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SALT LAKE CITY — The big political news breaking this week: Mike Leavitt is on board Team Romney heading the planning for a transition of a possible Romney administration.
That sent TV guys like me doing the archival deep dive, in this case into the basement of the KSL mothership. The task at hand: Finding video of Romney and Leavitt together during the 2002 Olympic years.
It was actually a tougher task than one might think. At the big events, like say Opening and Closing Ceremonies, Romney was joined not by Leavitt, but by host city mayor Rocky Anderson and International Olympic Committee chief Jacques Rogge. And Leavitt didn't attend regular meetings of the Salt Lake Organizing Committee, which got heavy media coverage, because he had a representative on the board already.
I did locate a video clip of Romney and Leavitt together at the bobsled run near Park City in early 1999. In retrospect, now 13 years after the fact, it was a window into a key period of the Olympic era and a critical juncture in both their careers.
The video shows the two of them loading into bobsleds, popping on helmets.
"Sled number three! Governor Mike Leavitt! And runner Carl Wooten on the brakes! Bobsled in track!"
Whoosh.
Leavitt hit 50 miles per hour, and a few Gs. At the end, with Romney nearby, both donning nervous smiles and 2002 Olympic baseball caps, Leavitt said it was rough ride.
"It is not smooth. I would put it in the category of jarring."
No doubt, the word also could have described the prior three months for Leavitt.
In November of 1998, the Olympic scandal broke, with allegations that, to win the bid, Salt Lake organizers had plied members of the IOC with more than a $1 million in gifts, ranging from thousand-dollar shopping sprees to antique guns to health care and scholarships for IOC members' relatives.
Within weeks, the story went supernova.
Longtime Swiss IOC member Marc Hodler said there'd been abuses, pay for votes, in IOC voting to select not just Salt Lake, but for Sydney's 2000 Olympics and Atlanta's in 1996. He injected the word "bribery" into the entire conversation, effectively launching four investigations, by the IOC, USOC, SLOC and the U.S. Department of Justice, and one whale of an international news story.
That's jarring.
Over the next several weeks, Utah faced a harsh and unflattering spotlight with new revelations weekly about overly generous Salt Lake bidders and overly acquisitive Olympic leaders.
"Lords of the Rings" as one British journalist famously dubbed them.
Top Utah Olympic leaders Frank Joklik and Dave Johnson were out; a SLOC ethics report pinned the blame on Johnson and former SLOC chief Tom Welch. (They were both later indicted and acquitted, throughout maintaining they'd been made scapegoats.)
In early '99 Leavitt was in a pickle, having governed the state during an Olympic bid that the state's entire political establishment, including him, had enthusiastically backed. He and Olympic organizers needed a fresh start, someone to guide the now rudderless 2002 bobsled down a suddenly treacherous track.
The short list included then-Madison Square Garden and New York Knick chief, and future Real Salt Lake owner Dave Checketts, and former Singapore ambassador, and future Utah governor and presidential candidate Jon Huntsman, Jr.
But Romney had the inside track all along and in February 1999 he was introduced in a downtown hotel ballroom to a standing ovation by a group of stressed and exhausted Utah Olympic leaders. Romney entered stage right, with wife Ann, shaking every hand. Leavitt promised more strict rules regarding ethics and conflicts of interest.
Then the new chief wowed the crowd with a vintage Romney PowerPoint presentation, outlining a way down Utah's icy Olympic path, and this quote: "There has never been a willingness to accept as answer for failure 'Everybody else does it."
More than a few in the room that day, including yours truly, left with the distinct impression Romney would be a presidential candidate some day.
Sponsors soon were reassured and re-upped, the media moved on, the public got back on board. Eventually, Utah's games went off pretty much like organizers had promised long before the scandal erupted.
Fast forward a decade. Romney is a finalist in the run for the White House. And Leavitt, who'd gone on to leading a pair of federal agencies under George W. Bush, is now helping drive Romney's political bobsled.
Both survived the hairpin turns of the Olympic track, but in spring of 1999, staring down from the starting line, the idea it wouldn't work out like this was a "jarring" possibility.
Now, they're joining an elite club of political thrill seekers climbing into a bigger, faster bobsled, heading down the slicker, and wilder track of presidential politics.
And just like in '99, their political fates are tied together.
