Every four years, billions of people across the globe tune into the Summer Olympics. The 2024 Games are set to be a spectacle, descending on Paris for the first time in 100 years.
But sometimes, scoring the biggest sporting event on the planet is rife with corruption. And the scandals don’t stop after the winning bid is announced.
Olympic pride and bragging rights
In the United States, polls show the number of people who are extremely proud to be an American is at record lows. But through the Olympics, that sentiment changes. During the Tokyo Games in 2021, 63% of Americans said they had a “very positive” reaction to seeing the American flag.
The reach goes beyond the traditional sports fan. Yes, the Olympics features the world championships in 300 different events, but moments are what make the games memorable.
The legends of athletes like Usain Bolt, Michael Phelps and Simone Biles are born during those two weeks and those legends will live on.
The Olympics also puts the spotlight on the host city and country. The world’s media focuses its cameras on the culture and history of nations that viewers may never have the opportunity to visit.
It’s the host city’s time to shine on a global stage. Paris is seizing that chance with a tradition-breaking opening ceremony. Instead of the pomp and circumstance in a world-class arena, Paris is opting for a parade of nations along the city’s famed Seine River.
The Olympics is a biennial wonder that attracts millions of in-person spectators and many more through broadcast. But behind the scenes, this event can be rife with bribes and other shady deals.
Controversy and scandal have been part of the Olympics since the ancient Olympic Games in 776 B.C.
History of Olympic corruption
To understand Olympic corruption, you have to go back to its inception. Despite the tradition of swearing an oath to Zeus to play fair, the competition was founded on cheating.
As Greek mythology goes, Pelops won his bride’s hand by sabotaging the chariot of her father King Oenomaus before a race. The king died in the race and Pelops founded the Games to commemorate his victory.
The remnants of the ancient Games’ history with cheating are still visible today in Olympia, Greece. Pedestals that once supported bronze statues of Zeus can be found on the pathway to the entrance of the ancient stadium.
The Zanes, as they were called, were paid for by fines imposed on cheating Olympic athletes. The pedestals had the names of the cheaters inscribed, shaming them and warning other athletes to play fair. But though centuries have passed, some still need to be warned.
Athletes cheating with performance-enhancing drugs, also known as doping, is a very real issue in the Olympics. But that specific type of controversy deserves its own deep dive.
Bid rigging
Olympic corruption can start decades before the cauldron is lit at the opening ceremony. It’s called bid rigging and the Olympic version was a poorly kept secret before Salt Lake City’s scandal busted it wide open.
Salt Lake City tried and failed to secure the Olympics four times before winning the 2002 Winter Games. After the city’s fourth loss, to Nagano, Japan, for the 1998 Winter Games, the Salt Lake organizing committee changed its strategy. Tired of losing, officials took a page from Nagano’s book after learning Japanese officials spent as much as $14 million, or $32 million in today’s dollars, to land the Games.
Nagano, at the time a little-known Japanese city, reportedly gave International Olympic Committee (IOC) officials the five-star treatment during the bidding process. Nagano’s bid committee hosted members in fancy hotels in Tokyo, Nagano and Kyoto. They also entertained them with geishas and helicopter rides. To cover up any corruption, they burned 10 large boxes of documents to incinerate the paper trail.
When there’s money, there’s corruption.
Charlie Battle, Olympic bid consultant
“The Salt Lake City people realize that you had to keep a file on each IOC voting member,” Olympic historian David Wallechinsky told Straight Arrow News. “And then, you do whatever you could to get their vote.”
Wallechinsky fell in love with the Olympics as a kid when his father took him to the 1960 Rome Games. He became so intrigued with the event that he wrote “The Complete Book of the Olympics” and is one of the founding members of the International Society of Olympic Historians.
Wallechinsky said the way Salt Lake City secured the Games was some of the most overt bid rigging in history.
“There was an IOC member from Togo,” he said. “Togo doesn’t compete in the Winter Olympics. That didn’t matter, because the guy still voted. So they kept flying him out to Salt Lake City. Well, that wasn’t good enough, so they had to include a stopover in Paris so his wife could go shopping on the bid committee’s pocketbook. The whole thing was so ridiculous. But they got the Games and that was all they cared about.”
After investigators found out about the Salt Lake City scheme, the IOC expelled 10 members. The U.S. Department of Justice also brought bribery and fraud charges against the president and vice president of the Salt Lake City bid committee. Both officials resigned years before the games came to town. Those charges were dropped after the successful 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City.
The crackdown didn’t end allegations of bid rigging. In 2021, years after the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Games, Brazilian Olympic Committee President Carlos Arthur Nuzman was sentenced to 30 years in jail for crimes connected to buying votes to secure the Olympics. However, Nuzman is still free after a Brazilian federal court ruled the original judge didn’t have the legal competence to rule in the case.
How to get the Olympics
While the honor of hosting an Olympics has driven some to risk jail time, scoring the global event isn’t always a corrupt process.
“Growing up as a child, I loved to watch the Olympics,” said Charlie Battle, an instrumental member of the team that brought the Olympics to Atlanta in 1996. “I believed in it. I bought into the whole [idea of] bringing the world together through sport.”
Before Battle got involved with Atlanta’s Olympic bid, he was a municipal finance attorney in the city. He said when they started the bidding process, Atlanta was a very different city than it is today.
“We were just in the ’80s, beginning to get international plane service,” he recalled. “But we call ourselves the world’s next great city.”
“Truth be known, when we started this, people wondered if we were going to have blackjack because they got us confused with Atlantic City, New Jersey,” he added.
Before U.S. city organizers can pitch to the IOC, they need to win over the national committee. After Atlanta beat out San Francisco, Nashville and Minneapolis for the U.S. bid, the committee needed to raise money to challenge other nations for the right to host.
“The government doesn’t support the Olympics in this country,” Battle said. “There are a lot of constitutional provisions that prevent cities and counties from pledging money.”
“We couldn’t start building our stadium until we had a TV contract in hand,” Battle continued. “That was a bankable contract. And then when we won the U.S. designation, we were able to get some corporate support.”
Atlanta-based beverage behemoth Coca-Cola put up, at least, tens of millions of dollars to bring the games to their home turf, though they’d been a major Olympic sponsor for years. For the most part, the Atlanta Games was a privately-funded affair.
But selling sponsorships was just a part of the process. Battle said they also had to sell the IOC on Atlanta’s event-hosting prowess.
“There were 88 international members,” he explained. “We had to meet them, try to get them to come to Atlanta, go to see them. And basically, I ended up just on the road for the next couple of years.”
There wasn’t any bribery involved in bringing the Olympics to Atlanta. As far as Battle was concerned, all they needed was southern charm.
“That’s why I went on the road so much to go visit people, visit them in their homes, get to know their families, try to get them to come to Atlanta, show them that we’ve got the people they can trust,” he said. “It’s a marketing deal in the end, but from our perspective, making friends was the key.”
In 1990, the IOC officially awarded the games to Atlanta. At the time, the Atlantic Journal wrote, “Battle’s personal skills at lobbying IOC members were a key to Atlanta’s win.”
Six years later, Atlanta was celebrating a successful start of the games when a bomb detonated at Atlanta’s Centennial Olympic Park, killing one woman and injuring more than 100 others.
Security guard Richard Jewell was initially hailed as a hero for discovering the suspicious backpack and moving Olympic fans out of harm’s way, limiting the bomb’s destruction.
Within days, Jewell was wrongfully targeted as the prime suspect. It took years to catch the real bomber, Eric Rudolph, whom police arrested in 2003. Clint Eastwood directed a film focused on Jewell’s part of the story in the 2019 film, “Richard Jewell.”
Outside the tragedy and some problems with heat and traffic, the ’96 Olympics were mostly seen as a success. Despite that success, in 2013, when the U.S. Olympic Committee asked cities to put names in the ring for the 2024 Games, former Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young, who co-led the ’96 bid, said they shouldn’t make another push.
“I don’t feel like going through it again, and I don’t imagine anyone from 1996 will,” Young told Atlanta Magazine at the time. “It’s a 10-year commitment.”
Still, Young said hosting the Olympics is good for any city, and Battle agreed that Atlanta benefited greatly from the Games.
“There are always people who say, ‘Well, we shouldn’t spend this money, we ought to spend it on something else,’ and there’s no doubt about that,” Young said. “We should, but that isn’t the way the world works. We wouldn’t have had this money. They weren’t going to raise to revitalize [the city or] something else or help build housing, or this, that and the other.”
The winning bid had a lasting effect on the city, specifically on Atlanta’s downtown.
“We built a downtown park in Atlanta called Centennial Olympic Park, which was on nobody’s radar at the time we started, but ended up being, really, the best legacy of our games,” Battle said.
In the three decades that followed the Atlanta Games, the city’s population doubled. Hosting the Olympics helped solidify Atlanta as a premier sporting event destination. Since 1996, it has hosted two Super Bowls, multiple NCAA Final Fours and the College Football National Championship.
The pitfalls of hosting
Not every Olympic host city secures a symbolic gold medal. One of the biggest pitfalls is the budget, which tends to be more aspirational than pegged in reality.
From 1960 to 2016, the Summer Games went over budget by an average of 213%, according to an analysis from the University of Oxford. The 2008 Beijing Olympics only went over budget by 2%, but the city had a significantly higher budget than the average host city. Meanwhile, the 1976 Montreal Games exceeded its budget by 720%.
For the Winter Olympics, the average cost overrun is 142%. The 1980 Lake Placid games went 324% over budget.
Overages can wreck a hosting legacy. There’s no place more “Olympic” than Greece, but the country was in poor shape to handle its most recent hosting duties.
“The only reason Greece was able to put on the Games was the EU, but they borrowed too much money and went into financial [trouble] because they built all kinds of monuments that they didn’t need,” said Battle, who continued consulting on bids following the success of the Atlanta Games.
While some cities like Atlanta reap the benefits of hosting the Olympics, abandoned state-of-the-art venues often become an eyesore in others.
“They build way too much stuff and they build stuff they don’t need and they waste a lot of money,” Battle said.
Atlanta transformed its Olympic track-and-field stadium into Turner Field shortly after the Olympics. The facility became the home of the MLB’s Atlanta Braves for two decades.
Because issues like budget and abandoned facilities continue to come up with each event, the IOC is taking steps to stop it from being a regular part of future Olympic stories.
“What the IOC has done is they’ve introduced a system where you have to — in advance, before you’re even allowed to bid — meet a certain criteria of where you’re going to get the money; what are the venues that are going to be built; the environmental aspects; sustainability,” Wallechinsky told SAN.
Post-bid corruption
For controversy-laden Olympics, the opportunity for bribery doesn’t stop after a city has been named as the host.
The 2014 Games in Sochi, Russia, cost an estimated $55 billion. With all of that money to spend, contracts to support hosting the Games were highly coveted.
“When there’s money, there’s corruption,” Battle said.
A major Sochi beneficiary was Arkady Rotenberg, who Bloomberg described as “the boyhood friend and former judo partner of black-belt President Vladimir Putin.” The publication counted at least 21 contracts awarded to Rotenberg worth more than $7 billion, which totals more than some entire Olympic budgets.
The contracts ranged from a share of the transportation system linking Sochi to ski resorts to a highway along the Black Sea and a $387 million media center.
After the Sochi Games, Putin also quietly handed out medals to his billionaire friends who invested in the Games.
There is a lot of money involved in putting on the Olympics. Even as the IOC tries to clean up the process, the last Summer Olympics in Tokyo faced scandal.
“There were bribes: TV rights bribes, all sorts of bribes, which sponsor would get the rights to this or that,” Wallechinsky said of the Tokyo bribery scandal.
Advertising giant Dentsu, five other companies and seven individuals are charged with colluding in assigning contracts for the Tokyo Games. Organizers also faced allegations that they may have secured the Games in a less-than-honest fashion. But as the world prepares for the next summer spectacle, the most recent is still playing out in Japanese courts.
Paris is in the thick of preparing to host the games. But in October of last year, officials raided the office of the Paris Olympic Committee. A source told Reuters at the time that the raid was part of an investigation into alleged favoritism for some awarded contracts.
IOC’s rule change
While the IOC cleaned house over bid rigging corruption, it has less control over what happens after awarding the games. Paris will be the first Olympics under the IOC’s new anti-corruption clause.
“What we’ve seen now is a real change,” Wallechinsky said. “The IOC under Thomas Bach, who’s the president of the IOC, realized this is not good. We can’t have another Sochi situation, we can’t have another Rio situation.
“So when they got really good bids for the 2024 Summer Olympics from both Paris and Los Angeles, they went, ‘Wait a minute, let’s not pit these people against each other. Let’s give them each an Olympics.’”
Instead of a long, drawn-out bidding process for the Summer and Winter Olympics, which has historically produced corruption, two IOC panels are permanently open to talks with any city that could host the games. These panels can also approach prospective cities they think might be the right fit to host the Olympics.
The idea of eliminating the bidding process altogether and using a handful of rotating sites has come up, but it didn’t gain much traction. Still, cities that have hosted successful games could get multiple chances.
“Salt Lake City is going to get the Winter Olympics again,” Wallechinsky said. “But in a more honest way.”
Salt Lake’s path to 2002 might have been burned by bribery and budget overages, but the city turned it around when Mitt Romney took the reins. The 2002 Winter Games turned a profit when all was said and done and turned Romney into a household name. After snubbing him in 1994, Massachusetts voters elected him to be their governor in 2002 and the rest is history.
Though the Salt Lake City scandal forever tarnished IOC’s history, it’s now the front-runner for the 2034 Winter Games.
Paris scrutiny
Aside from the ongoing investigation into the Paris Organizing Committee, Wallechinsky — who splits his time between the south of France and the U.S. — said there are other hosting concerns.
“There have been some terrible terrorist attacks in France,” he said. “They’ve come up with this opening ceremony, which is going to be in public with hundreds of thousands of people.”
It’s an Olympic first: An opening ceremony outside of a stadium. The Paris pomp and circumstance will take place along the Seine. While it will make for an amazing spectacle, security is top of mind.
“The challenge that the French are facing is not just protecting the Olympic venues, but the entire city and to a certain extent the rest of the country as well, all at the same time,” Wallechinsky said.
But still, he said there isn’t a lot a city can do to avoid scrutiny.
“I always told people from host cities, ‘Everybody’s going to criticize you before the Games,’” Wallechinsky said. “Because as members of the media, if we say, ‘Oh, this is going really well,’ nobody’s going to follow that. They don’t want to read that. It’s not click-friendly.
“And so we’re always looking for something that’s wrong. That’s going to be the story. And then when the competition starts, everybody forgets about that unless it’s really serious.”
While the bombing at Atlanta’s Centennial Park shook the city, Americans still remember the Magnificent Seven taking home gold, or Michael Johnson breaking the 200-meter world record that stood until Usain Bolt burst onto the scene. And that’s why people like Charlie Battle still believe in the Games, despite its flaws.
“I still believe that good athletic competition and good athletic stories can be inspirational to young people,” Battle shared.
The 2024 Paris Summer Olympic Games kicks off with the opening ceremony on July 26 and runs through Aug. 11.
