GamesBids.com presents the fifth annual Top Ten list of Olympic Bid Stories for 2012. These stories impacted the course of Olympic bids, or the Olympic bid process, and formed interesting plotlines for the year. We’ll run them down from 10th to 1st during the holiday season.
Top Olympic Bid Stories of 2012: #10 Old Documents Hint at Nagano Olympic Bid Vote-Buying
This story never made many headlines, and wasn’t even reported by GamesBids.com – but is still noteworthy on our Olympic bid top-ten list for 2012 because it gives us a peak at the secretive bidding landscape from two decades ago.
In September, renowned sport business critic Andrew Jennings revealed a “private and confidential” letter sent in 1991 from the President of the Olympic Council of Ireland Pat Hickey (now an International Olympic Committee member since 1995) to the Chair of the 1998 Salt Lake City Bid Committee Tom Welch. In it, Hickey claims that “certain IOC members have entered in to a contract with Nagano to vote for them for a fee of $100,000.”
Nagano, Japan went on to win the bid and host the 1998 Olympic Winter Games, edging Salt Lake City 46 to 42 in the fifth round of voting. While the written claim is unsubstantiated and Pat Hickey hasn’t been accused of any wrongdoing in the incident, it does paint a compelling picture of the bidding politics that existed prior to the Salt Lake City 2002 vote-buying scandal that turned the IOC upside-down and resulted in the creation of the IOC Ethics Commission in 1999.
