Andy Spalding, an academic and author who studies corruption at sporting "mega-events" such as the Olympics or the football World Cup, says the French authorities are showing they are serious about delivering a clean Games. Three preliminary investigations are looking into possible favouritism in the awarding of some 20 contracts worth tens of millions of euros, while a fourth - revealed by AFP on 6 February - is examining the salary of chief organiser Tony Estanguet. 

In an interview with AFP, Spalding, a professor at the US-based University of Richmond School of Law, explained the troubled history of Olympic corruption and why he believes the Paris Games could mark the start of a "new era" of cleaner international sport.

When did corruption in the Olympic Games first come to attention?

The 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City was the first time that hard evidence of corruption was made public. Before 2002, we knew there was corruption, but we couldn't prove it, and the world was largely resigned to corruption. Then, in the late 1990s, there's what's sometimes called the "corruption eruption" - a period when the world suddenly starts to pay a lot of attention to corruption issues. 

There are new international conventions; there's an explosion of scholarship. There are scandals and resignations, new enforcement initiatives. What we saw in the following Games was not just incidents of corruption, but systemic corruption. Russia with the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics was probably the most egregious example of this, where it is estimated that billions of dollars were misappropriated in the course of the event.

How has it affected the Olympic movement?

The corruption scandals have done enormous damage to the brand of the International Olympic Committee. This was most obvious in 2015 when the 2022 Winter Games were being awarded and the only credible candidate, China, was a country with almost no winter sports tradition. Other countries simply didn't want it because of the systemic corruption and the cost overruns. 

The IOC needs a sustainable business model, so they adopted reforms that attacked the two different components of corruption: one is the corruption at the IOC level, particularly with the Executive Committee, which meant they had to reform the bidding process. Then the second step was to tackle corruption at the host level: the organising committee, the city, the national Olympic committee.

What is the new "anti-corruption clause" in the contract with the Olympic host city?

France is the first country to have an enforceable contractual obligation to adopt anti-corruption compliance programmes. Nobody knows what it means yet, but starting with Paris, then the 2026 Winter Games and Los Angeles in 2028, we will have these contractual obligations each time. You start with a contractual requirement. The next step is to provide some guidance on what that means. 

Then we need operations and some enforcement for breach of contract. When all of these steps are completed, then the clause will mean something. When a convention or a statute is adopted, there is a time lag before enforcement. The law that was the catalyst for global anti-corruption enforcement, the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, was on the books for 25 years before we did anything with it.

What else is different about Paris 2024?

France won the Olympics in 2017, the same year it adopted a new highly innovative new anti-corruption law, Sapin II. This created an independent requirement for companies to adopt anti-corruption compliance programmes to prevent things like bribery, favouritism or extortion. In most parts of the world, anti-corruption compliance is not a legal requirement.

France applied all this to the Olympic Games. They placed the organising committee under the jurisdiction of the new French Anti-Corruption Agency (AFA), whose sole purpose is to help companies set up compliance programmes. In its review of the Organising Committee, the AFA has uncovered issues that were potential red flags.

It sends these red flags to the prosecutors, and the prosecutors are now investigating. What is this evidence of? Systemic corruption or an innovative anti-corruption initiative working really well? It depends on whether anything it is verified. And if it's verified, how serious it is. I think Paris could mark the beginning of a new era of anti-corruption law enforcement and anti-corruption measures at the Games.