Big Games Hunter

Respite from Andrew Jennings's dam burst comes from a long drag of his rolled cigarette. In his London apartment he's fielding calls from Japan, his publishers and UK newspapers. He's also writing a script for the BBC and an article for the Guardian. The Times have just left. He's not too hopeful there. He washes over you with outrage, facts, anecdotes, expletives. The subject of the Olympics is obsessively dear to his heart.

"No one had told me that Samaranch (IOC president Juan Antonio) was an old arm waver," he says. "Here was a man who I thought that if he doesn't reject fascism, he shouldn't be allowed into polite society. He shouldn't be met by elected government ministers and you wouldn't take him home to meet your mum because he's a disgrace."

Jennings is an Olympic game hunter. International Olympic Committee (IOC) presidents, committee members, executives, public relations "blast faxers" and sycophants. The whole sickly sporting mix of global wannabes. Jennings has rolled them over, called them names, stuck sticks in their eyes, spooked their sponsors and has been part of the biggest shakedown the IOC have ever had to face.

And he hasn't stopped. His combative nature is to wade deeper into the morass. Seek out more goons. Twist more ears. Jennings has been chasing them since he walked away from World In Action, a six-year stint on police corruption in the flying squad and an up-close look at Chechnya gangsterism. He thought he'd left it all but he finds himself back in familiar territory.

He comes from the spadework side of journalism, where facts talk and opinions land you in court and occasionally the grave. He left the police and their drugs, peeped in at the sordid world of then International Amateur Athletics Association president Primo Nebiolo, and saw how some officials didn't even try hard to cover up how they cheated. "I did a film on him for World in Action. That was easy. Dope cover-ups, cheating, the Giovanni Evangelisti thing in the long jump. We'd footage of the guy putting the marker in the sand."

Then, looking around for a "big subject" where there were few foot prints, Jennings came across a piece in a broadsheet in the run-in to the Seoul Games of 1988. This guy called Samaranch? Jennings had never heard of him.

It was an elegantly-written profile of the IOC president and it contained one line that caught his eye. The piece stated that Samaranch was Franco's sports minister in the 1970s.

"Here was the conflict journalists are always looking for," he says. "As I saw it, it was the public face of Olympic idealism and the private face of unreconstructed nazism.

"I hired a researcher in Barcelona because I didn't speak Spanish, who got me the first two pictures (Samaranch in fascist uniform). It was all there. I'd also a few connections with the Catalan left. They were happy to help. From there on, it has been about digging up things, working."

If the International Olympic Committee (IOC) had their way, Jennings would be crossing off the days he had left to serve on a Swiss prison wall. The IOC tried to muzzle him, but he rode out that storm. A five-year suspended sentence from a Lausanne court for the defamation of Samaranch and IOC members has jokingly become a badge of honour. It's the only wound that the richest gentlemen's club in the world has been able to inflict. Jennings didn't contest the case because he felt he knew what the outcome was going to be from a court located in Samaranch's adopted city of residence. The book had been to 40 other countries. The only writ, he claims, was issued in Lausanne.

Jennings maintains that the IOC is so profoundly corrupt that it should be abolished and that its president is an incorrigible fascist. Bolshie and intellectually pugnacious, Jennings claims that the IOC "is not about sport, it is about money, politics and crime".

That is a theory that might have gained credence at a meeting in the spring of 1999 in Washington DC. Senator John McCain, candidate for the Republican presidential nomination and chairman of the US Senate's commerce committee which supervises Olympic affairs, invited Samaranch to come and talk to them after the scandals of the Salt Lake City Olympic bid had become public. His Excellency, as he likes to be called, declined and sent Anita de Frantz, an American IOC vice-president and the daughter of a civil rights activist, in his place. Samaranch clearly didn't like the look of the big hitters from the US Senate, but his arm was twisted as the US provides between 60 and 70 per cent of the IOC's finances.

After an in-house inquiry, the IOC suggested that certain members were victims of predator cities and accepted improper gifts. A few heads rolled. In the eyes of the IOC, the matter had been cleared up.

Senator George Mitchell, hardened by his years of knocking heads at Hillsborough, accompanied McCain as part of the investigating team. He was not impressed.

"In the absence of swift and meaningful reform," declared Mitchell, "the Olympic movement runs the risk of becoming a testimonial to excess, to elitism, to money."

McCain echoed the view. Short of calling for the head of the president, the Americans merely pointed out that they provided the money and that from now on they would be watching how it was spent.

Jennings had been invited to brief McCain and his colleagues after sending them a copy of his previous book, The Lords Of The Rings. In his latest work, The Great Olympic Swindle, the allegations against IOC impropriety come served with documentation and eye witness accounts. Unable to accept that their organisation is even moderately corrupt, or that they have shown anything but blind indifference to the environmental and social issues that surround the staging of summer and winter games, the IOC finally hired a public relations company to sweeten their image.

Hill and Knowlton were the PR outfit who sold America the idea that tobacco wasn't dangerous. Co-ordinating the operation for the IOC is Dick Hyde, a man who had spent more than 30 years controlling corporate crises for Hill and Knowlton. He acquired hero status in the industry for handling public concern over the Three Mile Island crisis, the worst commercial nuclear accident in US history.

Just how Hill and Knowlton will use their unquestionable expertise to deal with the latest allegations of IOC infiltration by the Russian mafia, absurdly crude fixing of Olympic boxing medals, environmental destruction of the Japanese countryside, massive land strokes, sexual favours for visiting IOC dignitaries, and a president who refuses to accept the norms of 21st century democracy in his organisation, will be interesting.

Jennings believes the IOC won't sue because he has the FBI files, the mug shots, the IOC minutes of private meetings and the backing of a number of athletes and officials who have been repulsed by their experiences. Fight-rigging and dope cover-ups may well hurt IOC sensitivities but Jennings never wavers.

"The IOC cannot be reformed . . . I mean Idi Amin's army chief Nyangweso (Francis), what the hell is he doing there? So he was a good boxer . . . so?" he says. "Why does the IOC spit in the face of this world ballot box phenomenon? They say they have women in the organisation. Women? The women's movement was going well over 30 years ago."

The cigarette is finished and his heavily pregnant partner Clare, co-writer of the book, potters downstairs. He jumps up to pump a mobile phone which won't stop. Still wonderfully effusive, he will not stop either.

"The god-like status of athleticism which de Coubertin (founder of the modern Olympic movement) brought in is pagan and it is objectionable and it stands between us and being able to recognise what our decent drug-free athletes do well."

In his last shot, he defers to a piece written in the New York Times on May 17th of this year by columnist Jere Longman. "The Olympic Games," wrote Longman, "are as decayed as a bad tooth, perhaps facing permanent extraction sometime in the future."

Jennings wishes he'd thought of the line himself.