Tarnished Rings: The International Olympic Committee and the Salt Lake City Bid Scandal
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the revised edition of this book, originally published in 2011, the authors update their study of the response of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to the bid scandal that erupted in 1998 in the lead-up to the Salt Lake City Olympics in 2002. The original text is largely left intact. The revised material includes a new epilogue and a foreword by Richard Pound, the long-time IOC member from Canada who served as a key source for the original work. The authors, both collectively and individually, have contributed a great deal to scholarship on the IOC and the Olympics, but this revised edition is a bit of a missed opportunity.The original text begins, somewhat unusually, with a biographical chapter on the former president of the IOC, Juan Antonio Samaranch. Although Samaranch had been president of the IOC during the period of the bribery scandal, and his policies to expand commercial sponsorship of the Olympics were central to the actions that became the Salt Lake City bribery scandal, the chapter reads more like a biography than an effort to provide the necessary context to understand the scandal's origins. The subsequent chapters provide a detailed and carefully documented description of the IOC's response to the bid scandal as it emerged in media reports, first from Utah and then from around the world. Efforts by the IOC to respond to the media storm, negotiate with sponsors, and attempt to create structural reforms of the organization and its bidding process are presented in great detail. Yet the origins of the scandal pertaining to the processes of the IOC, its members, and the actions of local bid officials are never clearly laid out and appear only in bits and pieces in these chapters.The epilogue in the revised edition provides the authors the opportunity to update developments in the Olympic bid process and related events since 2011. This new chapter captures one highly salient development in how some city residents have responded to Olympic bid enthusiasts by telling the story of Denver's 2019 initiative, requiring a vote prior to any commitment of public resources to a future Olympics. The authors use the vote in Denver as an illustration of the type of actions that happened in numerous cities worldwide that led the IOC to reconsider its bid process in an apparent attempt to avoid locals forcing the rejection of pending Olympic bids. The authors also make note of a recent Olympic bribery scandal from Rio de Janeiro with similarities to what had previously occurred in Salt Lake, Atlanta, Sydney, and Nagano. Yet, on this front, the authors failed to connect the dots between the Salt Lake City bid scandal and the reoccurrence of bribery in the Olympic bidding process. Unfortunately, this is a missed opportunity to elaborate more fully on the theme of why Olympic bid scandals continue to occur.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".