Agenda 2020 -- keeping it real

LAUSANNE, Switzerland — The International Olympic Committee is trying, really trying, to prove that Agenda 2020, the would-be reform plan that president Thomas Bach and the members passed last December in Monaco, amounts to significant change. But when confronted with real-world realities, like the two candidates for the 2022 Winter Games, Beijing and Almaty, Kazakhstan, which made presentations here Tuesday to the members, the question must be asked: how much change, really, is in the air?

This is the predicament the IOC has put itself in, and it has only itself to blame.

To be clear, Agenda 2020 is at best aspirational. The only concrete point among the 40 that the members approved in Monaco is the development of a television channel.

The rest are in line with prior efforts at reform — in particular, a 2003 package of 117 specific recommendations that included the format of the Games, the bid process, TV coverage, the extravagance of the opening and closing ceremonies, fiscal accountability and more.

In recent days, the IOC has done self-congratulatory cartwheels over changes, purportedly spurred by Agenda 2020, to venues in Tokyo for the 2020 Games; those moves will save $1.7 billion. Saving that much money is of course to the good. But if the IOC were really that interested in saving money in the first instance it would have chosen Madrid for 2020 — where, all-in, the construction budget totaled a mere $1.9 billion.

We live in the real world. Tokyo was going to be elected because that was part of the three-way deal at the IOC session in Buenos Aires in 2013 — Tokyo for 2020, wrestling getting back on the Summer Games sports program and Bach for president against five challengers.

We live in the real world.

While it is true that Agenda 2020 has considerably strengthened Bach’s standing as IOC president — and the IOC traditionally works best when the president is firmly in charge — Agenda 2020 now has to be measured against the real world.

For the IOC, the first significant test is this 2022 process. To be real, for the IOC this 2022 process probably can’t end soon enough. After the hangover of Sochi 2014, and the $51 billion figure associated with those Games, a handful of western European cities pulled out of the 2022 contest, leaving only Beijing and Almaty.

Almaty presents a compact bid with real snow. That’s far more in line with the spirit of Agenda 2020.

But Beijing, with China’s political and economic strength, has assuredly emerged as the overwhelming favorite.

Even with Agenda 2020, the IOC stuck with the post-Salt Lake City rule that prevents the members from visiting any of the bid cities.

Of course, a significant number of the members spent 17 days, or more, in Beijing at the 2008 Summer Games and, as well, visited China last summer for the Nanjing Youth Games. Big advantage to Beijing.

Because there are no visits, the IOC prepares a report after visits to the candidate cities by what’s called an evaluation commission. The commission visited the cities earlier this year. Many of the members candidly admit they don’t read the report. It’s full of facts, figures and coded double-speak.

Our real world is full of uncertainties. In the 2022 report, 137 pages long, this is the one paragraph that jumps out, from the Beijing analysis:

“Overall, the [organizing committee] budget appears to be well thought-out and presents a viable financial plan. Upside potential on marketing revenues, strong government support and experience gained from hosting the 2008 Games suggest that the degree of financial risk should be relatively low.”

To hammer home the point that the members can sleep at night if the Games go to Beijing, there’s this as well:

The 2008 Games generated $1.2 billion in sponsorship. The 2022 estimate is only $740 million. The commission said the 2022 bid team “appears to have significantly underestimated sponsorship targets” — that is, they significantly low-balled the number.

From the report on Almaty:

“Kazakhstan has limited experience with complex high-value marketing programs relating to sporting events.”

And: “The guarantee regarding the financing of venue costs involving multiple parties, creating ambiguity on the division of responsibility including ultimate financial responsibility.”

And: “Economic factors, including low oil prices and exchange rate issues, could negatively impact Games preparations and the government’s capacity to provide financial and other support.”

How does all this jibe with Agenda 2020?

Let’s see, because the IOC put out a statement Tuesday after both bids made their presentations to the members in which Bach said, “You could see a clear focus in both bids on sustainability and affordability.”

Turning to the Beijing bid, and focusing first on sustainability:

There is no little to snow in the mountains there. The evaluation report is clear that the Chinese would have to use artificial snow, requiring diversion of water from existing reservoirs, which may impact other land uses. The proposed alpine ski and sliding venues as well as the Olympic village in the mountains are next to a nature reserve, which would “impose a number of environmental requirements.” Travel times will be long. Air pollution is a “prime concern.”

Again, from the report: “Northern China suffers from severe water stress and the Beijing-Zhangjiakou area is becoming increasingly arid.”

And: “The commission considers Beijing 2022 has underestimated the amount of water that would be needed for snowmaking for the Games but believes adequate water for Games needs could be supplied.”

It’s almost laughable, really, because the Beijing slogan is “Joyful Rendezvous upon Pure Ice and Snow.”

Pure?

From the IOC evaluation report: “The word ‘pure’ conveys China’s desire to create a cleaner environment.”

To piggyback off the Almaty slogan, “Keeping it Real”: how has that worked out since 2008? Earlier this year, there were pictures of runners wearing masks at the Beijing marathon. That was, for sure, real.

Continuing from the IOC report on Beijing: the ski jump there would require the relocation of 400 people, one of the Olympic villages another 1,100. All 1,500 have been offered “new housing or compensation.”

As for affordability?

Almaty 2022 said its infrastructure budget totals out at $1.853 billion.

For comparison, Beijing said its capital works would cost $1.511 billion. Less than Almaty! For real?

Who believes — after a reputed $40 billion was spent for 2008 — that a 2022 Beijing Winter Games, considering for starters the environmental work that needs to be done up in the mountains, would cost only $1.511 billion? Again -- for real?

There’s a new train line needed between Beijing and the mountain venues. Intriguingly, that’s not included in the $1.511 billion figure.

So now we have a new way of Olympic accounting, to compensate for the Sochi hangover.

Before Agenda 2020, there used to be there were two columns of numbers: 1. Games costs and 2. infrastructure that went with the Olympics.

Now there are three: 1. Games costs, 2. infrastructure that goes with the Games and 3. infrastructure that goes with the Games (like that train line) but is not being identified as going with the Games so that it can never, ever be counted because that way there can never, ever be a $51-billion figure ever again.

Is that even remotely honest? Either from our Chinese friends or the IOC? How is that in keeping with Agenda 2020’s demand for financial accounting and transparency?

This is what the IOC will have to answer for if the members elect Beijing, not to mention seven years of human-rights protests, just as in the run-up to 2008.

This is the opening the Kazakhs tried to take advantage of on Tuesday — hammering, time and again, on the proposition that they were “keeping it real,” reminding the members that they have snow, and lots of it.

To be real, the odds are still against Almaty. But maybe it's a race.

Kazakh prime minister Karim Massimov headed the Almaty delegation and was widely credited with giving an excellent performance, longtime IOC member Dick Pound of Canada, for instance, saying he was “very, very agreeably surprised” by the presentation.

That 2003 IOC report, with the 117 recommendations? It was headed by Pound.

Massimov told the members the bid was a “national priority,” and that Agenda 2020 aligned “perfectly” with the desire to leave “lasting economic, health and sporting legacies for future generations.”

“To put it simply,” he said, “Kazakhstan not only wants the Winter Games, we need the Winter Games.”

The vote in Kuala Lumpur is July 31.

The kabuki theater of the 2022 evaluation commission

The kabuki theater that marked the two-stop International Olympic Committee’s evaluation commission for the 2022 Winter Games wrapped up Saturday in Beijing. In this and a prior trip to Almaty, Kazakhstan, it can be said to have accomplished practically nothing of consequence. Here is why. The technical merits of these two bids are practically irrelevant, even if one might like to argue back and forth about whether the ski jump in Almaty is so close you can touch it or the ski run is so far away from Beijing it might as well be in Mongolia.

This 2022 race is the worst the IOC has conducted in its modern history.

Worse, by far, even than the 1984 Games “race,” when Los Angeles was the only entry.

Then at least you knew what was going to happen.

IOC elections can be unpredictable. Even so, this one would seem to be showing a lot of clarity already.

First and foremost, the 2008 Summer Games were in Beijing.

That means that some significant number of the IOC members have actually been to Beijing.

Moreover, the Nanjing Youth Games were just last summer. That means some number of members have been to China who knows how many times over the past several years and seen for themselves just how incredibly good the Chinese are at organizing Olympic events.

It’s true. The Chinese do grand Olympic scale stuff exceptionally well. Of course they do. This is not difficult: money plus resource plus the ability to tell people what to do equals prime-time showtime.

That gives Beijing a huge — and unfair  — advantage over Almaty.

The dumb IOC rule that says the members are not allowed to visit candidate cities means that in this context they can’t visit either Beijing or Almaty. But most have already been to Beijing. So when the time comes this July 31 to make a 2022 choice at the IOC assembly in Kuala Lumpur, and the members know from just seven years ago, or even just last summer, that the Chinese are hugely capable, what button are they most likely instinctively to push?

This dumb rule, meanwhile, cuts both ways. It’s currently three hours from Beijing to what would be the ski venues in 2022. If the members were able to sit on a bus for three long hours and think about that — even though the Chinese say they’re going to build a high-speed rail to cut the travel time to under an hour — would they still want Beijing?

How does such an expensive high-speed rail fit into Agenda 2020, the IOC’s purported reform agenda? Let’s be real. The Chinese say the rail line to the ski resort is unrelated to the Games. Who believes that? Without the Olympics, is there all of a sudden this drive to get 300 million Chinese — about the population of the entire United States — to embrace winter sports, which has abruptly, indeed over just the past few weeks, become one of the drivers of the Beijing 2022 campaign?

The Chinese are masters of propaganda. Nothing in and of itself wrong with that. All countries engage in the stuff. But the opportunity has been dropped into their laps for Beijing to become the first city in the history of the modern Olympics to stage both the Summer and Winter Games -- and this from a country that didn't even come back to the Summer Games until 1984. Incredible.

More straight talk, meanwhile: when the Chinese government promises its full resource, that’s a huge guarantee. Especially for the IOC, and its Winter Games.

The IOC’s winter franchise is wobbly. Think about this 2022 race. Stockholm, Lviv, Krakow and Oslo all pulled out. Munich, the 2018 runner-up, was going to get in but didn’t after a 2013 no-vote referendum and just a few days ago, the head of the German Olympic confederation, Alfons Hörmann, said what everybody in Olympic circles knows all too well:

“It is bitter that Almaty and Beijing are the only ones left. It is now clear that Munich would have been served the Games on a silver platter.”

With Thomas Bach, from Germany, as the IOC president — Munich would have won not just a silver platter, but one piled high with turkey and cranberries and all the fixings. Or German sausage. Or whatever.

The resource of the Chinese government is important, indeed, because the federal Kazakh authorities have been, for some reason, slow in coming to the table with their full faith and credit.

In so doing, the Kazakh government may have squandered some very valuable backstage relationships — key one-to-one ties that within senior IOC circles are well-known, indeed.

Take, for instance, this seemingly unremarkable picture, captured by Xinhua in mid-January:

It shows Sheikh Ahmad al-Fahad al-Sabah of Kuwait, one of the most influential personalities within the Olympic movement, with Chinese president Xi Jinping.

The sheikh is, among other things, head of the Assn. of National Olympic Committees. He is also head of the Olympic Council of Asia. He seemingly has a proven capacity to move dozens of votes.

Just to be obvious, both Kazakhstan and China are in Asia.

How should this simple picture be interpreted?

Until a picture shows up just like this that features the sheikh with Nursultan Nazarbayev, the president of Kazakhstan, it’s pretty easy to understand exactly what this photo says.

Especially when you add in these remarks from the Xinhua story accompanying the sheikh’s visit to Beijing, which on their face would seem completely benign but are actually anything but, you can begin to parse certain key elements of the 2022 dynamic.

“Calling China an important cooperation partner of the ANOC, Sheikh Ahmad said the country had demonstrated its capability to hold large-scale international sport events.

“The Beijing Olympics and the Nanjing Youth Olympics were the pride of China and Asia, he said.”

This is not to say that Almaty is totally foregone. The bid has a great spirit that perhaps is just what the IOC needs. It also speaks far more to Agenda 2020, if indeed that package is real instead of aspirational, than does the Beijing proposition.

There’s little to no snow up in the mountains three hours from Beijing. No worries, IOC executive director Christophe Dubi told reporters this week: the Chinese would store water in reservoirs to make artificial snow. As opposed to Almaty, where every winter there is, like, real snow, and lots of it.

“Basically,” the chairman of the evaluation commission, Russia’s Alexander Zhukov said in Beijing at the wrap-up news conference there, referring to the China plan, “it is cold enough and everywhere there is sufficient water.”

As an environmental proposition, which wins? Moreover, which fits better with Agenda 2020?

Speaking of the environment:

How the IOC can even begin to entertain more jibber-jabber about the unfathomably bad air quality in Beijing when the same noise came forth in 2001 about 2008? This week, while the IOC team was on the ground there, readings for a benchmark pollutant in the air were more than six times what the World Health Organization considers safe.

Politically, as well: imagine seven more years of local and global protests against Tibet and human rights?

Principle 6 of the Olympic Charter, which requires host cities to secure the “rights and freedoms” set out in the charter “without discrimination of any kind,” was revised in December, at the IOC session in Monaco, in line with recommendation 14 of the 40-point Agenda 2020.

Yet, as Human Rights Watch asserted last week, “discrimination — on the basis of sex, gender, ethnicity, disability and sexuality, among others — remains rampant throughout China.”

Sophie Richardson, the advocacy group’s China director, said, “Host selections can no longer be made on promises of flashy infrastructure or glitzy opening ceremonies but now must require respect for fundamental human rights. Will the IOC enforce its own standards?”

In that same spirit, International Tibet Network member groups last week issued a position paper that called on the IOC “to reject [the Beijing bid] and in the context of events in China after the 2001 decision to consider with extreme caution the bid of Kazakhstan.”

This, then, is the dilemma the IOC finds itself in — one entirely of its own making — in the aftermath of the 2022 evaluation visits, full of show and short on meaning.

It could have reopened the 2022 race when there was a window to do so. But no.

Now, having a few months ago enacted the Agenda 2020 package, it remains to be seen whether — aside from the implementation of the Olympic TV channel, which assuredly is real — the rest of it is so much talk or, like many other well-meaning IOC vehicles over the years, just so many words.

A picture, they say, is worth a thousand.

No bid visits: will 'Agenda 2020' yield real change?

The International Olympic Committee tends, generally speaking, to move with tradition and with careful adherence to process in mind. Thus perhaps, maybe, possibly the final outcome of the all-members session in December in Monaco, at which the IOC will review President Thomas Bach’s “Agenda 2020” review and potential reform plan, will produce far-reaching change. But the signal sent at the close of Thursday’s policy-making executive board meeting seems decidedly otherwise.

In announcing that the ban on IOC member visits to bid cities will remain locked into place, Bach shot down what could have been one of the most welcome changes to IOC practice, a move that could have ushered in an era of fresh transparency and governance.

Instead, even as he sketched out for reporters on a teleconference some of the highlights of the “Agenda 2020” recommendations — saying he wants the bidding procedure to be more of an “invitation” to cities than an “application for tender” and wants proposals for a more flexible sports program — the concern reasonably has to be that change will end up, in practice, being incremental or at the margins, not the sort of shake-up that quite clearly is in order.

The challenge, as is evident to everyone familiar with the Olympic movement, is that it needs to figure out the 21st century.

When, as a for instance, you only have two cities in the entire world — Beijing and Almaty, Kazakhstan — that want in on one of your flagship opportunities, the 2022 Winter Games, and when, moreover, you, the IOC, have $880 million to give away to a winning city’s organizing committee and still there are only two entries in the derby, something systemic is not right.

On a different level, the IOC needs a crash course in how today’s teens and 20-somethings talk and think so it can then speak to these young people, wherever in the world they are, in the language of their hopes and dreams.

Full details of the set of 40 Agenda 2020 recommendations — or as the IOC press release slyly put it, “20 + 20” (get it?) — were not released Thursday; they need to circulate yet to the IOC members; all 40 are due to be made public in November.

One significant change was disclosed: the introduction of an Olympic TV channel. This is, for the Olympic movement, big stuff.

The rest: unclear.

What is absolutely clear is this:

The IOC works best when the president is large and in charge.

Unquestionably, this is Bach’s IOC. That executive board meeting was supposed to run three days. They got through everything in two — less, actually, because the closing teleconference was at 2:30 in the afternoon central European time.

This is indicative of a president who had his priorities for the meeting detailed and his board, well, on board.

Ladies and gentlemen — nothing wrong with any of that. Thanks now for the good work, and go home. See you in Monaco in December for the discussion and the voting, everyone.

Presumably, by the way, the votes will be more or less worked out ahead of time. There will be a lot of phone calls between now and then.

This is the way the IOC functions most smoothly. There's nothing undue or nefarious or even just weird about it.

It took Bach’s predecessor, Jacques Rogge, years to figure this out. Rogge experimented with enhanced democracy within the IOC and — it was a mess. Elected in 2001, it perhaps wasn’t until after the 2004 Athens Olympics, maybe even a couple years later, that Rogge made it clear that, OK, I’m the boss.

Bach — this analysis is absolutely intended to be complimentary — came to office last September and, in a myriad of ways, in particular the robust manner he has sought to delineate sport’s role in a political world, wasted zero time making it plain he is running the show.

There have always been two ways to view Agenda 2020, the blueprint of which was right there in Bach’s campaign manifesto.

You could say it has left the IOC in the stasis that marked Rogge’s final year-plus in office for yet another year. (While, of course, to be thoroughly fair, the IOC got through the Winter Games in Sochi and the Youth Games in Nanjing.)

Or you could argue that Agenda 2020 gave Bach a year to get buy-in from most (no one ever gets all) of the stakeholders throughout the Olympic movement, and beyond.

If you see it this latter way — pretty darn clever, right?

It’s pretty darn clever because Bach is himself a most shrewd guy and, as well, learned a great deal from many people, including Rogge and, before that, Juan Antonio Samaranch.

The overarching question throughout Agenda 2020 has been how far Bach can — could? is willing to? — push the IOC.

This is where the bid visits issue is so telling.

The visits were banned as a response to the scandal that erupted in late 1998 amid Salt Lake City’s winning bid for the 2002 Winter Games. Ten IOC members resigned or were expelled for taking cash, gifts or other inducements.

In recent years, some have pushed to reinstate the visits.

For instance, would the IOC really have voted for Sochi if the members had been able to go there and seen — what? Virtually nothing was there in 2007. Could the IOC have saved itself a (purported) $51 billion headache if there had been visits?

Further, the real issue is one of trust — revolving around the members themselves. If you take a step back, there are two parties in the bid game, the cities and the members. The IOC long ago purged itself of those members it couldn’t trust. Remember, the cities are the ones seeking favor — they’re the ones with the gifts and inducements most readily at hand. So, now, who needs to be curbed, the cities or the members?

To that end, Bach faces a credibility gap when he flies around the world and talks to anyone — you name it, anyone from prime ministers to civic groups — about the IOC itself. Is he supposed to be taken as seriously as he could be, as he should be, when his own members can’t be trusted to visit the cities bidding for his franchise?

This is why a debate in Monaco about bid visits could have been one signaling a renewed era of IOC transparency.

Instead, Bach said Thursday to reporters: “I hope my executive board members and other members will forgive me if I say here already, but there will be no recommendation for a change in this regard.”

Change is what the IOC needs.

How much it’s going to get is what remains to be seen.

Time for IOC leadership, not lip service

Friendship, excellence and respect — these are the key values underpinning the mission of the International Olympic Committee, indeed the Olympic enterprise worldwide. Moreover, the IOC likes to say that athletes are at the center of everything everyone in the Olympic movement does. Two episodes over the weekend raise serious questions about whether both are true, or just so much lip service. And with the IOC’s policy-making executive board meeting later this week in Switzerland, the issue becomes what — if anything — the IOC is going to do about it.

The first:

Shamil Tarpischev, the head of the Russian tennis federation and an IOC member since 1994, got caught saying on a talk show that sisters Serena and Venus Williams were “brothers” and and “scary” to look at.

He denied any “malicious intent,” according to Associated Press and said his quotes had been taken out of context.

“The IOC will directly contact Mr. Tarpischev to ask him for a full explanation of his comments,” a spokesman said Monday in response to a request for comment.

The second:

Many runners at Sunday’s Beijing Marathon opted for particle-filtering surgical masks to cope with the oppressive smog blanketing the city. The smog was so bad the U.S. Embassy rated the air quality hazardous.

“Actually, on a normal day, nobody would run in such conditions," Liu Zhenyu, a runner and computer engineer, told Associated Press. “But the event is happening today, so what can we do?”

Even the People’s Daily China acknowledged conditions were bad.

Some of the runners have given up in the 2014 Beijing Marathon due to the serious air pollution in Beijing. pic.twitter.com/GoVpxcPcKH

— People's Daily,China (@PDChina) October 19, 2014

To be clear, the IOC itself had nothing to do with the Beijing Marathon.

But — Beijing and Almaty, Kazakhstan, are the only two cities in the world that are left in the race for the 2022 Winter Olympics.

So here are the choices:

Beijing, where the air is so bad — and this, six years after the 2008 Summer Games, amid promises then by the Chinese authorities that it was going to get better, instead of worse — that runners are wearing surgical masks to try to get through the running of a marathon?

Or Almaty, where remarks last week from the director of the ice rink in Astana proved unusually revealing. The Asian Winter Games in Kazakhstan in 2011 split time between Astana and Almaty; the 2022 plan, at least for now, is to focus solely on Almaty.

“We have to formulate our bid something like this: ‘The Olympic Games in Almaty — the cheapest, thriftiest, smartest Games,” said rink director Nail Nurov.

He went on to say, referring to the $51 billion figure associated with the 2014 Games, “What the Russians have done in Sochi is a serious problem,” because by spending so much, “they raised the bar to “unbelievable organizational heights.” The perceived “rule” that each edition of the Games must better the preceding one was, he said, probably why Oslo, Munich, Krakow, St. Moritz/Davos, Stockholm and Lviv had said no thanks to 2022.

Oh, and in 2013 voters in Austria said no to a 2028 Summer Games bid as well.

If you were writing a slogan, and at the risk of being perhaps overly glib, what would you have?

Beijing 2022: “Most Polluted Games Ever And No Mountains Remotely Close.”

Almaty 2022: “Cheapest Games Ever.”

To use an American saying: this is no way to run a railroad.

Three times in recent weeks, after Oslo dropped out, reducing the number of purportedly viable candidates from three to two, this space has urged the IOC to consider whether the 2022 campaign as it stands now is best practices, and to put the whole thing on pause for six months.

The IOC has said it is committed to its process.

In ordinary times, that would be a defensible position.

As this space has pointed out, however, this is an extraordinary situation, and extraordinary times call for an extraordinary re-think — and leadership.

Lest all this be seen as the promotion of a 2022 late-stage bid by the U.S. Olympic Committee from Denver and Salt Lake City — there is no signal that is in the works. The USOC is intent on 2024, if that still seems do-able after the IOC’s all-members vote on President Thomas Bach’s “Agenda 2020” review and potential reform plan in December.

What has to be asked, however, is why other cities aren’t even being given a chance to see if they might be interested. Is the IOC quietly doing due diligence? Shouldn’t it be?

To reiterate: the IOC has $880 million to give to the winning city, which would cover nearly half, if not more, of a prudent organizing committee’s operating costs.

When Oslo dropped out, the IOC said it intended “to communicate, to communicate, to communicate” about the advantages of bidding for the Games.

It has been nearly three weeks now.

There has been no such communication.

There has been an announcement that the IOC intends to meet with sports officials in Norway about what went wrong there.

Why meet with sports officials? If you want a debrief, fine. But in this context, what authority do such sports officials have? It was the government that pulled the plug. The politicians are the ones paying the bills. If you want to do something constructive, meet with the politicians, as awkward, weird, uncomfortable, whatever it might be.

Remember: the Lillehammer Youth Games are in 2016. Who’s paying for those?

As Bach said in September in South Korea at the Asian Games — and it is a profound mystery why more people have not picked up on this huge statement — sports and politics absolutely do mix.

Which leads, in its way, back to Tarpischev.

Tarpischev is close to Russian president Vladimir Putin. When Bach was elected IOC president, the very first call he — that is, Bach — took was from Putin.

So whatever is going to happen is going to be complex and layered.

Tarpischev, 66, has already been fined the maximum $25,000 and banned from the WTA Tour for a year.

According to RT.com, Tarpischev appeared Oct. 7 on a show called “Evening Urgant” — the host’s name is Ivan Urgant — with former WTA player Elena Dementieva.

This was part of the dialogue:

“I was at the Olympics and saw Maria Sharapova play her … him …," Urgant said.

“… One of the Williams brothers,” Tarpischev finished.

Can there be little question that his remarks were not only insensitive but also sexist and racist?

Serena Williams certainly thought so, adding, “I thought they were, in a way, bullying.”

Sharapova, who has played Fed Cup for Russia throughout her career, said of Tarpischev’s comments, “I think they were very disrespectful and uncalled-for, and I’m glad that many people have stood up, including the WTA. It was very inappropriate, especially in his position and all the responsibilities that he has not just in sport but being part of the Olympic committee. It was just really irresponsible on his side.”

Tarpischev said, according to RT.com, “I am sorry that the joke which was translated into English out of its context of a comedy show drew so much attention. I don’t think this situation is worth all the hoopla because those words were said without any malice.”

He also lamented, the website said, that the situation was “hyped to an absurd level,” adding that Russians do not file complaints when there are jokes elsewhere about “vodka, balalaika and bears.”

Friendship, excellence and respect is a long way away from vodka, balalaika and bears.

Tolerance and making the world even just a little bit better — this is what the International Olympic Committee, indeed the entire Olympic movement, piece by piece, day by day, person by person, is (supposed to be) about.

Whether or not Tarpischev intended to hurt anyone is not entirely relevant. In this case, the person whose feelings are at issue is Serena Williams. She is a big person and doesn’t need anyone to defend her in this sort of context but, honestly — four Olympic gold medals, three in doubles with her sister, and then of course the thrilling singles victory at Wimbledon in 2012?

Remember, the athletes are at the center of everything, right?

Tarpischev, whether he or Putin like it or not, has to be held to a higher standard. Too often the IOC is criticized for reaching for a utopia of sorts in which sport can not make a difference in showing the world how to get along. This incident offers a teachable moment.

To begin, the International Tennis Federation has been deadly silent on this issue. That is indefensible. The WTA has taken strong action. So should the ITF.

So, too, the IOC.

European soccer has been marked by ugly incidents of racism. Here is the perfect example for the IOC to demonstrate that words, even if meant in jest, which these arguably were not, can be just as hurtful as, say, throwing a banana on a soccer pitch.

In a world in which racism and sexism are regrettably yet virulent, the IOC can, and should, provisionally suspend Tarpischev.

You want the legal hook? He has brought the IOC into disrepute with his remarks. The IOC ethics commission can take it from there.

You want common sense? Everyone knows that hurtful words are the trigger for more.

And that saying something was just a joke is often just a lame way of covering up.

Again, extraordinary times call for extraordinary leadership. If the IOC means what it says, then there has to be more than just lip service.