SLAM! Sports
Olympic Scandal
COLUMNS
REVIEW
INTERACTIVE
ALSO ON SLAM!
Lillehammer bid calculating but clean
The disclosures by Norwegian news media Friday came a day after the town made available about 20,000 documents relating to its bid for the 1992 games, which it lost to Albertville, France, and for its successful bid two years later.
Lillehammer is proud of the success of its games, considered among the best Winter Olympics. It took the unusual step of releasing the documents in an attempt to preserve the town's image amid the growing Olympics bribery scandals.
Major Norwegian news media sent teams of reporters to Lillehammer to begin sifting through the documents Thursday, and reported Friday that there was no evidence so far of bribery and vote-buying.
But they also found evidence of behavior that offends Norwegians' generally high sense of propriety, notably the use of Norway's diplomatic corps to compile background files on International Olympic Committee members ahead of their visits to Lillehammer.
The files contain such information as the member's health, alcohol consumption, ethnic origins, families, hobbies and other preferences. One dossier included the note that a member's wife "was very interested in shopping."
"Every member has a vote. These were our customers, and a customer has to be taken care of," Petter Ronningen, a Lillehammer games top manager, was quoted as telling the newspaper Aftenposten. "We had to find out what each one liked."
But the newspaper Dagbladet characterized the files "expose how the city's Olympic bosses, with help from the foreign service, cynically evaluated the 90 powerful men of the International Olympic Committee."
Officials of the Foreign Ministry could not immediately be reached for comment on whether Norway's diplomats had overstepped their bounds by helping prepare such dossiers.
According to Aftenposten, one document gave the bid committee the following advice from a Norwegian ambassador: "Africans can well be bribed and Norwegians are usually too honest and lose."
The Lillehammer documents gave details of IOC members' wishes to be pampered.
The bid committee sent a tourist class ticket to Mali's IOC member, Lamine Keita, so he could visit Lillehammer. Aftenposten said Keita, who was ousted from the IOC in January, said, "As you know, IOC members travel first class. I am returning the ticket for rebooking."
Lillehammer lavished attention and first-class treatment on IOC members, but the newspapers said there was so far no evidence of outright corruption. Gifts to IOC members were modest, such as sweaters, crystal figurines, silver salt and pepper shakers.
The Norwegian news agency NTB said 27 documents were withheld as confidential under national law, two files were missing and Ronningen had removed two boxes of files as personal property.
Kaci Kullmann Five, a former leader of the Conservative Party and member of the bid committee, said she was shocked that Lillehammer had released the dossiers.
"It is terrible that information that was given in the greatest confidence has now been made public," she said.