Olympic odium

Two years and six months from now, the world will come to Salt Lake City for the 2002 Winter Olympics. Added to the usual array of skiing and skating contests will be several new events — plea bargaining, posting bail, doing time.

The Justice Department brought its first criminal charges related to the Olympic bribery scandal Tuesday when David E. Simmons, a Salt Lake businessman, pleaded guilty to tax fraud. Simmons admitted he created do-nothing job for the son of a powerful South Korean member of the International Olympic Committee, misused more than $200,000 in Salt Lake Olympic Bid Committee funds to cover the ersatz salary, falsified tax returns and helped the young man stay in the United States illegally.

Simmons says its was part of a broader scheme concocted by some of Salt Lake’s leading movers and shakers to get the games, and all the accompanying international attention and acclaim, by lavishing IOC members and their families with gifts, favors, cash, medical care, phony scholarships and bogus jobs. He has agreed to cooperate fully with Justice Department, IRS and Customs Service investigations. He’s going to name lots of names.

And still the world, specifically the world media, will come to Salt Lake City — not to report on athletic prowess, but to remind the home audience that the world’s richest, most powerful country had to cheat. With the full consent of Congress, American citizens will chip in more than $100 million in new roads, tramways and other goodies to perpetuate this hoax; so it’s guilt by association for 260 million.

It’s not often that such monumental embarrassment can be seen coming from so far in the future. The humiliating pratfall is still some 30 months away, and yet this nation makes a beeline for the banana peel.

Certainly, the IOC is every bit as guilty as anyone in Salt Lake City; bribery is, after all, a tango for two. The IOC may even be guiltier. At least the United States has launched a full-scale criminal investigation of the bribe-givers by three of its most relentless agencies. The IOC has merely scolded the bribe-takers; Kim Un-yong, the influential father of the do-nothing jobholder, remains the leading contender to succeed Juan Antonio Samaranch, the do-nothing IOC chairman, when he retires in 2001.

The IOC, in fact, has done something far worse than just try to wish this scandal away. It has insulted its member nations by suggesting that the bribery, targeted primarily at Asian and African delegates, is simply a matter of cultural differences. The Salt Lake organizers have fudged and stalled, counting on winter 2002 to arrive before the indictments. It’s time for the United States Olympic Committee, and Congress, to step in and insist that these games are moved to a venue, in this country or elsewhere, that has hosted them before. What happened in Salt Lake City is wrong — it’s not necessary to invite the world to the scene of the crime.