The last-minute addition of a new termination clause in Utah’s contract to host the 2034 Winter Games has attracted a lot of attention. But it’s not the kind bid leaders expected when they agreed to the change sparked by a U.S. Justice Department investigation into an international doping controversy.
The new clause is being described as “blackmail” and promoting “dirty Games.”
What it does is allow the International Olympic Committee to take back the 2034 Games awarded on July 24 in Paris if “the supreme authority of the World Anti Doping Agency in the fight against doping is not fully respected or if the application of the World Anti-Doping Code is hindered or undermined” by the United States.
“I’ve obviously seen many opinions and stories,” Fraser Bullock, president and CEO of the Salt Lake City-Utah Committee for the Games, said after his recent return to the United States. “My hope is that people understand the two fundamental principles behind all this.”
Those principles, Bullock said, are supporting a “clean” Games where athletes compete without the advantage of performance-enhancing drugs, and working to resolve tensions between the Canadian-based World Anti Doping Agency, or WADA, and the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, or USADA, that have been “festering for years.”
Read more about how Utah and the United States are planning to address the issue.
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