A leading sports official has spoken of an endemic culture of bribery and corruption in the Olympic movement, claiming he was involved in paying bribes to committee members to secure taekwondo’s place at the Games as well as handing out $500,000 in cash to rig an election.
In an interview with The Times, the official has detailed a culture in which payments were made in exchange for gold medals in World Championship and Olympic boxing. He says bribes of as much as $1 million were demanded to guarantee Olympic boxing gold at Athens 2004, and that Azerbaijan paid $10 million in the form of a loan after being offered a gold medal at London 2012. He also has photographic evidence of cash he was offered to fix World Championship bouts.
The whistleblower is Ho Kim, a 66-year-old South Korean who was the head of marketing and PR at the World Taekwondo Federation and then executive director of the amateur international boxing association (AIBA) for a decade.
● The cash, cars and hookers that helped Taekwondo make the Olympics
● ‘I have cancer, I could die . . . I need the truth to come out’
He says that he was directly involved in bribing Olympic officials while working for two of the most influential figures in the history of the International Olympic Committee (IOC). The first was Dr Kim Un-yong, founding president of the global taekwondo federation, who became a vice-president of the IOC; the second was Wu Ching-kuo (CK), a former global president of amateur boxing who joined the IOC’s executive board in 2012.
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Ho Kim describes himself as the “delivery boy” for Dr Kim and Wu as they sought to grow their influence in global sport, saying he was handing cash in envelopes to corrupt officials in exchange for votes.
Taekwondo was included in the Olympics for the first time in 2000 after a vote at the IOC congress in 1994. The Korean martial arts discipline had repeatedly tried and failed to gain a seat at the Olympic table for two decades before that.
Ho Kim says that in the build-up to the 1994 congress, Dr Kim instructed his staff to do whatever was necessary to secure IOC support for the sport. Ho Kim says he arranged for two Daewoo cars to be sent to Lamine Keita, an IOC member from Mali, while other officials with voting rights were bought off with cash in brown envelopes, often flying into Seoul to collect their money.
Officials were also reimbursed for first-class airline tickets that had already been bought for them by Dr Kim. “Taekwondo started as an Olympic sport from Sydney in 2000 because of that,” Ho Kim said. The names of the officials he claims to have bribed have been shared with this newspaper.
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World Taekwondo said: “We urge that all evidence behind these allegations is shared with the World Taekwondo Integrity Committee so a proper investigation can be conducted.”
Keita, the now deceased Malian official, was later expelled by Olympic chiefs over his involvement in the Salt Lake City bribery scandal, when IOC officials were accused of taking gifts from the organising committee during the bid for the 2002 Winter Olympics.
Ho Kim says he was directly involved in bribing Olympic officials TINA HSU FOR THE TIMES
Dr Kim, who Ho Kim says was behind the taekwondo bribery case in 1994, was a South Korean businessman later forced to resign from the IOC in disgrace after being jailed for embezzlement and bribery. He died in 2017.
Ho Kim was interviewed by The Times over four days in Seoul and supported his claims with hundreds of documents and testimonies from other officials. In boxing, Ho Kim says Wu offered Azerbaijan a gold medal at London 2012 in return for a $10 million loan to support a new boxing initiative. In the end Azerbaijan did not win a boxing gold at the Games.
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Ho Kim provided pictures of what he says was a $20,000 bribe offered to him to manipulate bouts at the 2011 World Amateur Boxing Championships in Baku. He says it was part of a cash-for-medals culture that existed in boxing.
Wu said that he “never authorised” any illicit payments.
Ho Kim is prepared to repeat his claims in a public inquiry into corruption in Olympic sport, and says he is speaking out now because of the IOC’s threat to remove boxing from the Games programme. The rebranded International Boxing Association (IBA) is suspended by the IOC and the sport, which has been part of the Olympics since 1904, is not listed in the programme for Los Angeles 2028.
Before this week’s IBA presidential election — as part of an extraordinary congress — the IOC has expressed concern about the governance of the organisation under the president, Russia’s Umar Kremlev.
Kremlev, who last year enlisted the services of the Canadian lawyer Richard McLaren to conduct an investigation into corruption within the international federation, has rejected the IOC’s criticism. Ho Kim argues that the governing body is being punished for the corruption that took place in amateur boxing during Wu’s tenure, when, he claims, it was the IOC that pushed for the Taiwanese architect to become the president in the first place in 2006.
He believes it is unfair for boxing to be punished because it was actually the IOC that parachuted an individual he describes as “corrupt” into the sport via a rigged election. “There are a lot of dirty stories hidden but what the IOC is doing to boxing right now, they also have to do something to clean their position also,” Ho Kim said.
He says Wu, described in a recently published independent three-part report by McLaren as a “key actor” in allowing corruption to flourish at AIBA, was asked directly by Jacques Rogge, then the IOC president, to join the race to become president of the organisation in 2006. Wu accepts he spoke to Rogge but denies he told him to run.
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Ho Kim says that bribes to get Wu elected were paid by his campaign team directly to national federation delegates at the 2006 AIBA election in the Dominican Republic.
The election was marred by the death of a delegate, whose body was found at the bottom of a hotel lift shaft. Ho Kim claims thousands of US dollars in cash were distributed in envelopes before the vote, with Wu up against the sitting president, Anwar Chowdhry. “In our campaign office in Santo Domingo people arrive and we have to bribe,” Ho Kim said. “We won, 83 votes to 79.”
When asked if he had a response to criticism of him in the McLaren report, Wu said: “I wanted to take legal action. However, my wife advised me, ‘Let bygones be bygones.’ ”
The IOC did not respond to any specific allegations made by Ho Kim. “Anybody who has good governance concerns with regard to IOC members is invited to contact the IOC ethics commission,” a spokesman said.
The Azerbaijan Boxing Federation was approached for comment.