NBC Gets Sydney, Salt Lake Games : Olympics: Unique $1.25-billion bid may have been designed to shut out Disney.

In a stunning move, the International Olympic Committee and NBC on Monday agreed on a $1.25-billion deal that awards the U.S. television rights for both the 2000 Summer Olympics at Sydney, Australia, and the 2002 Winter Olympics at Salt Lake City to NBC.

Dick Pound, IOC TV Committee chairman, said NBC bid $705 million for the 2000 Summer Games and $545 million for the 2002 Winter Games.

This move came on the heels of two other billion-dollar television deals.

Exactly a week earlier, Disney and Capital Cities announced a $19-billion merger that will give Disney control of Cap Cities-owned ABC. Two days after that deal, Westinghouse bid $5.4 billion to buy CBS.

Now NBC has made the IOC an offer too good to pass up, and it may have been prompted by the Disney-Cap Cities merger.

ABC and NBC were working jointly on an Olympic bid until Disney’s takeover of ABC, and that deal, according to sources, is what caused NBC to strike out on its own, and effectively shut out ABC, as well as CBS and Fox.

ABC spokesman Mark Mandell confirmed Monday night that there had been discussions between NBC and ABC, although, he said, “both parties understood there were anti-trust considerations.”

Now Disney is out of the Olympic picture, at least through 2002.

The IOC is not bound to open the bidding. It just normally does it that way because it makes good business sense.

Bids were expected on the Sydney Games next month, but bids for the Salt Lake City Games weren’t expected for two more years.

NBC’s $705-million bid for Sydney is $249 million more than NBC will pay to televise the 1996 Summer Games in Atlanta, and the $545-million bid for Salt Lake City is $170 million more than CBS will pay for the 1998 Winter Games at Nagano, Japan.

NBC initially bid on only Sydney, with Salt Lake City thrown in on Friday. The NBC bid stipulated that the IOC accept it right away without open bidding.

“If they didn’t accept it by this past weekend, it would be withdrawn,” said Dick Ebersol, NBC Sports president, who also said there was a stipulation that it be kept secret from the other networks.

Fox was known to be keenly interested in the Sydney Games because Fox owner Rupert Murdoch is a native of Australia.

Pound said he informed the other networks Monday, just before the announcement.

“Their reaction was disappointment and a reluctant admiration for the initiative that NBC took,” he said.

The deal for two Games took less than a week to put together.

“Last Tuesday, there were 20 or 25 of us huddled in Atlanta for a production meeting,” Ebersol said, when NBC President Bob Wright called, asking to go over the numbers for a Sydney bid.

Ebersol and Wright met the next morning, and “in the course of that meeting, Mr. Wright suggested we might be better off to go for two Olympics.”

Wright went to the phone to call his boss, Jack Welch, chairman of General Electric, which owns NBC.

“The decision was made in a half-hour,” Ebersol said. “We took Mr. Welch’s private plane to Sweden that night to meet with the IOC president.”

IOC President Juan Antonio Samaranch was in Goteborg, Sweden, at the track and field World Championships. On Thursday, Ebersol and Randy Falco, NBC operations president, met with Samaranch and were back in Montreal the next day to meet with Pound.

“By 4 p.m. Friday, we signed the agreement,” Ebersol said.

NBC’s deal includes plans to use its two cable networks, CNBC and the newer America’s Talking, to share in the coverage.

The Associated Press contributed to this story.