IOC’s Secret Is Safe in Switzerland

The International Olympic Committee evaluation visits to the five bid cities are now complete and the woman who was the toast of the town just last month, Chairwoman Nawal El Moutawakel, is now sequestered with her team at IOC headquarters in Lausanne, Switzerland, trying to report what she has seen.With the fate of NYC2012 and the other four bid cities within its grasp, the team has an important role in determining the results of this bid and perhaps how host cities will be elected in the future. Onlookers are not only interested in what they will report, but how they report it and what kinds of tools they will give IOC members in their decision-making process.The site evaluation report is a product of the Salt Lake City vote-buying scandal that rocked the Olympic world a few years ago. The IOC decided that in order to keep the process clean, members should not have unmonitored contact with bid committees. Instead, the evaluation team makes official inspection visits and then reports back to its membership so that informed votes can be cast.The candidate evaluation report to be delivered by June 6 will be quite a bit different than the applicant report that was used to select the five-city short list last year. That report provided a mathematical analysis using the proprietary “OlympLogic” formula that featured charts and a benchmark effectively drawing a line between qualified candidates and also-rans. The report Ms. El Moutawakel and her team are now drafting will likely be a written analysis that tries to strike a delicate balance between objectivity and diplomacy.The evaluators will take the three volume bid books, add the four-day site visit, and then compress the 18 themes into a 20-page report for each bid. The result is not much more than a summarized version of what we already know with little further input from so-called evaluation team experts. And when they’re covering everything from average humidity to equine health, there isn’t much room for detail. Unfortunately, that leaves us with more trivia and less hard information.For instance, in Paris’s 2008 evaluation we learn that “there have been no terrorism threats to any major sports events in France in the last 10 years,” followed by the line “there is a unit with responsibility for terrorism intelligence” – both comprising the entire terrorism section. Then, we’re treated to a full-page Zagat-style guide to hotel accommodations.To NYC2012, this means that the facts behind their biggest troubles might get lost in the subtext or perhaps show up in the subjective analysis at the end. In fact, past reports typically explain the financial guarantee in one sentence – usually to indicate that it’s in order. The Olympic stadium is merely mentioned with respect to the overall concept, and then isn’t given another thought. Serious concerns are often drawn out in a footnote.This could have an unpredictable impact on New York’s chances if IOC members discount the potential problems based on a lack of reporting or if they are forced to draw their own conclusions, which may or may not be accurate.If they’re like me, IOC members will immediately flip to the summary page of the report and scan down to the final paragraph for each bid. That’s where the evaluation team tries to get subjective by offering a one sentence thumbs-up or thumbs-down, effectively rendering the rest of the report redundant. For 2008, three bids got the evaluators’ blessings. For 2012, there will be a reluctance to snub any of the high-quality bids.The evaluation team ultimately faces a conundrum: They can persist with past practices and write a diplomatic report that provides much praise but no means of differentiating between the bids, or they can forge a new direction by identifying risks and issues and giving their membership a real decision-making tool – but risk the backlash of those still steeped in IOC tradition.It is not widely known that the IOC Executive Board of Candidate Cities must select bids for election based on the candidate evaluation report. A hard-hitting analysis that singles out deficient bids could give that board the political means to eliminate bids before the vote, making the whole process more equitable – something that has not happened yet under the new system.Perhaps while preparing her report in Lausanne today, Ms. El Moutawakel will set aside politics and diplomacy and choose to steer in a new direction by embracing her role and telling her fellow members what her team really thinks about the five candidates. We won’t know until the secret document is disclosed one month before election day in Singapore.Mr. Livingstone is producer of GamesBids.com.

IOC’s Secret Is Safe in Switzerland

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