Former Salt Lake Olympic leader Tom Welch said Monday he isn't surprised by a new report on the excesses of Nagano's bid against the Utah capital for the 1998 Winter Games.
"The Nagano report only validates that which was common knowledge about the bid process," Welch said.
Welch and his No. 2 at the bid committee, Dave Johnson, faced federal fraud, conspiracy and racketeering charges in connection with Salt Lake City's successful bid for the 2002 Winter Games before the case was thrown out mid-trial by a judge who acquitted both men of all charges and called the case "misplaced prosecution."
Welch and Johnson were accused of lavishing more than $1 million in cash, gifts, medical treatment, college scholarships and other inducements on International Olympic Committee members.
Nagano bidders, long suspected of providing IOC members with everything from geishas to ceremonial swords to expensive electronics, burned their records after being awarded the 1998 Winter Games in 1991.
However, the new report order by the Nagano regional government shows they spent $4.4 million just to entertain the IOC, an average of about $46,500 per member. They were also given an average of about $5,700 each in gifts — when the official limit was $200.
"We were never in a position as a bid that we were able to do the entertainment or give the gifts or spend the dollars that the Naganos of the world were able to do," Welch said. "We were never able to compete on that type of level."
Nagano beat Salt Lake City in the race for the 1998 Games in a close IOC vote, a lesson that Welch and other members of the bid team took to heart. "It wasn't about who was the best city. It never was," Welch said. "It was excess."
But until the Salt Lake scandal surfaced seven years ago — thanks largely to meticulous record-keeping — no one questioned the way IOC votes were courted. "The process was you had (90-plus) 'kings' out and you had to try to build relationships," Welch said.
Now a business consultant with a home in Park City, Welch said he had no hard feelings about the new Nagano report finally confirming what was described in its pages as an "illegitimate and excessive level of hospitality" in another bid city so many years later.
"Bidding cities were the bottom of the food chain that supports the Olympic movement," he said. "It was the process. If you were going to be successful, you had to learn what that process was. . . . We didn't believe we were doing anything wrong."
A spokeswoman for the Switzerland-based IOC said Monday she learned of the Nagano report through a story in the Deseret Morning News. "Let us find out what the report says and who compiled it," the spokeswoman, Giselle Davies, said, declining further comment.
The report, dated Nov. 22, 2005, was sought by Nagano Gov. Yasuo Tanaka. Tanaka was elected after the Olympics to head the prefecture, a region similar to a state, on a platform that included a pledge to further investigate Nagano's bid.
Ed Hula, the editor of an electronically published newsletter about the Olympics, "Around the Rings," said he doubted the IOC would pursue an investigation into the Nagano report findings. An IOC investigation into the Salt Lake scandal led to the ouster of several members.
"I think the IOC probably wants to consider any questions about Nagano over and done with, given the length of time that's elapsed," Hula said. Plus, he said, the report contains no names of IOC members or any specifics about what they received.
Still, Hula said, the report "does certainly go to the argument that those were the rules of the game at the time. Nagano and Salt Lake weren't the only ones trying to spend as much as they could. . . . It reveals the extent to which some bids would go."
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