Lack of ethics is business as usual

By Jere Longman

NEW YORK, MAY 18. Having declared him innocent beforehand, the International Olympic Committee set about investigating excessive travel privileges for one of its delegates, Kevan Gosper of Australia, in the Salt Lake City bribery scandal. To no one's surprise, Gosper was cleared of wrongdoing on Monday. You usually have to be the president of Indiana University to conduct an investigation as feeble as an IOC inquiry.

The case involved two trips to Utah while Salt Lake City was bidding on the tarnished 2002 Winter Olympics. One trip, to a ski resort, was taken in 1993 by Gosper's wife and two children. The other was an ``official'' visit made by Gosper to inspect Salt Lake City's bid in 1995. A report by the IOC's ethics commission noted that Gosper's wife had paid for the ski trip and suggested that $ 30,000 in the reported cost of the trips had been deceptively inflated by the Salt Lake organizers.

Still, the ski trip represented another example of extraordinarily bad judgment on the part of Gosper. The latest example came last week when he allowed his 11-year-old daughter to bump another girl as the first Australian bearer on the Olympic torch run toward the 2000 Summer Games in Sydney. A year and a half after the Salt Lake City scandal, despite professed openness and reform, the IOC still reeks of abuse of privilege, arrogance and brazen entitlement.

Of all the places his wife and children could have gone skiing in 1993, Gosper's family chose Deer Valley, Utah. It strains credulity to think that Gosper did not know that his family would receive preferential treatment - even if it was only free meals and a preferred condominium - from a group of fawning organizers who were willing to spend millions in illicit cash payments, scholarships and medical benefits to gain the Winter Games.

To avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest, Gosper should have sent his family elsewhere. The ethics commission said that Gosper's family acted as friends do among friends, but Gosper should have known that his friendship was being bought. Apparently, it never crossed his mind.

Nor did it occur to him that it was improper for his daughter, Sophie, to displace another girl as the first Australian torch bearer. She has been embarrassed internationally by her own father, who should have known better as a former member of the IOC's ethics commission and a man who aspires to replace Juan Antonio Samaranch as president. Gosper apologised to Samaranch on Tuesday, and said he would pull out of next week's flame ceremonies in Guam, but his contrition was late and hollow.

Ideals compromised

As the 2000 Summer Games slouch toward Sydney in September, the Olympic ideals have been thoroughly and perhaps irretrievably compromised. Let's recap. Sydney won the Games narrowly over Beijing by essentially bribing delegates from Kenya and Uganda with promises of $ 35,000 apiece the night before the vote. Both IOC members from Australia have been tainted. Gosper by the torch and hospitality scandals, and Phil Coles for taking expensive jewellery from organizers of Athens' failed 1996 Olympic bid and for contributing to dossiers about the peccadilloes of his fellow delegates.

Inscrutably, Coles remains on the IOC, warned but not expelled. Like basketball coaches at Indiana, powerful IOC members find their jobs secured through the wink-wink of double- secret probation.

Sydney organizers also came under heavy criticism for deceiving the public about the withholding of 500,000 tickets to be sold to corporate bidders at three times the normal price. And now come reports from Australia that hundreds of Sydney Olympic officials and their families have jumped in line for the torch relay.

``First it was nepotism, now it is self-promotion,'' said an angered New South Wales legislator, Charlie Lynn.

- Copyright: New York Times News Service, New York, 2000

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