“And the winner is ... the IOC!” Wild cheering for International Olympic Committee president Juan Antonio Samaranch from the other IOC members, corporate sponsors and television networks. Well, this is what would happen in Sydney in September if the big winners of the real gold in the self-enrichment event that is the Olympics were to take the limelight.

The hidden winners of the Olympics have the spotlight turned on them in a new book by Andrew Jennings, a journalist who Samaranch once tried to have jailed for alleging that IOC members took bribes from cities bidding to host the games.

Jailing critics might have been the go in the four decades of General Franco’s dictatorship in Spain, when Samaranch was a loyal fascist luminary, but more modern methods of control — corporate PR techniques — were called for when the Salt Lake City scandal broke in 1999, revealing the buying of IOC members’ votes by the Utah capital for the 2002 Winter Games. Jennings’ book romps through the festering mess of corruption that is the IOC and its response to the crisis.

Salt Lake City, whose businesspeople keenly wanted the profit windfall from the Winter Games, had learned their lesson back in 1991 when their bid for the 1998 Winter Games had been trumped by Nagano, which showered visiting IOC delegates with gifts and geishas and made a US$27 million donation to Samaranch’s IOC museum in Lausanne, Switzerland. Not to be outdone this time, the Salt Lake Organising Committee (SLOC) bought IOC members’ votes with free ski holidays, massages, jewellery, bicycles, guns and sporting goods, jobs and scholarships for their children, and envelopes of plain old cash.

One of Australia’s IOC members, Phil Coles, received not one, but two, ski holidays because not only did SLOC believe Coles had a vote for sale but his partner had a dossier on IOC members and the gifts it would take to procure their vote. Australia’s Kevan Gosper, an IOC executive member, was also caught in the fallout. The former boss of Shell Australia, and his wife, were alleged to have partaken of la dolce vita in Salt Lake.

The winning IOC member at Salt Lake, by a golden mile, was the delegate from the Congo who received cash, trips, free hospital treatment, sweetheart business deals, scholarships for his 10 children and sports equipment. His wife received free cosmetic surgery for her eyelids and a holiday in Las Vegas.

SLOC denied that sex was ever used to buy an IOC member’s vote but Terri from Snow White Escorts had a different view, one supported by the history of IOC members receiving sex as their gift if that was their penchant. If sex wasn’t offered up front, sex-for-votes blackmail was used. In 1985, at a hotel reception for visiting IOC members in the Swedish city of Falun, an IOC member tried to blackmail a hostess into having sex with him or lose Sweden a vote for the 1992 Summer Games.

The gift giving continued at Atlanta. We did “nothing unethical” claimed the bid organisers, but leading IOC members, some of them on the IOC ethics committee (an oxymoron if ever there was one), managed golfing freebies on the exclusive Augusta course. Mrs Samaranch had the run of the town for her every shopping desire and also scored a seat at the Academy Awards.“Ask and ye shall receive” is the Olympic motto.

Gifts are accompanied by privilege for the IOC member. Kim Un-Yong, world head of Taekwondo and a former intelligence agent with South Korea’s secret police, has a daughter, a pianist of limited ability who nevertheless staged a number of prestigious gigs in Salt Lake City so that her father could appreciate the extent to which the bid city liked her work. Gosper has a daughter. Young Sophie luckily was honoured with the first run with the Olympic torch in Athens, bumping off the selected girl. Dad would have been impressed.

IOC corruption should not be surprising, considering the moral seedbed it sprouts from. What else can be expected from the billionaires and corporate capitalists, the princes and princesses, who make up the IOC.

Meet Mohamed “Bob” Hasan, a Suharto crony, with his $3 billion fortune from logging Indonesia’s rainforests to near extinction. See there the NBC executive and spot the connection between the US media giant scoring a contract for television rights to five consecutive Olympics and its $1 million donation to Samaranch’s Olympic museum.

And over there, is that the Ugandan member, Idi Amin’s former defence minister? And at the top, the ageing fascist himself. The fish, as the Chinese proverb has it, rots from the head.

IOC members are not the only ones to benefit from the Olympics road-show. Enormous business opportunities present themselves to the bid city organising committees.

The SLOC dispensed Olympics contracts worth $68 million. $50 million of this went to businesses controlled by individuals closely associated with ... the Salt Lake Organising Committee! For the 1998 Winter Games in Nagano, a developer on the organising committee was enriched by the $15 million worth of construction for a new bullet train and expressways to his ski resorts at the games site, all at taxpayers’ expense.

How did the IOC react when the bribery scandals broke? With sincere penitence and house-ordering? Not on your free-loading nellie.

First, the IOC tried denial: Anita de Frantz, IOC vice-president, called before congressional hearings, could see no evil, hear no evil and would speak no evil (this may have had something to do with her acceptance of a gold necklace from the Nagano bid). Second was deflection of blame: the IOC members were the wronged party, the “poor victims of predator cities”. Then they tried to redefine bribery — the gifts were but expressions of personal friendship, and, getting all high-minded, the offers of free college places to the children of delegates from poor countries were portrayed as “humanitarian aid”.

When these explanations only made the IOC more of a laughing stock, they moved to The Enquiry: all allegations of bribery and corruption of IOC members would be ruthlessly investigated ... by the IOC!

A private enquiry, conducted behind closed doors by Samaranch loyalists, with only a few of the most blatant crooks expelled, gave this exercise a credibility rating of zero. With the big-money sponsors pressuring the IOC to control the crisis or lose their investments, the IOC was eventually forced down the PR path. Their perks and luxury must continue, but they would have to be hidden behind a facade of reform.

To the rescue came the US image doctors, Hill and Knowlton, reputation salvagers to damaged governments and corporations. Hill and Knowlton added the IOC to their illustrious client list, which included Union Carbide (after the Bhopal disaster in India which killed 3000 people), the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant (after the partial meltdown of its reactor core), tobacco companies, the Kuwaiti government (with the fabricated atrocity of Iraqi soldiers ripping Kuwaiti infants from incubators), and various regimes notorious for torture and abuse of human rights. Thoroughly deserving company for the IOC, it would seem.

Now all the talk from the IOC was of reform, and a reform commission was established. It took a nanosecond for Samaranch to appoint himself as chairperson. He then stacked the 80-plus throng with IOC members and the great and the good, such as Henry Kissinger. Any threat of real reform was thus safely laid to rest.

Further relentless probing of corruption continued. Phil Coles’ free-loading in Salt Lake was investigated. All Australia held its breath. When yet another, further, “serious warning” was issued, the sign was sent that it would be business as usual for Coles, Gosper and more than two dozen others probed by the IOC internal watchdogs. It was like being savaged by a butterfly.

Change was all the rage, or so the IOC would have us believe. During the 30 years since drugs had become endemic in elite sport, the IOC had nabbed an average of just two drug-abusing athletes a year and, to avoid damaging the commercial value of the Olympics, it had covered up positive doping tests in Barcelona, Los Angeles, Seoul and Atlanta. Now, however, it had to be seen to be taking action, although with the IOC having the numbers on its new World Anti-Doping Agency, the drug cheats need not fret.

Nor should organised crime fear the winds of change. Major heroin traffickers and crime bosses from Uzbekistan have made a home for themselves in world amateur boxing and the Olympics. In Seoul, 20 fights were fixed as judges were bribed by South Korean officials to award fights and medals to Korean boxers. Atlanta, too, had fights rigged in favour of Uzbek boxers. Watch out for Uzbek boxing gold in Sydney.

Jennings provides ample evidence of why the IOC culture of corruption will continue to flourish, why the IOC members and their business partners will continue to use the games as a front for their personal and corporate enrichment.

But, however much Jennings may want to return mythological Olympic idealism to the games, the Olympics have always been an institution promoting conservative political, nationalist, commercial and elitist values. IOC corruption is not so much a parasitical growth on a healthy body as a symptom of a diseased one. Grassroots sport, which should be about participation and enjoyment from healthy exercise, is as far from the Olympics as socialism is from capitalism.