games till Athens 2004, an issue the US Congressmen raised at his hearing. Alex Gilady, his media henchman, controlled the London and New York offices of the sports monolith. That is why the dirt accumulated so much, it suffocated the sport, forcing governments in US and Canada to call IOC members to explain themselves.
Proven cases of vote buying and sex exchanges for votes unmasked the Olympic family, whose legal issues were controlled by Judge Mbaye, a Supreme Court of Senegal judge, an unflinching supporter of the president and chairman of the ethical committee.
In every corner where dirt could swirl from, Samaranch had his men to manage things. Even when US companies threatened to pull the rug, he sent the best public relations team in the US at the time, Hill and Knowlton, to manage things. Never mind they bore a US$2 million hole in the Swiss Bank for the few weeks’ job that had a few press conferences and a prepared speech that Samaranch read before the US congressmen led by Senator John McCain in 1999, just months before the Sydney Games roared into life.
Perhaps where Jennings showed spectacular understanding of the web was where he questioned Samaranch’s insatiable hunger for the company of the crooked and corrupt including sworn dictators and fascists — Ugandan former defence minister during Idi Amini’s reign, Francis Nyangweso — is classical.
Just five years into his presidency in 1985 Samaranch shocked the world by awarding Erich Honecker, East Germany chancellor the Olympic Order — the highest honour in the games in return for promise of participating in the Seoul Games 88, sowing seeds of a cancer that would threaten the survival of the games in future.
The East Germans who had boycotted the Los Angeles Games 84 together with USSR, Cuba and 14 others, would later bring the biggest doping scandal to the games through state engineered doping involving over 10 000 athletes, an issue that drew the ire of the medicine commission prompting Dr Arne Ljungqvist to exclaim, “The worst thing is that he (Samaranch) knew about it”.
Jennings drew a jail term for daring say IOC members took bribes but indeed East Germany took part in the Seoul Games as Samaranch wanted to massage his political pride, further tightening his grip on the IOC.
Reading this book during the just ended London Olympics was as beautiful and as exciting as watching paint dry, what with Usain Bolt restoring the beautiful memories of the games pounded to pulp by bribes, doping scandals, political harlotry, royal indulgence and brass nepotism.
The Belgian Jacques Rogge, a Samaranch protégé and appointee succeeded him in 2001 and has since presided over Athens (2004), Beijing (2008) and London Games (2012), still shy of Samaranch who reigned from Moscow (1980) Los Angeles (1984), Seoul (1988), Barcelona (1992) Atlanta (1996) to Sydney (2000). But thanks to Jennings it is all in print and all the readers the wiser while sports journalists are challenged to the core.