In mid-July last year, longtime International Olympic Committee member Dick Pound of Canada sounded the alarm about the possibility that Utah might not be awarded the 2034 Winter Games, due to a dispute between the world and the U.S. anti-doping agencies.

Utah could yet lose the Olympics, Pound told the Deseret News Monday.

“There is a whole series of dominos that need to tip over to have something happen, but the mechanism is there and the consequences are there. At some point, it may turn out to be a game of chicken,” Pound said, adding, “there’s probably lots of countries at this point that would love to host the Games in ‘34.”

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Still, the now-honorary member of the Switzerland-based IOC, who helped found the World Anti-Doping Agency known as WADA in 1999, said he’s hopeful “at some point, cooler heads will make the right decisions.” He said Utah’s Olympic organizers should leave that up to U.S. officials and stay focused on following up on the success of the 2002 Winter Games.

Fraser Bullock, president and CEO of the Salt Lake City-Utah Committee for the Games, suggested the Olympics are here to stay.

“We are fully confident Utah will host spectacular Games in 2034,” Bullock said in a statement to the Deseret News when asked about Pound’s comments. “We believe the parties involved will eventually work out these issues to ensure anti-doping efforts can be as strong as possible.”

He made it clear that it’s the IOC, not WADA that would make any final decision about hosting Games.

“To be clear, the ultimate authority of hosting games is vested in the IOC,” Bullock said. “The IOC has been highly supportive of Utah and it’s hosting of the 2034 Games.”

Why the 2034 Winter Games could be taken away from Utah

Six months ago, Pound told Reuter’s news service that the United States could be disqualified as an Olympic host over the U.S. government’s investigation into Chinese swimmers testing positive for a banned substance in 2021 but being allowed to continue to compete by WADA.

Just over a week later, on Utah’s July 24th Pioneer Day holiday, the IOC voted 86-6 to give the state another Olympics and Utah Gov. Spencer Cox signed the host contract with the IOC guaranteeing that Utah taxpayers would cover any shortfalls in what will add up to a $4 billion privately funded Games.

However the contract contains a new termination clause, thanks to a flurry of last-minute negotiations, spelling out that Utah could lose its second Olympics if “the supreme authority of the World Anti Doping Agency in the fight against doping is not fully respected or if the application of the World Anti-Doping Code is hindered or undermined” by the United States.

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Now, the Biden administration has withheld the United States’ $3.6 million 2024 dues payment to WADA. The decision, backed by the U.S. Anti Doping Agency “as the only right choice to protect athletes’ rights, accountability, and fair competition,” is leading to new speculation the country could end up being unable to host international sporting events, including the Olympics.

Pound, a lawyer, described the added host contract language as “a belt and braces (suspenders) thing. It’s kind of like underlining the fact there’s an international system here you’ve got to be compliant with. It sort of puts it in boldface italics the thing you could figure out by reading the original contract. It’s more of a warning to USADA (the U.S. Anti Doping Agency).”

Dick Pound talks outside of the courthouse after testifing in the Olympic Bribery trial Dec. 3, 2003. | TOM SMART

It does pose the threat that Utah’s Games could be taken away, he acknowledged.

The new clause gives “WADA the means to do if it comes to that,” Pound said. But with more than nine years to go before the 2034 Winter Games, he predicted “it’s just going to go away or the whole system will have blown up by then anyway. I would really not be losing much sleep over it.”

The U.S. government’s investigation into WADA’s acceptance of China’s explanation that accidental contamination resulted in nearly two dozen swimmers testing positive for a banned substance can be seen as “an invitation” to exercising the termination clause in Utah host contract, Pound said.

He added, however, that “an investigation is an investigation. I don’t know that there’s anything in that language that prevents an investigation from going on.” The controversial law enabling the U.S. government’s actions, the Rodchenkov Act passed by Congress in 2020, is a “sore point with the rest of the world” but was “validly adopted pursuant to U.S. law and so it’s there.”

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WADA was created “to get everybody on the same page” when it comes to enforcing anti-doping measures, with the Switzerland-based Court of Arbitration for Sport having the final say rather than any government’s legal system, Pound said. That calls into question for him what the U.S. expects to accomplish by investigating what happened with the Chinese swimmers.

“You’ve got to have some sense of reality here in that it’s not going to go anywhere,” he said, warning the “Armageddon” outcome is the United States withdrawing from international anti-doping agreements, leaving its athletes unable to compete and cities unable to host.

“If you’ve dug yourself into a hole, stop digging,” Pound said. “I think that’s what’s happened here.”

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China reported the positive tests during a time when the country was under a COVID-19 lockdown, so WADA relied on an investigator there “that may not have done everything 100% by the book but there’s nothing that points in any other direction than the contamination,” Pound said. He said had it been a case of doping, the test results never have been reported.

“We’d never have heard anything,” Pound said. “But they did what they were supposed to.”

The issue became public in April 2024, when The New York Times reported that “several of the athletes who tested positive — including nearly half of the swimming team that China sent to the Tokyo Games — went on to win medals, including three golds” and continued to compete.

Pound blamed USADA for influencing the U.S. government’s decision to subpoena a top international swimming official just weeks before the 2024 Summer Games in Paris, which apparently triggered the backlash among international sports officials that led to the change in Utah’s host contract.

“I think the U.S. government seems to have consumed the USADA Kool-Aid,” he said. “You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to see that all this attention has suddenly appeared at a U.S. government level at a time when relationships are more strained than usual between the U.S. and China. I think that attention is not unconnected to the current relationships.”

Utah still seen as able to host another ‘great Games’

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The situation the U.S. is in with WADA is “already silly. You don’t want to turn it into a fatal accident,” Pound said. “This is a silly position for USADA to be taking and, in my respectful view, for the U.S. government to be taking. They just need to know the consequences and that within the Olympic movement, this is a big deal.”

Even though those consequences could be serious, Pound, who headed up the IOC’s investigation into the scandal surrounding Salt Lake City’s bid for the 2002 Winter Games, was upbeat about Utah’s next Olympics. He said he expects them to be organized “really well” and U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee officials and others to “figure out how to get out of this present logjam.”

It wasn’t a surprise that the IOC wanted Utah to host again, Pound said.

“They did a great job in 2002 under difficult circumstances post 9/11,” he said, referring to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorists attacks against the United States that affected security and other aspects of the 2002 Winter Games. “There would be no concerns of an inability to organize great Games again.”

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