It was a strange, unexplained footnote amidst all the antipodean delirium. On the night in Monte Carlo when Sydney pipped Beijing for the right to host the 2000 Olympics, David Sibandze went missing.

Sydney won by two votes in the fourth round, having been two behind after round one and seven behind after round two. After the second voting session ended, David Sibanze of Swaziland got up and walked out the door and climbed into a waiting Mercedes.

Sydney claimed he was one of theirs. So did Beijing. Curious.

There were other little mysteries. Ahmed Touny, the Egyptian delegate, had stayed home, sick. Ivan Slavkov, the Bulgarian member, was detained at home while under investigation for fraud. Both were votes which Beijing had been counting on.

Whatever went on, three IOC members who had been wined, dined and feted from bidding city to bidding city for the previous three years were absent when the final vote was taken.

That was September 1993. Last week, Sibandze resigned from the International Olympic Committee, sparing himself embarrassment at the expense of lifestyle. A day or two later, John Coates, the ebullient head of the Sydney Olympic Committee, admitted to offering bribes to two IOC members the night before the vote was taken. Sibandze has said goodbye to all that, two other IOC members have resigned along with him, and six more face the sack.

Back in 1993 Frank Sarlor, Sydney's Lord Mayor, reviewed the Monte Carlo lobbying process thus: "We went to the brothel de Paris every morning to prostitute ourselves and try and get one more vote for Sydney." Nevertheless, the world proclaimed the Sydney win to be a victory for sport over politics. We know now it was a win for one sort of small-time corruption over a bigger, more pervasive kind.

There was just the faintest whiff then. The Chinese uncovered a letter sent by Bruce Baird, the Australian minister in charge of the bid, recommending the son of the Romanian IOC member to be interviewed for an engineering job. In the face of such a "victory for sport" the letter was dismissed as petty stuff.

Rightly so. Even Manchester, which has taken the high moral ground this week, seeking recompense for the glorious failure of its two dull but competent bids, has admitted to similar practices. The playing pitch was slanted that way, so that's how cities played the game. This week's turmoil is about changing the players but not the pitch.

The failure of the current debate is that the overall philosophy of the Olympic movement or of sport generally is not being addressed. Who owns these assets to humanity? How do we gain them back? What do we want sport to stand for? If we tolerate drugs cheats, why not bent administrators?

The IOC could resign en masse tomorrow and be replaced by choirboys but the Olympic movement would still be in thrall to its television and corporate paymasters, would still be covering up positive drugs tests, enslaving itself to wealth instead of health.

It's natural. The IOC has undergone such a severe personality change in the past 20 years that the fusty Corinthians who used to run world sport from inside their blazers wouldn't recognise the institution. First-class tickets, top hotels, fat expense accounts. The IOC lifestyle makes tri-residential EU commissioners look like pitiful paupers.

Juan Antonio Samaranch, the president of the Olympic movement who presided over these changes, lives these days like Don Corleone without the hardware, straining his old snake eyes to follow the machinations of sports movers and shakers.

Most worrying to him are the quiet men in the suits: Dick Pound, the Canadian lawyer who has played his hand well in the current crisis; Dr Jacques Rogge, the Belgian who has done likewise; and Petyer Thalberg of Finland, who has slipped somewhat. We fret about ethics. They worry about positioning.

The young IOC members have been waiting for this: Samaranch hoist by his own petard. Scandal is the only means by which an autocracy like the IOC can change itself. Despite the movement's acceptable claim to be a world organisation, ownership of the Olympics has long devolved to a private club which makes its own rules. Samaranch, having ushered in the era of big business, has stocked the IOC pond in such a way that he can be removed only by death or disgrace. And when (as Samaranch did) you cut your political teeth as a loyal Franco fascist, disgrace isn't always separable from setback.

Samaranch will hang on for now, but can the IOC reform itself? Probably not. It can produce the illusion of reform though, swearing fidelity once again to the high ideals which it uses as an armour in the slippery world of commerce. The games are doomed to be a gravy train decked out with laurels though. To paraphrase Yeats: graft comes wearing as its mask all the virtues.

Bribes are not the big problem. Undoubtedly the IOC can get 15 people of integrity and expertise to assess its potential sites but it can't stop the Olympic movement from being the whore of big business and bad politics.

Samaranch is often credited with having saved a comatose movement after the Munich massacre of 1972 and the Montreal bankruptcy four years later. Yet Moscow and Los Angeles took place as giant spartakiads celebrating the political philosophy of the host nations. The following three Olympics were bought by big business and influence.

Palms were greased by Salt Lake City and Sydney, but what are we to make of the role of Adidas in the procuring of the 1988 games for Seoul? Horst Dassler, the managing director of Adidas, actually served as marketing director for those games. The story, never effectively denied, is that Horst guaranteed Barcelona 30 IOC votes in its bid for the 1992 games if the Spaniards urged their extensive contacts to vote for Seoul.

The South Koreans got the 1988 games, the Spaniards won the 1992 games. Then Atlanta, home of CocaCola, wrenched the centennial games from the hands of Athens. Those cities bribing with small wads of cash and scholarships must curse their innocence.

The corruption of the Olympic movement exists on two levels, the micro and the macro. Vigilance and procedure can eliminate small-scale graft. Nothing will quench the needs of corporate money, though. We can hope that the IOC makes itself more accountable and that public bodies demand more transparency.

Short-term cures suggest themselves. Samaranch should go soon. That he was ever allowed to bury his Falangist past to become leader of the world's greatest sporting organisation is a measure of the decline of idealism. Cocooned in the Lausanne Palace hotel, and tended by sycophants and time-servers, Samaranch is increasingly remote from the realities of modern sport. He embarrassed the Olympic movement greatly last year with his confused pronouncements on the drug issue. The great scandals which have sullied the Games in recent times have taken place under his watch.

The council itself needs streamlining. And the practice of inducting the fantastically wealthy as adornments to the set-up should be abandoned entirely. A smaller IOC made up of working committees would make its own demands as to calibre.

The secret ballot system for host city selection should be scrapped. The proposed 15-person assessment group should report in detail and decide by consensus. No more selection as spectator sport.

The practice of lobbying must become defunct by becoming a disqualifiable offence. The splendid hubris of the Olympian nabobs should no longer be swelled by the sight of prime ministers, royals and presidents prostrating themselves before them.

The instinct of Olympianism is towards giganticism - that has to be reversed. The process of selecting sports, selecting cities and selecting sponsors has always been blatantly political and openly abused.

Reform must ripple from the top down. There is a New York story about old men and whores which comes to mind when watching Samaranch hanging on to power by the tips of his liver-spotted fingers.

In Manhattan there was an ancient codger of a judge called Hymie Bushel, whose boast was that he had never sent a prostitute to prison. On the day Hymie announced his retirement a few court orderlies were clearing up the court when an old prostitute walked in and inquired if it was true that Hymie Bushel was retiring.

"Yes, it is."

"Well, tell him I'm getting out of the game too, then."

If Juan were to leave us now, quite a few lesser harlots might get the message too.