Salt Lake City 2002 — The Bid That Bought the Olympics and Broke the IOC

The bid that won Salt Lake City the 2002 Winter Olympics also detonated the worst corruption scandal in the modern history of the International Olympic Committee, and in 1999 the IOC did something it had never done in more than a century: it expelled its own. The Salt Lake Organizing Committee had spent roughly US$1 million on cash, university scholarships, medical care, lavish gifts, jobs for relatives, and assorted favors directed at IOC members and their families, all to secure the votes that awarded the Games. When the scheme surfaced in late 1998, the IOC’s response was a purge — ten members expelled or pushed to resign, and ten more sanctioned or warned. It was the first such cleansing the committee had ever undertaken, and the verdict that stands on record is the IOC’s own, because the criminal case against the bid’s organizers collapsed.

The mechanism was old-fashioned and almost casual in its brazenness. Salt Lake City had lost four previous bids, and its organizers, led by bid committee chief Tom Welch and his deputy Dave Johnson, decided the fifth attempt would not fail for want of generosity toward the roughly one hundred IOC members who held the votes. They paid college tuition for members’ children — including more than US$108,000 toward the education of Sonia Essomba, daughter of the Cameroonian IOC member René Essomba. They arranged medical treatment, shopping sprees, jobs, and in at least one case land deals that turned a profit for the member involved. Salt Lake won the 2002 Games at the IOC session in Budapest on June 16, 1995. The bill for how it won came due three and a half years later.

The scandal broke on November 24, 1998, when a Salt Lake television station, KTVX, obtained a letter revealing that the bid committee had been paying Sonia Essomba’s tuition. Within weeks the IOC member Marc Hodler, a Swiss veteran, publicly alleged that bribery had been routine in the bidding process — not unique to Salt Lake, he implied, but systemic. Four separate investigations followed. The criminal prosecution of Welch and Johnson ended in acquittal in December 2003, when a federal judge dismissed the case. But the IOC, judging by its own ethics rather than a courtroom’s burden of proof, had already acted: members were gone, and the committee was forced into the most sweeping governance reforms in its history.