Olympics-Sydney seeks to limit Games fallout
1999-01-25

Nations Australia City Brisbane Event 2000 Sydney Olympics

SYDNEY - Australian officials vowed on Monday to convince sponsors and potential spectators that Sydney's successful bid for the 2000 Games was clean.

They said they had nothing to fear from further scrutiny of the agreements the Sydney bid team signed in 1993 with 11 African officials, five of them linked with a bribery scandal over Salt Lake City's 2002 Winter Games bid.

Olympics Minister Michael Knight said it was now up to Sydney to help the Olympic movement put scandal behind it.

``Indeed they are looking for us to rehabilitate the image of the Olympics, not just in the minds of Australians but in the minds of the whole world,'' he told reporters.

Games organisers, still facing a A$220 million (US$140 million) shortfall in funding, wrote to sponsors saying a planned visit by senior International Olympic Committee (IOC) officials was aimed purely at demonstrating support for the host city.

``The 'inquiry into Sydney' that you may be hearing or reading about...is an exaggeration of what the IOC intends,'' wrote Sandy Hollway, chief executive of the Games organising committee.

IOC president Juan Antonio Samaranch said in Lausanne that Francois Carrard and Jacques Rogge would visit Sydney in two or three weeks ``to know what exactly is going on and what happened.''

The Australian Olympic Committee took the calculated risk on Friday of releasing hundreds of documents to try to clear itself.

These showed its president John Coates agreed to give sports funding totalling US$1.2 million to 11 African countries just before the 1993 vote on Sydney's bid.

Five of the 11 Olympic officials who signed the agreements have been named in the Salt Lake City investigation: Kenya's Charles Mukora, Mali's Lamine Keita and Congo's Jean-Claude Ganga, all recommended for expulsion from the IOC; Swaziland's David Sibandze, who has resigned; and Louis Guirandou-N'Diaye of the Ivory Coast, who is to face further investigation.

Hollway told Reuters that Sydney's sports funding was not in the same league as the Salt Lake City scandal, where IOC members were accused of taking $600,000 worth of goods and services.

``Those involved...are sure the bid never overstepped the line,'' Hollway said.

Knight said Sydney's team obeyed the rules in place at the time. ``They are not the rules I would have chosen, but they are the rules everybody had to play under,'' he said.

Coates has acknowledged he promised some of the funding to Kenya's Mukora and Uganda's Francis Nyangweso the night before the vote on Sydney's bid. Sydney beat Beijing by 45 votes to 43.

Coates gave reporters a graphic description at the weekend of how he had sensed Sydney's votes were slipping away in 1993 as China stepped up its efforts to win the 2000 Games.

``I was in Mali,'' he said of his 1993 African tour. ``We were met at the airport and driven into the capital and it's explained to me the Chinese government is paying for this new highway...

``I wasn't going to die wondering why we didn't win, like we didn't win with (earlier bids for) Brisbane or Melbourne. We needed to get our fair share of votes out of Africa.''

Initial soundings suggested many ordinary Australians remained uncomfortable with Sydney's bid tactics.

``It's a bit of a joke, really,'' said Matthew, a Sydney insurance broker. ``Look at how the other (bidding) countries behave. But you don't expect it from Australia, because we're always strong on criticising corruption. It has tarnished our reputation.''

Ian Armstrong, a politician who served until recently on the Games organising board, said it would take much work to undo the damage in his rural constituency near Sydney. ``The cynicism is just about total. They think the whole thing stinks of nepotism.''

Knight acknowledged there was work to do.

``The IOC has become somewhat of a spectator sport in itself and we want to see that now moved back to the athletes and to the Games where (the focus) really belongs,'' he said. [Reuters]