The roller coaster saga of the
2002 Olympic Winter Games began when Salt Lake City was selected as the
host city at the 1995 IOC Session. Salt Lake City had bid for 1998 but
lost out to Nagano, and its 2002 bid was so strong that the IOC needed
only one round of voting to award the Utah city the bid, almost by
acclamation. It was the first high for the city with Mormon ties, but
the bottom of the coaster loomed ahead.
Over the next few years Salt Lake City
Organizing Committee did its work with few problems. The stock market
was booming and sponsorship money flowed into the Committee. But on 24
November 1998, Salt Lake City television station KTVX reported that the
Salt Lake Olympic Organizing Committee (SLOC) had been paying for Sonia
Essomba, daughter of an IOC Member, to attend American University in
Washington. Things were no longer well with the 19th Olympic Winter
Games.
That report led to the Olympic Scandal of 1999, which led to many
reforms within the IOC and among its members. But Salt Lake City was
implicated as being responsible, as their Bid Committee was shown to
have showered IOC Members with their largesse, much of it, if not in
contravention of IOC rules, at least pushing the envelope of those
rules. The Bid Committee members noted that they were playing the same
Games as other bid cities – that they had done nothing that the other
candidates had not done. But the damage was real.
Bid Committee kingpins Tom Welch and Dave Johnson had moved into
leadership positions within the Organizing Committee but were forced to
withdraw, and eventually the Federal Department of Justice brought
indictments against both men. The indictments were later thrown out by a
judge, but an appeal is ongoing. The man who replaced Welch as
President and CEO of the Organizing Committee was Frank Joklik, but when
it was revealed that he had had close affiliations with the Bid
Committee, he was tainted by association, and resigned of his own
accord.
The Olympic Winter Games were only two years away and without
leadership. Worse still was that several sponsors were making noises
about withdrawing financial support, threatening a fiscal disaster. And
as the stock market in 1999-2000 began to fall from its raging bull
status, new money to support the Salt Lake Olympics was not easily
found. The Salt Lake City Organizing Committee reached out to Mitt
Romney as their new chief. Romney was the son of George Romney, a
former US Presidential candidate, and he was a financial wizard, having
made a fortune as the leader of Bain Capital, a venture capital firm.
He quickly righted the ship and all seemed well again on the banks of
the Great Salt Lake.
Then on 11 September 2001, a scant five months before the Opening
Ceremony, Arab terrorists savagely and cowardly attacked American soil,
hijacking four airplanes and crashing two of them into the twin towers
of the World Trade Center, and another into the Pentagon. A fourth
plane was also being aimed at Washington, but the American passengers,
aware of the circumstances of that Tuesday morning, courageously
assaulted the terrorist pilots and the plane crashed into a deserted
Pennsylvania meadow, killing all aboard, but likely saving many lives.
The United States responded by announcing a war on terrorism and
within weeks was waging war on Arab terrorists and the Al-Qaeda
organization in Afghanistan. A larger war seemed imminent. Now the
question was not if Salt Lake City could fund Olympic Games in February
2002, but whether there would be any Games at all. Security concerns
would have to be ramped up an order of magnitude. But federal security
forces, which were to be used at the Winter Olympics, could be diverted
to fight the war, and it was not known if they would be available for
the Olympics. And if the United States waged a full-out war, would
other nations attend peaceful Olympic Games? Remember, the United
States had boycotted the Moscow 1980 Olympics specifically because they
thought it was wrong to attend Olympic Games while the host nation was
fighting a war.
But somehow, the 2002 Olympic Winter Games were held, and they were
Olympic Games to remember. Mitt Romney and the Salt Lake Organizing
Committee (SLOC) overcame all the obstacles. Security was tight, but
not much more intrusive than that which was seen at Sydney. The
American public embraced the Winter Olympics as “our” Games, a chance to
heal somewhat from the assault on our shores. The Europeans, often
critical of American Olympic Games, made a few by now standard
grumblings about too much coverage of American athletes, but much less
so than at Los Angeles in 1984. And there were none of the
organizational problems of the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. The weather
cooperated as well, with plenty of snow before the Games, but clear,
cold weather in the first week, and then almost spring-like conditions
in the second week.
The biggest news of the 2002 Olympic Winter Games was the controversy
surrounding the pairs figure skating event. On the night of the free
skate, the leaders were the Russians, Yelena Berezhnaya and Anton
Sikharulidze, with the Canadian pair, Jamie Salé and David Pelletier,
close behind in second. Whoever won the free skate would win the gold
medal, and to the audience, and many figure skating experts, that
appeared to be the Canadians, who skated cleanly while the Russians had
made several errors. But the judges voted 5-4 in favor of the Russians,
giving them the gold medal. The audience and media howled in protest,
and within 24 hours rumors of vote-fixing were rampant, focusing on the
French skating judge, Marie Reine LeGougne. Eventually, IOC President
Jacques Rogge ordered the International Skating Union (ISU) to hold
emergency meetings to investigate the rumors. Within 3 days, the ISU
and IOC announced that the two pairs would be considered co-champions
and Salé and Pelletier were given gold medals. The controversy reached
even further, calling for a complete overhaul of figure skating judging.
As of mid-2003, it is far from ended.
The two biggest medal winners at Salt Lake City received them in
seeming obscurity, as the American media focused on the figure skating
furor. Ole Einar Bjørndalen of Norway won four gold medals in the four
biathlon events, sweeping the competition. In women’s alpine skiing,
Croatia’s Janica Kostelić won three gold medals and four medals in all.
She became the first Olympic alpine skier to win four medals at one
Games.
The other big story from Salt Lake City was the return of Canadian
prominence in their national sport – ice hockey. Canada’s men had not
won the Olympic gold since 1952, after dominating the sport for the
first 30 years of Olympic competition. The Olympic ice hockey event had
most of the world’s top pros, as NHL players competed, and the level of
competition was supreme, highlighted by two games between the United
States and Russia. In the first, the two powers played to a 2-2 tie,
but in the quarter-finals, the US barely won, 3-2. In the final, the
United States faced Canada, and a similar close match was expected, but
Canada prevailed rather easily, 5-2. Canada’s women added to the story,
also facing the United States in the distaff final. In 1998, the US
had defeated the Canadian women, but at Salt Lake City, the Canadian
women defeated the US 3-2 for the gold medal.
In the end, after two glorious weeks in the Utah Mountains, the
Olympic Scandal and the tragedy of 9/11 seemed distant afterthoughts.
If anything could help Americans forget that tragic September morn, it
was the 19th Olympic Winter Games. Taken from http://www.sports-reference.com/olympics/winter/2002/