-Caveat Lector- >From Int'l Herald Tribune Paris, Thursday, January 21, 1999 Sifting Olympic Ashes Nagano in Uproar Over Lavish Perks And Destroyed Records of 1998 Bid ------------------------------------------------------------------------ By Mary Jordan and Kevin Sullivan Washington Post Service ------------------------------------------------------------------------ NAGANO, Japan - Around March 1992, 10 large boxes of documents cluttering up Junichi Yamaguchi's office in City Hall were hauled away to a locked warehouse. Then the trashmen drove them to the city incinerator, tossed them in the fire and burned the only known accounting of how this little city in the Japanese Alps spent more than $14 million to land the 1998 Winter Olympics. Yamaguchi, a key official in Nagano's Olympic bidding committee, said the boxes contained records showing how Nagano paid first-class airfare for 62 International Olympic Committee members and many of their companions to visit Japan, how they put them up in fine hotels in Tokyo, Nagano and Kyoto, wined and dined them, entertained them with geishas, flew them around in helicopters. They even showed how a couple of them billed Nagano for thousands of dollars for expensive Tokyo hotel suites where they stored their luggage as they toured other parts of the country. Yamaguchi, in an interview Wednesday, said Japanese officials had to treat the visiting IOC members well if they had any hope of landing the Olympics. ''These people were the ones in position to write 'Nagano' at election time,'' Yamaguchi said. Noting that IOC members had asked Nagano officials not to publicize their spending, Yamaguchi said the burning of the books was a ''courtesy'' to them. He said Nagano officials worried that if the documents were made public, ''It could cause unpleasantness to them. We didn't want that.'' As the probe into the Salt Lake City Olympics scandal widens, a new spotlight is being focused on the vast sums spent to woo the IOC before the 1998 Games in Nagano, which beat out Salt Lake City when the selection was announced in September 1991. So far, there have been no allegations in Nagano of the kinds of scholarships, free medical care, dubious real estate deals and sexual favors that have surfaced in Salt Lake City. But officials here acknowledge that they spent millions to entertain the IOC, which controlled whether this town got billions of dollars worth of major public works projects - including a new bullet train to Tokyo - as a result of landing the Winter Games. In hindsight, Nagano's mayor, Tasuku Tsukada, a member of the Nagano bidding committee, said Wednesday that it was clear major reform of the selection process was needed. ''The burden is too much'' for small cities like Nagano to pay, he said. ''Some moderation, some balance'' must return to the Olympics. Tsukada joined a growing chorus of officials around the world who say Olympic host cities should be selected by a small subcommittee of the IOC, rather than the entire IOC membership. He said that in future the IOC, not the host cities, should be responsible for paying travel expenses, and that an independent watchdog should enforce an ethical code on Olympic practices. ''At the time, we did what we had to do. We did what was necessary. But we had many difficulties,'' Tsukada said. Officials here said the Nagano committee typically had to pay at least $10,000 for first-class airfare and $5,000 for lodging for IOC members, many of whom were from countries that never have snow, do not participate in the Winter Olympics, yet who were evaluating whether Nagano could be a site for downhill skiing and other winter sports. A citizens' group in Nagano has filed suit for the return of the money Nagano spent to win the Games. The group says the $14 million official figure grossly underestimates what was actually spent, but proof went up in smoke with the books. Last week it sent a letter to the FBI and U.S. Justice Department asking them to widen their probe of Salt Lake City to include Nagano. In addition to the money spent on entertaining IOC members in Japan, even more money was spent on Japanese officials traveling around the globe entertaining them in other countries. Without the books, almost nothing is known about these trips. ''If there was no wrong-doing, there was no reason to destroy the books,'' said Masao Ezawa, the head of the citizens' group who has been crusading against the Nagano Olympics for 10 years. Ezawa has a soon-to-be published book on the ''money-tainted Olympics'' that alleges that the Nagano beat out other cities by bribes to IOC members. Ezawa said Wednesday that he even believes the Japanese Olympic bid committee gave money to other cities to withdraw from the selection process. ''The bidding process is all about bribes. It's a very ugly part of the Olympics,'' said Ezawa. He calls the IOC members ''dirty aristocrats'' who expect lavish treatment. ''Basically they are salesmen selling a commodity to the highest bidder.'' Several years ago, Ezawa's group lost a court battle when it argued the burning of the documents was illegal. Japan has much narrower definitions than the United States about what constitutes a public document. An accountant had signed off on the books before they were burned and a final report - which is largely pictures of the committee members and one page of finances - is about all that is left on the public record. Ezawa said he filed a freedom of information demand that revealed that the Nagano prefectural governor spent more than $14,000 to go to Birmingham, England, in June 1991 on the eve of Nagano's selection. He said that money - and much more of taxpayers' money- was not even calculated in the $14 million officially involved in the bid process. The IOC's culture of luxury was clearly evident in Nagano embodied by the treatment the IOC president Juan Antonio Samaranch enjoyed here. When Samaranch came for a visit in May 1991 - a month before Nagano's s election - he was brought to Nagano on a chartered, three-car train. Once there, Olympic officials gave him a sword handmade by a local craftsman valued at more than $14,000, according to media reports here. Yamaguchi said he personally delivered to Samaranch a painting, a portrait of a dancing geisha, done by a Nagano artist. 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