CHAPTER 10

SPINNING OLYMPIC GOLD: L.A. 1984

The Amateur Sports Act of 1978 set the stage for American sporting excellence to be funded by individual citizens and corporate donors. As Vice President Ford wrote in Sports Illustrated, the restructured game plan for American Olympic excellence would be accomplished with “minimal federal involvement and control, and therefore at minimal cost to the taxpayer.”¹ In 1984, this federal emphasis on the private and corporate funding of athlete development cascaded down to the way the Los Angeles Olympic games were paid for. While Adidas was one of the first companies to show how the Olympic aura could sell products and Hitler was the first to use the Games to sell a national ideology, the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics were the first to turn the sports extravaganza into a self-supporting marketing package. Due to federal and local aversion to using tax dollars for Olympic development, the 1984 Olympics was largely dependent on corporate financial support. This created an obligation to businesses that also meant the Olympics would need to minimize public relations scandals that would surely come with the growing power of anti-doping missionaries.

The cost of upgrading civic infrastructure, building athletic facilities and housing, along with the expense of hosting and bribing the IOC members who vote on where the Olympics are held, has always been an enormous burden for aspiring Olympic cities. Writing in the publication Revue Olympique in 1913, Coubertin fretted that “people are worried about the increases in the amount of money needed” to host Olympic Games. Projecting into the future of the Olympic enterprise, he added, “The question is not whether they will be held, but how they will be held, and at whose expense.”2

Although the Olympics may have been modeled after a world of idyllic amateurism, they were hosted within a market-based system that demanded payment for the land, stadiums, and commodities needed to put on an international sporting spectacle. From the beginning, Coubertin’s spiritual ideals struggled with the fact that he had to execute them in an environment of hard commerce and finance. After Hitler’s Games upped expectations regarding the degree of spectacle the Olympics could deliver, the financial headaches only grew for the IOC and local organizing committees.

Los Angeles voters were skeptical about picking up the tab for the 1984 Olympics because of the financial debacle that still haunted their Canadian neighbors. The 1976 Montreal Olympic Games were initially expected to cost $310 million. The official IOC post-Games report put the final cost at $1.5 billion as of 1978, a number that history would prove to be half the actual cost.³ In its official report, the IOC tried to put a brave face on this financial slap to the province’s citizens, stating that the Montreal Games “made a profound impression upon youth at a time when honest rivalry and the noble spirit of competition, as being true values of life, appear threatened by a materialistic society.”⁴ While it may have been a fine and lasting thing to help Canadian youth regain honest gamesmanship, Québec taxpayers were also saddled with a debt that would eat up public funds for three decades. As politicians tried to sell them on the benefits of hosting the 1984 Summer Olympics, Angelenos knew Canadians were still making interest payments on the 1976 Games. Newspaper articles in the 1980s reported that the total cost of the Montreal Olympics would be $2.4 billion by the time Québecers finally got the debt off their backs in 1991.5 But even those projections were optimistic; Québec taxpayers did not shake the 1976 Olympic fiscal hangover until 2006, at a head-splitting cost of nearly $3 billion.⁶

As the 1984 Olympics approached, Los Angeles’s citizens were wary of IOC bluster about Olympic returns in the form of honorable rivalries and morally improved youth. They may have had sunny Southern California dispositions, but they did not want to get hustled. Denver had pulled out from hosting the 1976 Winter Games when local citizens voted against spending public funds on the event. At the time, broader California antitax sentiment also undermined the IOC’s normal bill-the-taxpayer operating plan. In June 1978, California voters passed Proposition 13, an initiative led by antitax agitator Howard Jarvis that strictly limited property tax increases. When L.A. mayor Tom Bradley commissioned a survey of Angelenos’ opinions in 1977, 70 percent supported hosting the Games, but that backing dropped to 35 percent when pollsters asked voters how they would feel if they also had to pick up the tab. Commenting on how to pay for the proposed 1984 Games, in 1977, Los Angeles city councilman Ernani Bernardi told the Washington Post that he worried about hosting a “financial fiasco” like Montreal. “The only way you can guarantee this city’s tax revenues is with an amendment to the city charter,” Bernardi said. “No other way can we guarantee the city taxes won’t go to this.”⁷ Accordingly, the L.A. city council proposed asking Los Angeles citizens to vote on a city charter that would ban the use of taxpayer funds for the Olympics.

Used to bullying cities into what it wanted, the IOC was having nothing of the fiscal-responsibility and voter-referendum rumblings coming out of Los Angeles. L.A. city councilman Bob Ronka was one of the primary sponsors of the city charter amendment. When Ronka tried to attend a 1978 IOC negotiating meeting in Europe, the IOC barred him. Ronka flew home and fumed to the Los Angeles Times that the IOC was made up of “aristocrats” who thought they could run roughshod over the California bumpkins. Meanwhile, Anton Calleia, the L.A. mayor’s liaison to the IOC, was panicking about the ballot measure, telling the press that the city could not go to the IOC in good faith “and put in a bid with a referendum hanging over our heads. We’d be the laughingstock of the world.”8

In May 1978, the IOC tried to call L.A.’s bluff. The Associated Press reported that because of the city’s unbending demands, the IOC was making noises about moving the 1984 Games to Mexico City, Munich, or—unbelievably—Montreal. “I should make it clear that while there is only one applicant it does not necessarily mean it will get the Games,” IOC president Lord Killanin threatened from Athens, where the IOC was considering the Los Angeles bid.⁹ After weeks of negotiations, in July 1978, Bradley announced that the city council was withdrawing its bid. But the city did not have to follow through with this brinksmanship. When Lord Killanin got wind that Los Angeles was about to drop out, the IOC returned to the negotiating table in earnest. When the only remaining alternative to Los Angeles, Tehran, pulled its bid due to the Iranian revolution, the IOC had no card left to play. It was going to be Los Angeles or nothing in 1984; power rested in Southern California, not Switzerland.

Ronka’s charter amendment went on the November 1978 ballot. With antitax sentiment still running strong after Proposition 13 had won by a landslide in June of the same year, Los Angeles’ no-funding charter also easily passed. Los Angeles voters had upended decades of IOC tradition. Where cities were once responsible for all Olympic hosting costs and risks, it was now illegal to use California taxpayer money to fund the Olympics. With taxpayer funds off the table, the California rubes held power over the Swiss aristocrats. The final agreement Killanin and Bradley signed at the White House in late 1978 immunized Los Angeles from any financial liability for the Games. For an organization used to dealing with groveling supplicants and extracting expensive IOC benefits, this was an astonishing turn of events.

With the Olympic brand still tarnished by the Israeli athlete slaughter in Munich, gross cost overruns in Montreal, and a boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics, the IOC was anxious to avoid more public-relations disasters. Because Los Angeles’ citizens had ruled that the IOC could not put management of the L.A. Games into the hands of public officials (who were paid by taxpayers), the IOC had to allow the 1984 Games to be turned over to a private corporation run by travel company entrepreneur Peter Ueberroth. The newly formed company was called the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee (LAOOC).

With the IOC desperate to get the Games settled in Los Angeles, Ueberroth had enormous leverage over both the IOC and the U.S. Olympic Committee. He extracted a risk-sharing deal from the USOC that gave 40 percent of any surplus income from the Games to the LAOOC, which would in turn use the money to fund Southern California youth sports programs.*

Ueberroth, who would become the commissioner of Major League Baseball in 1984, also played hardball with balky sponsors. Companies who won a coveted Olympic sponsorship berth at an auction had to pay a minimum $4 million in-kind donation to LAOOC. When Kodak only coughed up $2 million of this donation, Ueberroth told Kodak’s competitor Fuji that it had 72 hours to get a replacement offer on the table. The Japanese film manufacturer jumped at the opportunity. Ueberroth scratched the original $4 million Kodak contract and replaced it with a new $7 million deal with Fuji.¹⁰

Ueberroth also cut a $225 million TV deal with ABC, a bounty larger than the TV contracts for all previous Olympics combined. In total, the television contracts yielded $286.9 million, or $187 million more than TV revenue from the 1980 Games. The IOC had long struggled with how to manage television profits. The 1936 Olympics were the first to broadcast the events through closed-circuit TV piped into German viewing halls. As televisions entered more and more homes around the world through the 1950s, the IOC was so concerned that television money would compromise Coubertin’s founding principles that it did not formulate an official television policy until 1958. That year, Brundage added Rule 49 to the Olympic Charter, a regulation that allowed each Game’s local organizing committee to negotiate the terms of television rights, but gave final approval of the terms and say over how the revenue would be distributed to the IOC. Writing in 1966, Brundage warned that while TV revenue could be useful to the Olympic movement, “it can also be a great danger if Olympic ideals are not maintained.”11 Rule 49 gave the IOC TV money, but burdened local organizing committees with the hard work of negotiating with broadcasters. Local committees also had to shoulder the logistical challenges and legal risks that came with creating a television product and managing contract disputes.

Traditionally, the IOC collected all television revenue and then redistributed it in a fashion that the IOC thought would reinforce Coubertin’s ideals. Ueberroth ended this practice in 1984. When it came time to decide how to manage and spend nearly $300 million in TV revenue, Ueberroth pretty much ignored the IOC’s demands and used the funds in a fashion that fulfilled his obligation to Los Angeles’ citizens. In an account of Ueberroth’s Olympic legacy, historians Robert Barney, Stephen Wenn, and Scott Martyn explained that although the IOC was horrified to find itself in the position of “junior partner” in sponsor and TV negotiations, in the long run, Ueberroth’s negotiating skills immensely enriched the Olympic coffers.¹²

Seeking funds to kick-start the development of the L.A. Games, Ueberroth used shrewd financial techniques when negotiating with TV networks. Before submitting a bid, any network interested in broadcasting the Games had to provide a $500,000 refundable deposit. Once actual negotiations began, the five competing companies—NBC, CBS, ESPN, ABC, and television production giant Norman Lear’s Tandem Productions—had to ante up another $250,000.¹³ Besides ensuring bidders were serious, the $750,000 up-front money gave the LAOOC working capital that compounded in interest-bearing accounts. With interest rates averaging over 20 percent through the late 1970s and early 1980s, these refundable TV deposits brought in $1,000 a day in interest alone. “We’ve yet to spend a penny,” Ueberroth told a Sports Illustrated reporter in 1982. “With these current interest rates, our income is exceeding our expenses by a half-million dollars every three months.”14

When Olympic headquarters learned that Ueberroth was striking deals without its input and that the cash was going directly to the LAOOC, IOC director Monique Berlioux demanded that the LAOOC transfer one-third of the TV deposit money to a Swiss IOC account. Berlioux was known for the imperious requirement lists sent out in advance of her Olympic business travels that demanded Evian water, elaborate flower arrangements, no early or late meetings, and dining only at the finest establishments. Indifferent to her status, Ueberroth ignored Berlioux and kept the money in the United States.

The IOC was also horrified to learn that Norman Lear’s Tandem Productions was negotiating for TV rights. “Only an existing nationwide network should be considered,” Berlioux scolded. Tandem was known for producing sitcom hits like All in the Family, Maude, and Sanford and Son, not international sports events. “The games are not a lever for anybody to set up a ‘fourth network’ in the USA,” Berlioux warned. Ueberroth again ignored the IOC complaints, and Lear’s company kept its spot at the bidding table. “I am afraid,” IOC president Lord Killanin moaned in May 1979, that the unilateral dealings were “quite unacceptable to the International Olympic Committee.”¹⁵

Ueberroth also increased prices that western Europe paid to broadcast the Olympics. The European Broadcasting Union (EBU), a consortium of European broadcasters, paid $5.95 million for rights to the 1980 Moscow Games. At that time, the EBU’s purchasing power was restricted because the public ownership of most European networks limited its revenue, as did its lack of advertising. In the 1970s and early 1980s, few competing private networks existed in Europe to push Olympic rights bidding to the sorts of numbers the jostling American networks were prepared to pay. However, the EBU was the IOC’s only way to get its sporting festival to the European public, and the EBU used its monopoly leverage to keep costs down. Also in 1980, Juan Antonio Samaranch replaced Lord Killanin as IOC president. A staunch defender of the EBU’s position as exclusive distributor of the Olympics in Europe, Samaranch resisted Ueberroth’s efforts to extract demand-based TV rights from Europe’s 100 million television sets.

At a 1979 negotiating meeting at New York’s Park Lane Hotel, Ueberroth told Berlioux and EBU representatives that the fee to broadcast the 1984 games in western Europe was $100 million. Considering that the EBU had paid just shy of $6 million four years earlier, a dumbfounded EBU representative dismissed the offer as “utterly out of consideration.” The EBU countered at $8.33 million, and negotiations fitfully dragged along. A few months after the New York meeting, an independent Italian TV network offered the LAOOC $10 million for rights to Italy alone. A crack had opened in the European TV rights fortress. While Samaranch refused to let Ueberroth move forward with the deal, the proposition showed how out of whack the EBU’s $8.33 million offer was for coverage in 32 European nations. Still fearful that the Europeans would get blacked out if market forces pushed the EBU into a $100 million corner (at $1 per television, the price was lower than the $1.69 per household that American networks paid), the IOC boss stated at the IOC’s 84th Session meeting that it “was essential that everyone be able to see the Games through television.”16

Protected by its monopoly market position and Samaranch’s favoritism, EBU Olympic fees stayed relatively low, even as television reached near total saturation in European households. In late 1981, the LAOOC and EBU finally agreed to a $19.8 million fee, far lower than Ueberroth’s $100 million starting offer but more than triple what Moscow had paid. When the IOC demanded $6.6 million of this EBU sum, Ueberroth told Samaranch to get lost. Referring to the IOC’s blocking of the $10 million Italian offer, Ueberroth told Samaranch, “Because the IOC wishes to protect EBU, the LAOOC will be prohibited from receiving maximum amounts.” Ignoring the IOC’s $6.6 million demand, LAOOC kept $15.8 million of the EBU payment. If the IOC wanted more than the $4 million the LAOOC would wire into its bank account, Ueberroth told Samaranch he would have to “get it directly from EBU.”17

American TV executives were not dummies, and they knew the $1.69 per TV household they paid was much more than the $0.14 per household the EBU shelled out for the same feed. Gradually, Samaranch came around to Ueberroth’s way of seeing things. Eight years after Los Angeles, the EBU paid $75 million for Olympic TV rights to the 1992 Barcelona Games. By 2000, the arrival of private networks in Europe broke the EBU blockade and eased Samaranch’s fear that his sports product would not be visible in Europe’s farthest corners. Media mogul Rupert Murdoch’s $2 billion offer for the Summer and Winter Games from 2000 to 2008 put European pricing on par with the United States. Long after he became commissioner of baseball, Ueberroth’s Olympic TV pricing legacy continued to deliver exponentially increasing revenues into IOC coffers.¹⁸

Los Angeles also fundamentally altered how the Olympics made money from corporate sponsors. In Montreal, the Games pocketed $5 million from deals with 600 corporate sponsors. Ueberroth felt that going after fewer sponsors would be more lucrative than cutting hundreds of smaller deals. Trading quantity for exclusivity, in 1984, 35 corporate partners, 64 product and service suppliers, and 65 licensees brought $157.2 million in cash, products, and services to the Los Angeles Games—all of which again went immediately into the LAOOC’s high-interest bank accounts.¹⁹

With the law putting Los Angeles taxpayer funds out of reach, and with no backup city ready to host the games, Ueberroth had the leverage to put on a Spartan Olympics that was quite unusual for the IOC. Upon accepting the LAOOC job, Ueberroth had studied the financial statements from previous Olympic Games. It was immediately apparent that construction costs were an albatross around the event’s financial neck. So while the IOC typically demands shiny new buildings for its events, Los Angeles saved millions by housing athletes and staff in college dorms at USC, UCLA, and UC Santa Barbara. The 1984 Games only needed to build sports facilities for cycling, swimming, and shooting, and Ueberroth got those paid for by naming them after corporate sponsors 7-Eleven, McDonald’s, and Fuji. Athletic events took place in the Los Angles Coliseum, a structure built in 1922 that had been used 52 years earlier when Los Angeles hosted the 1932 Summer Olympics.

While IOC grandees may have fumed at having to sit in a 62-year-old structure, the aristocrats from Switzerland had no way to resist. And Ueberroth’s parsimony worked. In inflation-adjusted numbers, Los Angeles’ $93 million in building costs were less than 6 percent of the $1.7 billion the Soviet Union spent to build facilities for the 1980 Olympics. By the 1984 closing ceremony, the LAOOC had turned a $232.5 million profit. Time magazine named Ueberroth Man of the Year for his management prowess.20

Ueberroth also capitalized on the enormous untapped value in the Olympic rings. The Los Angeles Games saw a massive increase in sponsor revenue, funds that went to both the IOC and the LAOOC. In his book Drug Games, historian Thomas Hunt notes that IOC boss Samaranch “was both more commercially astute than his predecessor and more assertive as a leader.”²¹ Open to disconnecting the Olympics from its idealized Coubertinian mooring, Samaranch liked what he saw in Ueberroth’s management of costs and his savvy extraction of television and corporate sponsor dollars. Ueberroth provided a template for how the Games—usually a financial train wreck—could be run as a money-making business. John Hoberman writes that Samaranch was so inspired by the American’s vision that the Spaniard subsequently “presided over an almost total commercialization of the Olympic Games that has converted the ‘Movement’ into an advertising vehicle for the multinational corporate sponsors and American television networks.”²²

These media outlets and corporate sponsors became the foundation of enormous power, a force that helped Samaranch lever open the door to professional athletes in 1988. The appearance of names like Magic Johnson and Wayne Gretzky made the Olympics even more valuable to corporate partners, and sponsorship rates increased accordingly. Despite American IOC president Brundage’s early warning that a flood of sponsor dollars might be “a great danger if Olympic ideals are not maintained,” the 1984 Olympics were a watershed moment when the influence of parsimonious American taxpayers and a strong-willed American businessman forever displaced Coubertin’s romantic “religion of the muscles” with an abiding faith in commerce as the new guiding Olympic principle.23

EVEN AS THE 1984 OLYMPICS transformed Coubertin’s international celebration of amateurism into a jamboree of corporate products and services, the issue of drugs became more than a matter of amateur athletes embracing professional practices. When the IOC found unimaginable veins of television and product-marketing gold in the hills of Southern California, the discovery created new pressures to manage doping scandals. Whereas in the past, doping had been a problem of tarnished amateur integrity, the financial success of the 1984 Games made doped athletes a matter of soiled corporate brand equity.

In advance of the 1984 Games, the IOC Medical Commission, then led by the Belgian prince Alexandre de Mérode, set up a drug-testing lab in Los Angeles. Overseen by UCLA scientist Don Catlin, the IOC approved the lab in November 1983. A few weeks later, the USOC approached Catlin about testing U.S. athletes in advance of the Games.

At the time, Dr. Robert Voy was director of sports medicine and science and chief medical officer for the U.S. Olympic Committee. In his 1991 book with Kirk Deeter, Drugs, Sport, and Politics, Voy wrote that putting the IOC in charge of testing in Los Angeles was “like having the fox guard the henhouse.”²⁴ Aside from his initial efforts to protect European television from market forces, Samaranch was an economic pragmatist, especially when compared to Brundage’s single-minded amateur severity. Samaranch also worked relentlessly to unify the Olympic network, which was under considerable strain from the boycott of the Moscow Games in 1980, the year he became president. Traveling to hundreds of countries and meeting with countless IOC connections in his first three years on the job, Samaranch, as IOC member Dick Pound put it, brought a “breadth of ambition and understanding of politics” to the IOC that the insular organization had lacked.25 As a more commercially savvy and assertive president than his precursors, the Spaniard was not one to let amateur romanticism about chemical or financial purity get in the way of the Games’ enormous money-producing potential. Focused on moving the IOC forward, Samaranch also showed, in Thomas Hunt’s words, “a reluctance to engage with divisive issues.”²⁶ John Hoberman puts it more bluntly: “For Juan Antonio Samaranch and his closest associates, doping was primarily a public relations problem that threatened lucrative television and corporate contracts that are now worth billions of dollars.”²⁷ With the IOC and LAOOC cognizant of the importance of sponsor dollars to execute their Olympic mission, there was a lot of incentive to ensure that drug scandals remained behind closed doors. Catlin’s Los Angeles lab was a convenient way to screen out doped athletes before they could cause negative publicity. More than a lab to ensure a level sporting playing field, the lab was an insurance policy.

The USOC’s concerns about doping were not idle speculation. The American Olympic organizing committee knew Americans doped. At the 1983 Pan American Games in Caracas, Venezuela, 15 athletes, including one American, tested positive. When the U.S. athletes saw their teammate booted for doping, they realized the drug testing in Caracas was for real. Twelve U.S. track and field team members dropped out before they even put a spike on the track.²⁸

At the time, USOC vice president and U.S. track and field team chief of mission Evie Dennis argued the athletes’ “individual decision to withdraw would not be taken as an implication of guilt.” However, U.S. javelin thrower Curt Ransford—one of the few Americans who remained in Venezuela—said he “knew there was going to come a day when no one could hide from the testing.” When Dennis arrived in Venezuela a week before the events, she learned that the Pan Am Games’ drug-testing lab had new Hewlett-Packard gas chromatograph–mass spectrometer machines able to detect steroids taken months before the day of a test. Three decades after Ziegler introduced them to American Olympians, steroids were a standard element of the elite track athlete sports medicine program. Alarmed about the arrival of these new HP machines, Dennis called track and field headquarters in the United States to let them know that the team could be at risk. The American athletes still showed up, but, as Dennis later recalled, “They had to get here and see Cubans and Canadians disqualified. They asked me what the USOC was going to do so they could keep up with the Russians and others. I said we were going to do nothing, because we don’t condone these drugs.”29

As historians Jan and Terry Todd explain, before the Los Angeles Olympics, the 1983 Pan American Games were “by far, the largest drug scandal in the history of doping control.”³⁰ Caracas offered a teachable moment; the snared athletes taught the USOC that it needed to set up a drug-testing lab before the Los Angeles Olympics to avoid the same PR disaster that went down in Venezuela.

In fact, the positives at the Pan American Games were nothing new. Some track and field athletes had already been caught doping at the world championships in Helsinki, Finland. Yet even though the new highly sensitive HP machines were used in Helsinki, no athlete officially tested positive—that is, no positives were reported to the public. Instead, the positives were buried from view and surreptitiously conveyed to USOC officials. The USOC in turn told the doping American athletes that if the same testing procedures were used in Caracas, they would get caught. According to Voy, the USOC used these pre-event positives to help American athletes avoid embarrassing themselves and their national team. In Voy’s words, cover-ups happened “not only to protect the images of the violating athletes, but also to protect the sport organizations in charge of maintaining a level of fair play.”³¹

The 1984 Olympics were not the first to view drug testing as a threat to the Games’ economic viability. In 1971, IOC president Brundage expressed his belief that draconian anti-doping policies and enforcement were harmful to the IOC’s economic stability. As part of the lead up to the 1972 Munich Olympics, IOC director Berlioux told Brundage that the IOC would bear the cost of two Medical Commission conferences dealing in part with doping. Brundage was not keen on the idea, and responded, “There is no use wasting a lot of money on these superfluous meetings if we can avoid it.” Brundage underscored his reluctance to take a firm stand on doping by pushing for international sports federations to bear the technical and financial responsibility for enforcing anti-doping rules. An anti-doping brochure drafted in part by the IOC Medical Commission and distributed in advance of the 1972 Games put the “technical responsibility” for doping control on international federations. The IOC’s obligations were limited to “moral responsibility” for the controls and their overall Olympic organization.32 In addition to saving the IOC the cost of doping enforcement, pushing the responsibility for anti-doping onto the sports federations shielded the IOC from potential legal costs should an athlete or nation file a lawsuit due to a positive dope test.

A decade later, drug enforcement threatened the Los Angeles Olympics’ financial health. “Drugs and doctors are not only controlling the Games of the XXIIIrd Olympiad,” Ueberroth wrote to Samaranch in 1983, “they are beginning to gain control of the whole Olympic movement.” Corporate sponsors paid handsome sums to wrap themselves in the Olympic ideology of hope, youth, and vitality. Hunt writes that “the IOC, in Ueberroth’s view, should spend less time exposing doping and more time protecting the reputation of its athletes.”³³ And despite the tension over how the L.A. financial windfall was to be distributed, Ueberroth had a sympathetic ear in Samaranch.

As head of the IOC in 1980, Samaranch focused on making the Olympics more economically productive. The Francisco Franco disciple had little tolerance for dissent, which made Samaranch a natural bedfellow for Ueberroth, a driven CEO who was also used to getting his way. As leader of the LAOOC, Ueberroth built a centralized business organization and gave himself ultimate decision-making authority. Ueberroth knew that the limited time and resources available to put on the 1984 Games required crisp efficiency, not messy democracy.34 For Ueberroth and Samaranch, allowing dope-testing doctors powers that could smudge the Olympic rings made zero business sense.

Of the 86 U.S. athletes who tested positive in pre-1984 Olympic drug tests, only two were denied spots on the Olympic team—and even those two were not sanctioned.³⁵ The way to preserve the integrity of the sponsors who made the Games possible was to protect them from the stigma of drug use. Regardless of what the athletes needed to put in their bodies to ply their trade—and had done so for more than a century—the robust health of the Olympics depended on capping salacious doping scandals.

To manage that balance, Ueberroth and the LAOOC walked a fine line between suppressing drug scandals and avoiding them through testing neglect. On April 27, 1983, the LAOOC announced it would ignore an IOC mandate that athletes be tested for caffeine and testosterone at the 1984 Games. In what seems like a gambit to minimize drug stories and protect athlete and sponsor reputations, the Los Angeles organizers argued that unless the IOC could guarantee that its testing methods for these two substances were scientifically valid, athletes would not be examined. According to press reports, LAOOC medical director Tony Daly said that the IOC’s tests for caffeine and testosterone were “arbitrary and scientifically unproven.”³⁶ Later that year, the Los Angeles Times reported that the cost of these tests may have been another factor pushing the LAOOC to get rid of them.³⁷ Only when the IOC Medical Commission assured the LAOOC in November 1983 that the drug controls were “scientifically perfect and not assailable as incorrect” did Ueberroth’s team back down and allow testosterone and caffeine testing.³⁸ The integrity of the 1984 Games was as much a factor of financial solvency as it was a matter of athlete purity.

Despite USOC and LAOOC efforts to keep the cloud of drug use from darkening the Olympic skies, some Americans tested positive in 1984. As the Olympics approached their August 12 closing ceremony, multiple positive samples crossed the Games’ anti-doping lab test bench. Lab scientist Don Catlin reported nine drug positives to the IOC, but heard nothing back. “Those positives never saw the light of day,” Catlin later recalled.39

With many of the television-friendly track and field events taking place at the end of the schedule, Catlin’s workload was enormous, and the lab was coming up with a lot of positives. So many samples were going to the lab during the last week that many remained to be tested the day after the closing ceremony. And then Los Angeles Olympic medical director Tony Daly walked in and told Catlin to shut down the lab, even if he had not finished testing all the samples. Catlin refused, telling Daly he was under contract to test all the delivered samples in his lab.

Ignoring the LAOOC order to halt testing, Catlin and his team carried on and eventually found 20 positives. The IOC’s official report on the 1984 Games lists 11. Even in the historical record, the IOC and the LAOOC cleansed the Los Angeles Olympics for smoother public and corporate consumption. The Dubin Inquiry, the damning Canadian government report on doping that came out of the Ben Johnson scandal in 1988, would later reveal that 20 athletes who won medals in Los Angeles did so while taking performance-enhancing drugs prescribed by Los Angeles doctor Robert Kerr. Those athletes still have their 1984 medals.⁴⁰

When testing a urine or blood sample, lab technicians do not know who the sample belongs to. A number identifies each vial, not a name. This system is designed to maintain athlete anonymity and protect athlete and drug tester alike from bias. Only when a sample comes up positive is it cross-referenced to a separate database that matches sample numbers to donor names. In the case of Catlin’s positive tests, the IOC needed to go to medical commissioner Mérode, who possessed the sheet of paper listing the names corresponding to each sample number. After Catlin gave Mérode his list of positives, the Belgian prince informed Catlin that the list had gone missing from his room at the luxurious Biltmore Hotel. The IOC could not identify who the positive tests belonged to, so all were considered innocent.

While the circumstances leading to the loss of the paper that would identify the positive athletes are murky, IOC member and World Anti-Doping Agency head Dick Pound had little doubt what happened. In his book Inside the Olympics, Pound wrote, “It was the L.A. organizing committee that had removed the evidence before it could be acted upon by the IOC.”41 In his book on Ben Johnson and Carl Lewis at the 1988 Seoul Olympics, journalist Richard Moore points to evidence suggesting LAOOC medical director Dr. Anthony Daly had the documents destroyed to protect the L.A. Games’ image, an act that would please both Samaranch and Ueberroth and further Daly’s personal goal of replacing Mérode as the IOC’s medical head.⁴²

In 1994, Mérode blamed the missing documents on LAOOC penny-pinching—and American efficiency. The IOC medical director said that when he returned to his room at the Biltmore, workers had cleared it out in the process of converting his working office back into a hotel suite. First, Mérode said, he was told that the medical commission documents were at the LAOOC offices, but then Daly informed him they had been sent back to IOC headquarters in Switzerland. According to Mérode, when he told Daly he would return to Lausanne to inspect the records, the Los Angeles medical officer confessed that the LAOOC had shredded the documents. “The U.S. mentality was the Games were finished. They didn’t want to pay,” Mérode told reporters. “The U.S. attitude is not the same as the European one. They have their efficiency. Everything is done very quickly. They like to save money.” Mérode did not explain whether saving money applied to getting him out of an expensive hotel room quickly or eliminating a doping scandal that could damage sponsor relations. Responding to the accusation, Daly told the Los Angeles Times that he did not know about any destroyed test results and said a cover-up “would be shocking.” And if there were anyone to blame, Daly said, “It would not be possible for [the LAOOC] to do anything. We report the results to the IOC.”⁴³

Arnold Beckett was a member of the IOC’s Los Angeles anti-doping committee. An authority on the then-new gas chromatography–mass spectrometry drug testing, Beckett told the press in 1996 that he believed the LAOOC destroyed Mérode’s list of names because “it would have done quite a lot of damage if five or six” positives had been linked to medal winners, which “undoubtedly it would have done.” Beckett added, “Some of the federations and [the] IOC are happy to show that they are doing something in getting some positives, but they don’t want too many because that would damage the image of the Games.”44 In 1999, Beckett told the BBC investigative journalism program Panorama that covering up positives in Los Angeles in 1984 (and at the 1998 Atlanta Games) was for Olympic image management. “Is all this part of a pattern of trying to prevent too many positives?” Beckett asked, rhetorically. “In other words, we want to show at the Olympic Games that we are doing our due work in trying to prevent drug misuse in sport. But please don’t get too many positives, which will tend to damage the image of sport. That is the emphasis.”⁴⁵

In the same BBC program, IOC medical commissioner Mérode said that in advance of the 1984 Olympics, U.S. officials pressed the IOC to not hold dope testing at all. Mérode recalled LAOOC members telling him, “We don’t need it, and the Americans everywhere, even a majority in the United States said, ‘It doesn’t exist here. We don’t know what is it, doping, you know.’ And I say ha, ha, ha. We will see. And we have the Olympic Charter, you have to follow that. If you don’t organize the control, you will not have the Games at all.”

Mérode added that Los Angeles organizers were against dope tests “because they were afraid to have a bad image in the world, because there are too many doping cases.” Elite sports’ long and previously unremarkable tradition of using drugs to increase human performance was bumping up against a new anti-doping morality that itself challenged the remarkable financial success of the 1984 Olympics. As historian Robert Barney writes, “The financial health of both the IOC and its most flamboyant offspring, the USOC, is fundamentally embedded in the competitive zeal of U.S. television networks and corporate business giants bent on linking their endeavors with the world’s most illustrious sports spectacle—the Olympic Games.”⁴⁶

*    The LA84 Foundation has granted over $220 million in funds to Southern California youth sports programs since 1985. In a sense, the legacy of the 1984 Olympics’ financial success helps replace support for fitness for the masses that ended with the passing of the Amateur Sports Act of 1978.