The Oslo 2022 conundrum

The International Olympic Committee finds itself early this week in Oslo in a conundrum of its own making. On the one hand, it is assuredly the IOC’s responsibility to encourage strong bids to come forward. Thus Oslo 2022. On the other, in politics – even, perhaps especially, sports politics – perceptions can matter as much as reality. Thus, again, Oslo 2022.

A high-powered IOC delegation, led by the president himself, Thomas Bach, visits Norway Monday and Tuesday for a series of meetings revolving primarily – there are other sessions – around preparations for the 2016 Winter Youth Games in Lillehammer.

The timing comes at a fraught juncture for the Oslo 2022 bid, which all involved are keenly aware.

Thus the dilemma:

Is this good for the IOC? For Oslo 2022? Or, owing to layers of complexities, is this trip ultimately not likely to prove helpful for an Oslo 2022 campaign?

To set the stage:

The IOC agreed to these series of meetings in Norway weeks if not months ago.

As the longtime Olympic British journalist David Miller spelled out in the newsletter Sport Intern in a column published Saturday, the two-day itinerary begins Monday with meetings at the Olympic Sports Center and the Norwegian School of Sports Science.

The IOC president is due thereafter to take lunch with Norway’s King Harald at the Royal Castle along with Norway IOC member, Gerhard Heiberg. After that, Miller reports, the IOC delegation – which includes the likes of senior IOC member Ser Miang Ng, who is the new finance commission chair as well as Singapore’s ambassador to Norway for many years, and Angela Ruggiero, chair of the Lillehammer 2016 coordination commission – is due to “exchange ideas” with Norway’s culture minister, Thorhild Wedvey, and Oslo’s mayor, Stian Berger Rosland.

More meetings Monday are due to follow, with three NGOs, with four labor groups and, finally, with members of parliament.

On Tuesday, the scene shifts to Lillehammer itself, Miller reports, for a series of meetings, including with Ottavio Cinquanta (head of the skating federation), Rene Fasel (hockey federation chief) and Gian-Franco Kasper (ski and snowboard federation No. 1).

Also due to be on-hand from the IOC side, according to Miller: the outgoing Olympic Games executive director, Gilbert Felli, and the IOC director general, Christophe de Kepper.

Wow.

Assuming, indeed, that everyone shows up -- that is some serious IOC star power.

A bit more background:

There are five applicant cities in the 2022 bid race: Oslo; Almaty, Kazakhstan; Beijing; Lviv, Ukraine; and Krakow, Poland.

It’s not clear Krakow will make it past a May 25 referendum.

Lviv, of course, is struggling with enormous turbulence in the eastern part of the country. The IOC last week gave Ukraine’s national Olympic committee $300,000 just so its athletes could make it to training camps and meets this year.

The IOC’s policy-making executive board is due in early July to decide which of the five “applicants” will become “candidate” finalists. The IOC will pick the 2022 winner in July, 2015.

Almaty and Beijing would seem to be shoo-ins. They are both, of course, from Asia.

So who is going to make it from Europe?

It’s not exactly a secret that Norwegians love winter sports, indeed the Winter Games. The 1994 Lillehammer Games are often cited as the “best-ever.” Norway leads the overall Winter Games medal count, with 329, and the gold count, too, with 118 (the U.S. is second in both categories, 282 and 96).

The athlete who has won the most Winter Games medals? Biathlon king Ole Einar Bjorndalen of Norway, the new IOC member, with 13. He won two gold medals in Sochi in February -- just a couple weeks after turning 40.

Next? Cross-country ski god Bjorn Daehlie of Norway, with 12, eight gold.

Next, three athletes, one of whom is female Norwegian cross-country ski legend Marit Bjorgen, with 10 Olympic medals, six gold. In Sochi, age 33, she won three gold medals, among them the grueling 30-kilometer event.

Look, any Oslo bid for the Games would understandably be taken very seriously. For obvious reasons.

Two weeks ago, however, one of two Norwegian government parties voted against supporting Oslo’s 2022 bid. At issue now is whether the government will offer the needed financial guarantees.

The imperative – at least for now – is that the IOC would seem to need Oslo for the 2022 race more than Oslo needs the Winter Games. That is the box. And everyone in Olympic circles knows it.

At the same time, while Norwegians may love the Winter Games, it’s pretty clear there are some strong feelings about the bid, and they may be directly tied to the IOC. And those feelings may not be so positive.

A new poll conducted by the research firm Norstat for NRK, the Norwegian Broadcast Corporation, suggests that 60 percent of the Norwegian public is against an Oslo 2022 bid – with only 35 percent in favor.

“No, it is a considerable skepticism, and I think a lot of the information that has been around the IOC has increased that skepticism,” Christian Democratic Party leader Knut Arild Hareide said.

Bach has been in office for about nine months. He has shown an inclination to lead in a style that evokes some of the ways of Juan Antonio Samaranch, the IOC president from 1980-2001, who understood – appropriately – that the IOC is not just a sports institution but one that moves with nation-states and with influential political leaders.

Thus, for instance, the lunch with the Norwegian king as well as the exchanges with, for instance, the culture minister.

Too, Bach is possessed – this is meant to be a compliment – of first-rate confidence. You have to have such confidence to direct the IOC, a global institution with a multibillion-dollar budget. By definition, the position lends itself to high-pressure decision making. Bach took a decision to have this two-day meeting, and it is on.

He is also riding a wave of can-do. Sochi is in the rear-view mirror. The IOC and NBC just struck a $7.75 billion deal through 2032.

Even so, does the IOC president himself need to assess what’s going on in Lillehammer with regard to the 2016 Youth Games, when those Games are nearly two years away -- Feb. 12-21, 2016 -- and, besides, it’s well-known the Youth Games are way down the IOC priority list?

For this purpose, doesn’t he already have a coordination commission? And the chair of that commission is, you know, in Norway for this trip?

If this trip were just about Lillehammer, why meet with the mayor of Oslo?

It is also the case that the Norwegians doubtlessly would have some interesting – perhaps even some constructively provocative – ideas to offer regarding Olympic Agenda 2020, the far-reaching IOC study program the IOC president has launched that is now working its way toward the all-members session in Monaco in December. That would explain the sessions with the NGOs and the other Monday afternoon meetings, for instance.

But are the Norwegians the only ones in the entire world with suggestions so potentially clever that the president has to hear them in person?

And, this, coincidentally enough, before the July meeting at which the 2022 applicants are going to be passed through?

Earlier this year – the deadline was April 15 – the IOC took email submissions from anyone, anywhere who wanted to weigh in relating to Olympic Agenda 2020. Yet the Norwegians get an in-person audience with the IOC president himself?

Over the years, the IOC has gone to great – some would say extraordinary – lengths, particularly in the aftermath of the late 1990s Salt Lake City scandal, to keep its distance from anything that sniffed of even the hint of the appearance of conflict of interest in the bid cycle.

For instance, the IOC would not entertain sponsorship discussions from the Russian concern Gazprom while Sochi was bidding for the 2014 Games. Similarly, when Doha was trying, it would not entertain an approach from Qatar Airways even between bid cycles.

No one has suggested misconduct or wrongdoing in the slightest by either the Norwegians or the IOC. To repeat: nobody has said anybody is doing anything wrong.

And nobody is likely to.

The only people who would be likely to complain would be rival bid teams, in this instance most likely Almaty or Beijing.

How do you think it is going to go over when they read that the IOC president is in Oslo, and before the July executive board pass-through meeting?

If you were them, how would you react?

In private?

Now – what would you do about it?

Exactly.

Isn’t this, too, the dilemma?

Who do you love?

BUENOS AIRES -- As circuses go, this one is most excellent. The question: who will be the next ringleader and where is the next tent to be pitched? Here Friday morning in the corner of the Hilton Hotel lobby one could see Thomas Bach of Germany, the International Olympic Committee vice president running for the top job, talking very, very quietly with Cuba's Reynaldo González López.

A few feet away, in the main hotel lobby, Her Imperial Highness Takamado of Japan held court, meeting first with Italy's Ottavio Cinquanta, president of the international skating federation, then with His Royal Highness Prince Feisal al Hussein of Jordan.

On the big screen set up just a few more feet away, the international wrestling federation's press conference got underway, the changes the IOC had sought to see from the federation dramatically evident on the dais -- here were two female wrestlers along with the new FILA president, Serbia's Nenad Lalovic.

Speaking of royalty -- here was His Imperial Basketball Highness, the former Sacramento King, Vlade Divac, near the front door, now the president of the Serbian national Olympic committee. His luggage had been lost on the way down to Buenos Aires. What was a really tall guy to do in such a situation?

You want a story? Every few feet, every different huddle held a different story, the soundtrack of the entire thing encapsulated in George Thorogood's brilliant tour de force: who do you love?

The scramble for votes was on in full force as the landmark 125th IOC session got underway Friday night.

The 2020 vote goes down Saturday. Tokyo and Madrid seemed the likeliest choices. That said, no one was by any means willing to rule Istanbul out, and its supporters insisted they were very much still in it.

With apologies to Divac and mixed metaphors, wrestling seemed all but a slam-dunk certainty to be reinstated in voting Sunday to the 2020 program.

Los Angeles Lakers alert! Here was Divac, who of course played for L.A. before exile to Charlotte and Sacramento and then a last season in Los Angeles. Was that Pau Gasol? The current Laker big man is part of the Madrid team.

The intrigue underpinning the sports vote: which of the other two, baseball/softball or squash, will run second? Due to a quirk in the calendar, the next IOC session comes just five months from now, in Sochi in February. An entirely plausible scenario floating in the ether had it that an exception could well be carved out -- there being a new president and all -- for the runner-up here to be added to the program come 2020.

Everyone close to the Olympic scene -- repeat, everyone -- acknowledges that the process by which wrestling was first dropped and now appears on the verge of being reinstated needs wholesale review.

If Tokyo wins, imagine how easy it would be to imagine adding baseball/softball to the program.

Or adding squash, no matter which of the cities prevails.

The presidential vote -- which trumps all others, with six candidates -- happens Tuesday. That means Monday, an off day if you will, is likely to be rife with all manner of speculation, rumor, gossip and prevarications. Joining Bach on the ballot: C.K. Wu of Chinese Taipei; Richard Carrión of Puerto Rico; Ser Miang Ng of Singapore; Sergei Bubka of Ukraine; Denis Oswald of Switzerland.

IOC presidential elections have traditionally been subdued affairs. In the 24/7, TMZ-style world in which we now live, with camera crews scrambling for any image, the IOC is determined to keep it subdued.

This is the challenge:

The IOC received 1,846 media requests. A full 600 came from Japan; 300 from Spain; 180 from Turkey.

On Thursday, Bubka, the 1980s and '90s pole-vault champion who is now the head of his nation's Olympic committee and a vice president of the track and field international governing body, was sitting near where Bach would find himself Friday. When Bubka got up, that so stirred the camera crews that they madly began clicking and clacking.

This so unnerved the security and hotel staff that they thereupon drew the shades.

On Friday morning, the shades were still down.

This makes for an apt -- here comes that word again -- metaphor. The IOC votes in secret.

Thus here is the one absolute truth about such IOC elections:

The only thing predictable about an IOC election is that it is entirely unpredictable.

The candidate city votes happen every other year. The presidential vote is a generational thing -- every eight or 12 years, depending.

About the outcomes of either or both, this means -- as was sagely noted in the lobby -- the following:

Some people are guessing. Some pretend to know. Some assume. Some hope. No one knows.

A great many people are only too happy to lie, or maybe at least stretch the truth, or not just do what their kindergarten teacher would find wholesome.

Why do they act this way?

That's easy.

Because they can.

A skeptic would say the system encourages the members to be unaccountable.

Perhaps.

In truth, one figures out fairly consistently who votes for what -- though, to be fair, not with 100 percent accuracy. The IOC is a club, and clubs have certain discretions. What keeps the members accountable is that -- this is for real -- they are accountable to each other. Because there are votes for bid cities every two years, and votes for the policy-making executive board every year, there are favors and counter-favors and so on. One screws someone else at one's peril because, sooner or later, it comes back to haunt you.

The 2018 vote, won by Pyeongchang, was a runaway, which pretty much everyone -- except for a few affiliated with runner-up Munich -- knew going in.

The 2016 vote, won by Rio de Janeiro, was also a runaway, which Rio knew, even if others did not.

This 2020 vote does not appear to have a clear favorite. Thus the tension Friday in the Hilton lobby was very, very real, and theories fast and furious.

Right now there are, including the outgoing president Jacques Rogge, 103 IOC members. He does not vote. That means the vote count is a maximum 102. It likely will prove less because some members won't show up  -- because of illness or duties of business or state -- and because of IOC rules that prevent a member from Country X for voting from a candidate from the same nation. It is widely assumed that the winning vote total here -- majority plus one -- is going to be 48 or 49.

Because the balloting is secret, the members cheerfully tell each other whatever. In tallying up support, the denominator of 100 votes can quickly seem more like 200, indeed -- laughably -- more like 300.

"I support you," in IOC jargon, it must be understood, does not mean, "I'm going to vote for you."

"You have my vote," does not mean "in a round you want me to." Or "any particular round."

Indeed, in 2009, in balloting for the 2016 Summer Games site, the U.S. Olympic Committee felt sure before voting commenced that it had more than 30 rock-solid votes in the first round for Chicago. To the USOC's surprise, Chicago was booted in the first round with but 18 votes.

This is why, as one of the presidential contenders, surveying the scene Friday mid-afternoon, said, "Who the heck knows?" And he didn't say "heck."

This was a little bit after Kuwait's Sheikh Ahmad al-Fahad al-Sabah, the head of the Assn. of National Olympic Committees, walked in the lobby and the center of gravity seemed to shift, all eyes turning the sheik's direction. As has been speculated many times since he has become one of the Olympic world's most influential figures, with no definitive answer: how many votes does his excellency truly "control"? Any? Many?

As for the sheikh and 2020:

Does he support Tokyo? After all, he is also the longtime head of the Olympic Council of Asia. Within Olympic circles, it is hardly a secret that Tsunekazu Takeda, Japan's IOC member and the leader of the Tokyo 2020 bid, has been known to ride with the sheikh to important meetings on the sheikh's private plane.

Does he back Madrid? He and Alejandro Blanco, the head of the Spanish Olympic Committee, are known to be close through an association with Marius Vizer, president of the International Judo Federation and, as well, the recently elected head of SportAccord, the umbrella organization for the international sports federations.

Or might the sheikh prefer Istanbul? An Istanbul win probably knocks Doha, Qatar, out of the running for the Summer Games for many years. Given the intricacies of politics in the Middle East, might the sheikh find that a play worth exploring?

The sheikh is believed to be a supporter of Bach's presidential candidacy. Ultimately -- will he be?

The sheikh likes, most of all, winning.

Actually, two more things can be said for certain about an IOC election:

One, Fidel Castro's son, Antonio, is here, lobbying for the baseball/softball project. His translator speaks English so beautifully that Shakespeare himself might want to give a listen.

Two, Sheikh Ahmad controls his own vote.

Pyeongchang 2018's conductor: Yang Ho Cho

PYEONGCHANG, South Korea -- Nine years ago, Yang Ho Cho, who is the chairman and chief executive officer of Korean Air but who is really a regular guy, got five of his buddies together and they did one of those bucket-list things. They drove across the United States, Los Angeles to New York. Yang Ho Cho is not, after an extraordinary career in business, lacking for means. He could have arranged the trip so that he and the crew stayed at the most upscale of hotels and ate only the finest meals. Not the point. They wanted to feel the United States, to have a genuine experience, to talk along the way with real Americans.

They did have two big cars, a Lincoln and a Lexus, for all six guys and their bags. But for most of the trip they stayed at $30 per night Best Western motels. They ate with near-religious fervor at McDonald's for breakfast; at Kentucky Fried Chicken, Subway or (again) McDonald's for lunch; and, always, at a Chinese joint for dinner.

"No matter how small the town was," he said, laughing, remembering the adventure, "there was always a Chinese restaurant."

This third straight Korean bid for the Winter Olympic Games brings with it an almost-entirely new set of characters. Perhaps no one embodies that fact more than Yang Ho Cho, and that holds significant consequence should the International Olympic Committee chose Pyeongchang in its July 6 vote for 2018. Munich and Annecy, France, are also in the race.

The IOC's 2018 Evaluation Commission, after visiting Annecy last week, turned this week to Pyeongchang. It travels March 1-4 to Munich.

With the exception of a very few notable personalities, among them the former provincial governor here, Kim Jun Sun, the prior two Korean bids -- both unsuccessful, for the 2010 and 2014 Winter Games -- left a remarkably unremarkable impression. The image that lingers: packs of men, almost all men, dressed alike in dark suits, smoking a lot of cigarettes, speaking the Korean language almost exclusively, obviously giving off the impression of competence in their spheres but just as obviously not resolving to the IOC's satisfaction one of the most elemental questions any bid campaign presents:

Do I want to do business with these people?

In any enterprise, the wanting-to-do-business factor depends on the getting-to-know-you factor -- and all the more so in the Olympic sphere, where bids cost tens of millions of dollars and Games run to billions. The IOC has a franchise not only to extend but to protect.

The IOC thus moves with prudence and common sense.

So does Yang Ho Cho.

This is a man who oversaw nothing less than a thorough transformation of his airline's corporate culture. He took over after a series of accidents in the 1990s; he instituted changes that turned Korean Air into one of the world's safest carriers.

This is a man who moves easily now at the highest levels of Korean and western business, government and politics.

At the same time, this is a man who moves comfortably in any environment -- having seen pretty much everything along the way, including the Vietnam War, the Korean DMZ, gritty downtown Los Angeles and a lot of McDonald's menu boards.

He is a genuine human being. He is accessible and real. "I want not just to shake the hands of the IOC members," he said here Thursday night, one of a series of conversations in various locales around the world over the past several months. "Instead, I want them to say, 'This is a guy I can work with for the next eight years.' This is what we want to show."

Real people, even important businessmen, sometimes make mistakes -- that's life. Yang Ho Cho accepts responsibility and asks to move on. Last year, Korean Air signed a sponsorship deal with the International Skating Union. The ISU's president, Ottavio Cinquanta, is a ranking IOC personality. The IOC thereupon issued a warning to the Pyeongchang bid committee, and the airline agreed to postpone its sponsorship of the skating federation until after the July 6 vote.

"We had good intentions," Yang Ho Cho said. "There wasn't any hanky-panky. I had to learn.

"... If you're talking about transport -- I'm an expert. Sports -- I'm learning."

This Korean 2018 crew is -- like Yang Ho Cho -- entirely, indeed profoundly, different. They move, many of them, effortlessly in English -- like communications director Theresa Rah.

They invite you to sit with them in the hotel bars. If that doesn't sound like such a big deal -- it's a huge change from the prior two bid cycles.

Early on, it was decided that the 2018 strategy would be to reach out, early, to non-Koreans who could help -- among them, the English communications and strategy advisor Mike Lee, who played a key role in Rio de Janeiro's winning 2016 Games bid, as well as the American counterpart Terrence Burns, who helped Sochi win for 2014.

Most intriguingly, Yang Ho Cho is not the emotional center of the campaign. Nor is he aiming to be. In that regard, the German and Korean campaigns make for a vivid contrast. Munich puts forward a star: Katarina Witt, a two-time Olympic figure skating champion. Yang Ho Cho is more orchestra conductor than star.

It is perhaps illuminating that though Yang Ho Cho of course speaks English -- he went to high school in the United States -- he had no trouble a few months back acknowledging a succession of 2018 advisers who suggested that with a little bit of practice he could sound just that much better.

How many chief executives are truly willing to accept such coaching?

"Why not?" he said Thursday. "I can learn from anyone who can teach me."

If you know Yang Ho Cho's back story, though, that's hardly surprising.

Korean Air is the family business. So he didn't exactly grow up in poverty.

But he didn't exactly wallow in privilege.

Yang Ho Cho's passions have always been travel and photography. After high school, he went to go see the sights in Europe. His father sent him to the continent with $3,000.

"I spent only $2,000. I gave him back $1,000. After that," he said, "my father never questioned my spending."

Next:  boot camp in the Korean Army. When that was finished, he was sent to the DMZ:  "We had no electricity. We had to use kerosene lamps just to see. For me, it was just too much of a shock."

Anything, he reasoned, had to be better.

So he volunteered to go to Vietnam.

Again -- he volunteered to go to a war zone. "At least in Vietnam," he said, "they had electricity."

He spent 11 months there. "After that -- it was back to the DMZ." And after that, he had learned something about himself: "If I can live at the DMZ, I can do anything."

When his military service ended, he went to college in Korea, then moved to Los Angeles, to learn the family business in earnest.

He and his wife lived downtown. He was getting paid $800 per month. Their rent was $300. It was a big treat to take the kids out for French fries.

While in Los Angeles, he earned a master's degree at USC -- where he now serves on the board of trustees.

He still has the California driver's license he got all those years ago. It came in handy on that road trip to New York.

He and his crew saw the national parks in Utah; then took in Santa Fe, New Mexico; went back up to Oklahoma; headed down to New Orleans; east to Savannah, Georgia; then made their way up through Washington, D.C., to New York.

Oh, they did make one other important stop along the way. They went to Memphis, and for one very important reason.

That's where you can find Graceland and, as Yang Ho Cho said with a laugh, "I like Elvis."