Word: bidness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Salt Lake City was already a player in this transitional era, and was learning, painfully, how the game was changing. In 1984 and '85, Mayor Ted Wilson oversaw Salt Lake's effort to become America's bid city (the U.S. Olympic Committee designates one town to be the U.S. contender before the I.O.C. picks a winner). The two finalists were Salt Lake and Anchorage, which frankly didn't have a snowball's chance of ultimately being chosen by the I.O.C. "We did very little entertaining because we had been told not even to contact U.S.O.C. members," Wilson recalls...
Anchorage, meanwhile, was learning that courtship with the U.S.O.C. was kiss-on-the-cheek stuff compared to a tango with the worldly, rouge-lipped, fire-breathing I.O.C. Rick Nerland, an advertising executive who served as the Anchorage bid's executive vice president, said last week that he was approached twice by agents who asked up to $30,000 for a bloc of I.O.C. votes. "I was disappointed that the person was intimating that that went on," he said. "We dismissed it on the spot." Also resistant were officials from Toronto and Amsterdam, who reported similar shakedowns in the 1980s...
...rooms; at one meeting a makeshift parcel-post office was set up to wrap and ship "souvenirs" to delegates' homes. Helmick's wife surveyed the scene and termed it "legal bribery." Helmick told TIME that his wife saw I.O.C. delegates from the East bloc returning from shopping trips with bid officials, laden with Escada clothing and other $500 purchases. The I.O.C. could no longer claim such solicitation was "just rumor." In 1986 the committee put a $150 limit on gifts and insisted that travel tickets be nonrefundable...
Which slowed the flow of largesse not even a little. The situation reached its apex--or nadir, if you prefer--in the bidding for last year's Winter Games, won by Nagano. By 1991 Salt Lake City, always a suitable site and now represented by a savvy bid team, had grown to be an odds-on choice. But Yoshiaki Tsutsumi, then one of the world's richest men, had a dream: an Olympics in Nagano. "When I speak, 100 politicians jump" was his calling card. When he said he wanted to be president of Japan's Olympic committee, that group...
...promised to deliver votes for huge fees. In 1994 a citizen's group in Japan filed a criminal complaint against Nagano's mayor and the prefecture's governor for allegedly destroying documents said to detail how $18 million in public and private funds were used in Nagano's bid. The case was thrown out, but last week a former Nagano committee official disclosed that a 90-volume financial record of the bid process had been destroyed in 1992 because it contained "secret information." And Nagano mayor Tasuku Tsukada reversed previous denials and admitted to TIME that Nagano's campaign...