Those were dark, dark days in Utah’s Olympic odyssey, back in February 1999, when Mitt Romney burst onto the scene.
News accounts still appeared daily, as they had for two months, about Salt Lake City’s bid committee lavishing money and gifts on voters in an Olympic host-city selection process rife with corruption.
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The International Olympic Committee, U.S. Olympic Committee and Salt Lake Organizing Committee all were investigating evidence documented in detailed bid-committee records, but most ominous of all, so was the Department of Justice.
Possible criminal charges for bribery? In the headquarters city of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints? How ironic, how embarrassing.
What SLOC needed, said then-chairman Robert Garff, was a "white knight" to get the shell-shocked operation back on track and to restore Utah’s reputation.
Enter Romney.
He boasted a famous pedigree: the son of a Michigan governor who had run for president. He was a successful businessman. And even though he had lost, his spirited run at Ted Kennedy’s untouchable U.S. Senate seat in Massachusetts had pegged him as a rising Republican star.
While not a Utahn, Romney was a Mormon. He had insight into the local culture. He was more likely to be embraced quickly by the state’s largely LDS government and civic leaders. And he was eager to do his share to bring honor, not ridicule, to something important to the faith that meant so much in his life.
Romney also had bought into the idea that the Olympics were greater than just a sporting event. They were, he wrote in his 2004 book, Turnaround — Crisis, Leadership, and the Olympic Games, "a showcase of some of the great qualities of the human spirit … revealing the Olympic athlete’s unrelenting drive to push the limits of human capacity."
When the Games wrapped up to much acclaim in 2002, Romney departed immediately to launch his successful campaign to become governor of Massachusetts. He left behind a world inspired by the Salt Lake City Olympics, especially coming just five months after the horrors of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
How much credit Romney personally deserves for Salt Lake City’s stellar showing varies. So do opinions about how much he did strictly to benefit the Olympics and how much he did to advance his own political aspirations.
Romney could not be reached for comment for this story because of the rigors of his quest to become the Republican presidential nominee. But in his book, he said "despite suspicions to the contrary, I had no plans to parlay the experience into political advantage.
"Who knew where it could lead? I gave very little thought at all to what I would do afterwards," he added. "Many people can’t believe that. They think that I had calculated the political benefits. But, honestly, I had no idea. I saw no political connection at all. … I wanted to serve the community, not run for office."
Book reviewer Jesse Gordon, a Democratic activist in Massachusetts, didn’t believe that "for one second."
"Everyone in Massachusetts politics, including myself, always assumed Romney would run for office again, and fully expected him to segue from the Olympics to a gubernatorial run. If Romney was surprised by that turn of events, he was the only one!"
What about Romney "saving" Utah’s Olympics?
In his book, he takes great pains to attribute the success of the Games to the team he and his predecessors at SLOC put together — from supportive federal officials in Washington, D.C., to a volunteer corps of 26,000 in the Beehive State. He acknowledged his responsibility was big — as the face of the Games, the herald of its values and the guarantor of a pledge to deliver the event on budget — but said that his high-exposure role was necessary to distinguish the new-and-improved SLOC from the old corrupt one.
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