SYDNEY, Australia -- Kevan Gosper denies International Olympic Committee President Juan Antonio Samaranch sent him to sack Phil Coles when the two Australians met Monday.
Australian media speculated that Gosper, an IOC vice president, carried a message from Samaranch into the meeting with Coles, the target of sustained calls to resign from the board of the 2000 Sydney Olympics organizing board SOCOG.Gosper said he briefed Coles on the investigations into Coles' controversial dealings as an IOC member.
"It would be quite unusual for me to come out here, an investigation having been set up, to tell Phil Coles what he should do and what he shouldn't do," Gosper told reporters after the meeting.
"I certainly didn't arrive in Sydney with a message from Juan Antonio Samaranch advising Phil Coles to resign from either SOCOG or the IOC."
Gosper said he rejected Coles' view that there was a conspiracy working against him and said Coles may be guilty of "the possibility of a continuous pattern of misjudgment."
Coles has stepped aside from SOCOG pending the IOC investigations but says he expects to be cleared and to return to the board.
Coles, speaking in a pay television interview recorded before Monday's meeting but aired after it, said he was upset with the "hurtful vilification of me and those around me.
"You lay awake at night thinking what have I done to deserve this. All I wanted to do was bring the Games back to Australia. We finally got the Games here, and I sometimes wonder if it was all worth it."
The IOC announced last week it had deferred until June a decision on an investigation into whether Coles accepted expensive jewelry from a businessman associated with Athens' failed 1996 bid.
The IOC earlier had reprimanded Coles for accepting excessive hospitality and travel from the successful 2002 Salt Lake City bid team and warned him any further indiscretion would result in expulsion.
-- In other developments, an Atlanta newspaper reported that then President George Bush sent personal letters to each IOC member just before the final IOC vote in 1990 that sent the 1996 Games to Atlanta, according to records released by bid organizers.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported Sunday the documents were in nine boxes of Olympic records released by the Georgia Amateur Athletics Foundation. A bid team memo said Bush's message was "very effective."
Bush also videotaped a two-minute message that Atlanta organizers presented to the International Olympic Committee during its final bid presentation in September 1990 in Tokyo.
Such conduct by a head of state is not unusual in the bid process, and no wrongdoing has been linked to Bush's actions.
The records are being examined to see if they contain evidence of corruption such as that uncovered in Salt Lake City's successful bid for the 2002 Winter Games.