The only "best-ever" designation the 2002 Winter Games will earn from the new International Olympic Committee president is for housing for athletes.
IOC President Jacques Rogge said after he was elected last July that he would not rank each Games. His predecessor, Juan Antonio Samaranch, made the often-controversial remarks.
But at a breakfast meeting Sunday at the Little America Hotel with a small group of reporters from national and international news agencies and papers ? including the Deseret News ? Rogge was willing to bestow the title on the University of Utah housing.
"I think it was the best Olympic Village ever," Rogge said.
And he should know. That's where he stayed through the Games ? another departure from the Samaranch regime. The rest of the IOC had rooms at the Little America Hotel.
Rogge said he slept "in a good bed, in a quiet room. A little room, but we had everything we needed. It's a very good village. The food is excellent. The recreation areas are very good. Athletes are very happy."
As for the rest of Salt Lake's Games, Rogge would only say at breakfast that he was "extremely happy" and that the Games "really were very very, very good."
During his speech at the closing ceremonies Sunday, he said that the "people of America, Utah and Salt Lake City, you have given the world superb Games."
Earlier in the day, he told reporters that the Salt Lake Organizing Committee "has done a superb job," citing success in transportation, technology, security and even the weather.
Ratings for television coverage around the world of the Games "have exploded," Rogge said, citing as an example the 7 million viewers a day in Germany tuning into curling competitions.
Rogge wasn't so generous in his comments about the 1996 Summer Games in Atlanta, the last America city to host the Olympics. "The last Games in Atlanta were not good Games ? bad organization. This has been corrected here."
The IOC had no regrets about choosing Salt Lake City to host the Games, Rogge said, despite allegations Salt Lake bidders tried to buy the votes of IOC members with more than $1 million in cash and gifts.
"We always thought Salt Lake City was the best choice, and you have been vindicated today," he said. Salt Lake City "would have won legitimately without all the scandals that have occurred."
Rogge said the role of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was "absolutely invisible to us and to the rest of Olympic family and, I would think, to the spectators."
SLOC sought to avoid the "Mormon Games" label, going so far as to toast the success of Salt Lake's Games last year with champagne and orange juice at a press conference called to denounce the description.
Rogge said he was aware of the church's support for SLOC, which included donating the use of a downtown parking lot for the Olympic medals plaza. But he hasn't met with any top church leaders.
"They didn't seek contact with me, and I didn't seek contact with them," he said. "They were never pushing issues, you know, absolutely not."
Rogge ? who is Belgian ? called it "striking" that so many of the volunteers "obviously are Mormons" who learned a foreign language while serving a mission for the church.
He said that was a factor in the success of the Games.
"What I have found here is that the knowledge of foreign languages by volunteers was extremely high," he said, noting many of his colleagues have made the same observation.
"I have been greeted at many venues in Dutch, which is not a universally known language, (but it is) my mother language, at least 20 times by different volunteers who told me, 'I have been on a mission in your country.' "
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