SALT LAKE CITY — Fifteen years ago this Wednesday, the Winter Olympics arrived in Utah for their remarkable run, but you’ll forgive Dave Johnson for not craning his neck to look back.
“Tremendous time, tremendous event,” Johnson said. “But I find it’s better to look at what’s ahead than what’s behind. If you get on with life, the happier you’ll be.”
Anyone with even a passing knowledge of the history of the Salt Lake 2002 Games will not be surprised at Johnson’s reluctance to venture very far down memory lane. No one gave more and got less from Utah’s Olympics.
From the time he was 27 to the age of 40, first with the bid committee, then with the organizing committee, Johnson was the man who made sure things got done: the perennial top assistant, the co-pilot, the No. 2 guy, the consigliere, everybody’s man Friday.
And then in 1999, when the International Olympic Committee decided to publicly chastise itself for excessive greed in dealing with bid cities, citing Salt Lake City as its case in point, his was the second head to roll, right behind bid leader Tom Welch.
Tom and Dave got all the blame for playing a game not of their choosing. They were the only people associated with Utah’s Olympics to be expelled and publicly flogged. They spent the Olympics in time-out.
The tide didn’t start to shift until the Games were long gone, beginning in 2003 when all charges against Tom and Dave were thrown out of federal court by Judge David Sam, who said he had never seen a case “so devoid of criminal intent.”
With each passing year it’s become more and more clear that Johnson and Welch – and Salt Lake City – were victims, not victimizers.
Time, as it does, has moved on. Marc Hodler, the senior IOC member from Switzerland who took Johnson under his wing as a mentor until he accused him of bribery, died in 2006. Juan Antonio Samaranch, the IOC’s autocratic ruler who, like the highest-ups in Salt Lake, expelled others while taking no blame himself, passed on in 2010.
Some of Dave’s harshest critics have recently gotten their own dose of what it feels like to have the tide turn against you.
Mitt Romney, who ran the Salt Lake Games to great acclaim but had nothing kind to say about his predecessors, didn’t exactly have his best year in 2016. And what of Ken Bullock? Bullock was the SLOC board member who vociferously, and anonymously, questioned the propriety of giving college scholarships to children of IOC voters. It was Bullock who delivered the letter to reporter Chris Vanocur that ignited the investigation in 1998. He was the Salt Lake City bid scandal’s Deep Throat.
Nearly 20 years later, Bullock is under investigation himself about his handling of public funds as president of the Utah League of Cities and Towns. Two weeks ago, under fire reminiscent of 19 years ago, he resigned.
A few years after the Olympics, Dave Johnson was called to be a Mormon bishop. “What you come to learn,” he said, “is that when you’re going through a trial you think this is as bad as it gets. But if you look around, you’ll see that someone you know is going through a tougher time than you are.”
The best thing you can do for people, he opines, “is not judge them. People can do remarkable things when they’re not judged. Give people a chance.”
Six years ago, Dave broke his back skiing at Jackson Hole. He fell off a 40-foot cliff. He spent months in the hospital healing.
He’ll talk about that, and how it didn’t diminish his love of skiing, his “go-to” therapy. He’ll talk about the work he does with Sorenson Video Relay Service, helping deaf people communicate using video links and sign language interpreters. There were 10 employees when he joined the company in 2003. Now there are 8,000. He’ll talk about his wife Kim, the former KTVX news reporter and always his staunchest supporter, who recently realized a lifelong dream of becoming a member of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.
But as for the Olympic Winter Games he once strapped on his back and delivered to the Beehive State?
Maybe some other time.