Pressure Forced Olympic Officials to Act Decisively

SALT LAKE CITY — The complaint lacked many details and was mostly strategy.

But it worked like a charm.

When Pierce Brunet, a lawyer for the Canadian Olympic Assn., filed his paperwork Thursday afternoon with the Court of Arbitration for Sport, he asked two things: First, that the judges involved in the controversial decision that gave the Russian pairs figure skating duo the gold medal over a Canadian team be ordered to stay here and be made available for interviews. Then the kicker: The Canadian team must be given gold medals too, based on evidence of impropriety in the judging.

The complaint served as the final piece in a mosaic of political, sporting and backstage intrigue. It was hand-delivered by Brunet himself, reaching the court of arbitration about 3:40 p.m. Then things began to move quickly.

Brunet figures the International Olympic Committee and the International Skating Union knew about it “within minutes.” At the men’s figure skating competition the same night, the buzz that the Canadians were mounting a legal challenge spread like wildfire.

Brunet also knew he could get results by working through the court, an independent, international arbiter of sports issues: The CAS just recently had reinstated a Latvian bobsledder that the IOC had tried to ban following a positive steroid test.

Indeed, his document, with all that it lacked--like the who, what and how of the alleged judging wrongdoing--is now part of Olympic history. According to Brunet, the IOC and ISU were quickly notified that a three-person arbitration panel was being formed, that the panel had scheduled a hearing and, even though the hearing would be closed, there was the likelihood of a news conference immediately afterward, about 2 p.m. MST Friday.

Of course, Brunet knew if things went his way, there would be no need for that news conference. And he was right.

Instead, there was another news conference Friday, one announcing that Canadians Jamie Sale and David Pelletier would receive gold medals in addition to those received by the Russian duo of Elena Berezhnaya and Anton Sikharulidze.

IOC sources insisted Friday that the Canadian complaint--and any legal steps taken by the court of arbitration--”was no factor, wasn’t even discussed” in the decision to award double golds.

A key to the resolution of the dispute, it appears, was that IOC President Jacques Rogge and ISU President Ottavio Cinquanta of Italy had been discussing the controversy continually. They had held three meetings since Tuesday, the day after the pairs competition.

On Wednesday, the IOC wrote a letter to the ISU, pressuring it to move quickly on the matter. Rogge said Cinquanta “started an inquiry” Thursday morning.

On Thursday afternoon, Rogge and Cinquanta met again at the IOC’s base of operations here, the Little America hotel. Then they went to the men’s figure skating finals.

Late Thursday night, after the skating, Cinquanta called a meeting of his ISU executive committee. At that meeting, it was decided that the ISU would ask the IOC to give a second set of gold medals to the Canadians.

At the news conference Friday, Cinquanta said there was sufficient evidence that the French judge, Marie Riene Le Gougne, had “acted in a way that was not adequate to guarantee both pairs equal condition.”

And that apparently was the only evidence needed. What remains unclear, several sources say, is who pressured the judge to vote a certain way, how they did so, and why. Le Gougne has denied having succumbed to the pressure, admitting in an affidavit to the ISU only that she failed to report it to officials before the event.

Once the ISU executive committee made the proposal to the IOC, international sports protocol was nicely in order. The IOC could now act on the ISU’s action, rather than generating the action.

The distinction is critical for Olympic politics and relations. It meant that the decision-making power of international federations, and the authority of the federations over sports results at the Olympic Games, would remain intact.

Now it was up to Rogge to respond officially, and to do that, he called a meeting of his 15-member executive board for 9:30 a.m. Friday in Ballroom C of the Little America.

Because several of the IOC board members had left Salt Lake City, there were only nine on hand to vote. Voting yes to the ISU’s gold-medal proposal were R. Kevan Gosper of Australia, Thomas Bach of Germany, Denis Oswald of Switzerland, Gunilla Lindberg of Sweden, Marc Hodler of Switzerland, Toni Khoury of Lebanon and Sergei Bubka, the former world-class pole vaulter, of Ukraine. Voting no was He Zhenliang of China. Abstaining was Vitaly Smirnov of Russia.

According to sources, China’s He did not want the IOC to cave in just because the media applied great pressure. The sources also said Smirnov abstained, and they described this as a politically correct move because the Russian skaters’ victory was central to the dispute. Smirnov also reportedly voiced during the meeting a fear that the Russians would somehow be looked upon as the cause of the improper judging.

After the meeting, Smirnov declined to confirm or deny his abstention. But he expressed a concern that the IOC is setting a precedent that might be seized upon by others aggrieved by past Olympic results or those who might contest results at future Games.

“I have nothing against the decision about giving second medals,” he said. “But if we have such cases, they should be treated equally. If we have such investigations, they should be investigated more precisely.

“This is the problem. If you want to be fair, you have to be fair to everybody. It doesn’t matter whether they are Americans, Canadians, Russians, whatever.”

Sources in the Olympic movement said that media pressure was an issue--but not on the merits of the decision. Instead, it played a key role in Rogge’s move to expedite the case.

Others said there was pressure to get the Games back on track.

“I think everyone wanted to get the focus back on the athletes here, rather than dragging this out,” said a source who was familiar with the sequence of events over the last few days.

Friday’s IOC meeting lasted 45 minutes, and once the vote was taken, a news conference was hurriedly called for 11 a.m. Gosper, Rogge and Cinquanta delivered the news and took questions.

Brunet stood in the back of the room, smiling.

Late Friday, Rogge called the decision “elegant and proper.” He added, “We did this for justice and fairness for the athletes. And it respects the relations we have with the federations.”

In the end, he said, “the media buzz always plays a role. But we were not under pressure by the media.”