THE CHEAP SEATS with STEVE CAMERON: Let the games, and scandals, begin

It didn’t take long.

The athletes had barely checked in to their cushy rooms in Paris when we had our first waterfall of tears and accusation of cheating at the 2024 Olympics.

I don’t even recall the event.

Dragging an auto transmission 12 miles through afternoon traffic, maybe.

That’s usually a thriller at the beginning of the Games.

OK, OK.

I’m kidding.

I wanted to open an Olympics column with something silly — like pulling automobile parts through the Paris evening rush hour — just to make sure I had your attention.

The actual truth is that I have a love-hate relationship with the Olympics.

It would be magnificent if athletes from countless countries could gather in the thrill of competition every four years, and viewers around the world would get to know these men and women from countries that seem like a mystery to us.

To a certain extent, this athletic jubilee DOES take flight.

There are so many good things about the Olympics, start to finish.

Unfortunately, it’s almost impossible to keep the wrong grubby hands off an event this large.

There will be corruption and bribery — looking at you, IOC — in the awarding of the Games, and then cheating along with fudging at the scorer’s table during the events themselves.

It’s sad.

I’VE BEEN up close to several Olympics, and part of one — the Salt Lake City Winter Games of 2002.

The stuff you’d probably rather not know actually began years prior to the Games reaching Utah.

The 1998 Winter Games were staged in Nagano, Japan — after an insanely close vote and accusations that the result was fixed.

The movers and shakers and Utah drew the wrong conclusion from that result, and decided they wound be prepared to win this next vote — come what may.

I don’t know if you remember the “Salt Lake Scandal,” or if you heard about it in the first place.

But it had a terrible odor, especially when you consider the event that got swallowed by corruption.

I still have a copy of the Washington Post, from Nov. 24, 1998, the morning the Salt Lake Games exploded.

Several snippets (all of which were admitted or confirmed) are probably enough for you to take at one sitting.

The Post was following the TV reporting of Chris Vanocur, and launched his story worldwide.

From the Post:

“Salt Lake City officials reportedly spent money on lavish trips to Utah, paid children’s’ tuitions and covered medical costs, all for IOC members whose responsibilities included voting on the sites of future games.

“Vanocur’s report set off the largest bribery scandal in the history of the Olympics. Ten IOC members stepped down as a result, and the Justice Department indicted two local Olympic officials.

“The incident led Olympics officials to look back, uncovering bribery scandals in previous Olympiads.”

Predictably, peering at bids and awards at other Games, found plenty of wrongdoing.

Here’s a bit more from the Post:

“Vanocur’s bombshell report in 1998 tainted excitement for the city’s 2002 Olympic bid.

“About two weeks later, Salt Lake Organizing Committee President Frank Joklik acknowledged $400,000 in scholarships provided to relatives of IOC members between 1991 and 1995, when the city won its bid.

“About a week later, Marc Hodler, a Swiss member of the IOC since 1963, detailed the vote-buying process. He told reporters that corruption had dated to at least Atlanta’s bid for the 1996 Games.”

YOU SEE the picture by now, surely.

Ironically (or not), the Salt Lake Games were also the scene of a scoring scandal in the pairs ice skating that, in a normal world, would be remembered as the ice skating chaos of all time.

It wasn’t QUITE a normal universe, however, because nothing in skating has or will top Tonya Harding’s goon smashing the leg of her competitor, Nancy Kerrigan.

If we leave out the actual physical violence category, we’re back to Salt Lake, a terrific show for the pairs gold, a French judge who was pressured to cheat on her score, and even a Russian mobster who fixed the result and ultimately was charged by the U.S. government.

The cheating came up because a Canadian pair (Jamie Sale and David Pelletier) put on a fantastic show in a bid to defeat the Russian defending champions, Elena Berezhnaya and Anton Sikharulidze.

Ice skating is such a subjective sport at the elite level that that arguing on behalf of either pair was totally legitimate.

What was NOT, however, was the ultimate admission by the French judge on the panel, Marie-Reine Le Gougne, that she had voted for the Russians under pressure from the head of the French federation, to vote that way.

You might be getting a little headache by this time, but simple finish to the plot was that the French boss wanted a Russian vote for another event.

Where, exactly, the Russian mob boss came into the story is a little puzzling — but this story has enough twists already.

Let’s just say it’s the Olympics, and that’s explanation enough for me.

Crazy, eh?

Email: scameron@cdapress.com

Steve Cameron’s “Cheap Seats” columns appear in The Press four times each week, normally Tuesday through

Friday unless, you know, stuff happens.

Steve suggests you take his opinions in the spirit of a Jimmy Buffett song: “Breathe In, Breathe Out, Move On.”