"Please stay in the room. There is plenty of ice cream left and snacks and beverages."

This was the anything-but-grandiose public statement made by International Olympic Committee (IOC) President Jacques Rogge straight after announcing a few days ago that the race to win the 2018 Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games had been achieved in the first round of balloting.

It was hardly a remark to send shockwaves through the Olympic Movement and prompt calls for an immediate inquiry into corruption. More, perhaps, akin to a dinner party host pleading with guests to stay a while longer; or a thoughtful parent giving gentle advice to an innocent child as to how to pass the time.

But that is exactly the point. With over an hour to go before the official announcement of Pyeongchang's victory and with no second ballot needed, Rogge had to find the right words to keep his IOC colleagues in the cavernous Durban conference room.

He could have shut off the sound system from inquisitive reporters and told delegates behind closed doors not to leak the name of whoever had won. He could have been far more formal.

Instead he asked them to simply be patient and wait for the outcome. Rogge was not talking down to IOC members. Far from it. He was treating them with the kind of relaxed and respectful informality that has become the hallmark of IOC proceedings in recent years.


Tellingly, sitting a few feet away from Rogge was Sepp Blatter, not for once wearing his FIFA President's hat as such, attending instead as an IOC member. Was he listening?

Blatter, as everyone knows, has become embroiled in the biggest bribery scandal in FIFA history, preceded by the most contentious World Cup vote in living memory.

It was that vote, which controversially selected Russia and Qatar as World Cup hosts, that prompted Blatter to announce new reforms for future World Cup elections, to open up the voting to the entire FIFA membership – big countries and small - instead of giving carte blanche to an elite cartel of self-important and self-interested Executive Committee members.

As someone who has covered World Cup votes for years, it was so refreshing to witness the transparency and lack of covert skullduggery with which the IOC now operates.

Some things of course remain sacrosanct. The IOC, like FIFA, votes by secret ballot and Franz Beckenbauer, as reported by insidethegames, was distinctly unhappy with the way some of the IOC members ignored Munich's case.


But listening to the three 2018 Winter Olympic bid teams being quizzed from the floor in open forum straight after their final presentations, with IOC members needing to have certain i's dotted and t's crossed before deciding which way to vote, was in stark contrast to the flawed, behind-closed-doors system used hitherto by FIFA.

Revealing the numbers of votes each candidate received within minutes of the outcome was another element that has become de rigueur for the Olympic Movement yet which caused such a rumpus in Zurich last December.

Dick Pound, one of the most respected IOC members, pulled no punches as to why his organisation had to act when it did.

"We got ourselves into deep trouble," Pound told insidethegames. "In our case we either got the solution right or the Olympic Movement was in danger. The process seems to be working now. FIFA clearly have a problem. Maybe here is a model for them."

One can only hope Blatter took note of the entire process in Durban, coming as it did six months after FIFA's wretched performance over 2018 and 2022.

Andrew Warshaw is a former sports editor of The European, the newspaper that broke the Bosman story in the 1990s, the most significant issue to shape professional football as we know it today. Before that, he worked for the Associated Press for 13 years in Geneva and London. He is now the chief football reporter for insideworldfootball, our sister site. You can follow him on Twitter by clicking here.