For the past six weeks, this space has been dark. For the past six weeks, per doctor’s orders, the mandate has been to do nothing — or, to be practical, as little as possible. Thus, for six weeks, instead of writing, the mission has been to read and read and read, and in particular everything about the state of the Olympic movement.
You know what? I have been reporting, writing and observing the Olympic movement since late 1998, since the break of the Salt Lake corruption scandal. That’s 22 years, with 10 editions of the Games. Fair question now, after taking in everything over these past six weeks: when has the Olympic landscape ever been in a more precarious position?
Answer: in my experience, this is the worst.
Without hyperbole: the situation now bears echoes of the movement’s darkest days from the 1970s.
IOC president Thomas Bach at a news conference earlier this month // IOC / Flickr
Since I am in California, and amid the pandemic sales of stretchy, comfy yoga pants have soared as everyone works from home, permit me a yoga-like approach to explaining why the situation is so fraught with peril. If this were in yogic terms, we would say the universe is made up of galaxies. The IOC might be a universe but it is not, you know, all-knowing God. If you move a sun this way or a moon that way, you’re going to freeze to death or maybe fry. This interrelated ecosystem enables us all — all of us — to exist.
The Olympic Games sits at the center of the IOC’s ecosystem. The Games enables everything else to exist. Everything. What the pandemic has made crystal clear is that the Games are in jeopardy. Meanwhile, the IOC — flush, at least now, with cash — was prancing around the planet like a cat with milk around its lips. La-di-da.
The issues here are manifest but start and end with management and the vision thing.
Let us count the ways management is problematic if not worse, per reliable and recurring reports: incompetent, petrified, inert, scared, terrified, silent, pensive, removed, status quo-oriented, status-centric, silo-infused, empire-built, monarchistic, heavy, bloated, pension-focused, over-fed, cautious, political, stoic, institutionally unable to feel the ability to disagree is allowable, boring and bored.
Oh, and communication both within and, as has been noted in this space repeatedly, without.
Imagine having what should be the best job in the world — bringing the hope and dreams, the words and images of the Olympic movement, to life. Now go screw it up. In continuum, without end.
But at least the Olympic Museum in Lausanne was lit up blue over the weekend to honor the United Nation’s 75th anniversary. Thank the good lord!
The Olympic Museum in Lausanne lit blue over the weekend to honor the United Nations // IOC / Flickr
All of which comes back, time and again, to the issue of relevance. The IOC and the Games and the movement have got to be relevant.
In 2020, the lesson is that any organization has to be nimble and agile. It thus should be taking a systemic approach to figuring out — right now — what is what. In the IOC’s case, this means something verging on radical: how can this 19th-century invention stay relevant in the 21st century?
A pause: I want to stress that all observations and, indeed, criticisms, even if sharp, within this admittedly lengthy column are meant to be — as always — constructive, because I care deeply about the Olympic movement and its possibility to effect change in our broken and fragile world.
Juan Antonio Samaranch, the International Olympic Committee president from 1980 to 2001, knew that a crisis equally presents opportunity. So, too, did Mario Vazquez Raña, the Mexican businessman who for more than 30 years, from 1979 until 2012, headed the Association of National Olympic Committees.
The pandemic presents such an opportunity. The pandemic is a gift, really, because it would enable an organization such as the IOC — traditional, conservative — to try new things, to make mistakes without fatal consequence, to evolve if not transform into a 21st-century organization.
But no.
The IOC is sitting on a boatload of cash, literally billions of dollars. What it should have done already this year was to have spent, say, $50 million, even $75 or $100 or $280 million, and hired the likes of McKinsey or Bain or Deloitte or even Borat and said, you guys are gonna work 24/7 for three or four months and re-imagine us — that is, the IOC itself — and the Olympic movement.
But no.
Six years ago, the current IOC president, Thomas Bach, came up with a 40-point purported reform plan that he styled “Agenda 2020.” It was supposed to cut costs and reframe Olympic thinking. Even before the pandemic, the first Games to be fully run under the auspices of Agenda 2020, Tokyo 2020 — originally budgeted at $7.8 billion — has grown to $12.6 billion officially, $25 billion by some estimates.
Earlier this month, the Tokyo 2020 organizing committee announced it would be introducing cost-cutting measures that it said would save $280 million and be a “role model” for future Games.
$280 million? That’s about 2 percent. We’re nibbling at the margins when what the situation obviously — so obviously — is calling for is a fundamental reimagination. Do we really need 28 sports? (No.) 10,500 athletes? (No.) And so on.
If you want to put it in a different context, $280 million is more or less — $310 million — the sale price of the St. Regis Hotel on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan that will be finalized October 31 to Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund. So after all that work, the Tokyo 2020 organizers have, you know, in the name of “simplification,” essentially cut the equivalent of a fancy hotel.
Beyond: Bach’s pet project is called Agenda 2020. We’re now almost to the end of 2020. Now what? It’s not called Agenda 2021, or 2025, or whatever. What now?
Beyond, beyond: it’s not clear that the Tokyo Games can, will or should happen next summer. The reason for them to take place is that they can’t not happen for financial reasons. Almost every other reason suggests that they should not — but then the IOC would really be in a jam, because the next Games would be in China that following February, maybe, which is a can of worms all by itself, the political and human rights controversies heating up already, and if the pandemic postpones or prevents the Beijing Winter Games, then what?
If you — the IOC — can’t put on the thing that’s the raison d’etre of your mission, then how do you stay relevant and material in today’s world?
Especially when — as the data keeps showing — young people increasingly keep turning to esports. This is a no-brainer. There are eight billion people in the world, and three billion are already gaming. The pandemic has only accelerated and amplified interest worldwide in esports, and while the IOC held a seminar in July 2018 on the matter, and Bach mentioned the matter in an April 2020 white paper, the IOC is w-a-y behind the times.
You want relevance, which is the one thing the IOC and the Olympics is constantly after? The teen and youth market the IOC and the Olympics is ever chasing? Esports has it. Why?
Esports is fun. Kids, teens, young people want to play. For that matter, human beings want to play. It’s in our DNA. Believe me, after six weeks of being on the shelf — a broken left shoulder, what the doctor said was the worst clavicle break he had ever seen, shattered in four places, plus (as a bonus) a torn rotator cuff — I would know.
OK, how did I do it? Playing pickleball. I wish I had a better story. Like dropping in with Tony Hawk, or something.
But no.
If you aren’t sure what pickleball is, it was the hot new sport in the NBA Bubble. Only no one got hurt.
But I digress. We all want to play.
So how did the IOC — the Olympic movement — become such a source of sour grapes and litigious machinations?
Let’s just tick off what six weeks of hard-core reading — and 22 years of experience — has yielded.
To start with some big-picture issues:
Tokyo 2020/1: uncertain.
Beijing 2022: uncertain.
Paris 2024: political infighting all around, retraction of plans all around and yet seemingly all but guaranteed to run over budget, perhaps significantly, which will have to be paid for by taxpayers. Agenda 2020? Ha! Plus — tensions over security concerns never go away.
Gangwon 2024 Winter Youth Games — raise your hand if you know this exists.
Dakar 2022 Summer Youth Games — postponed to 2026. If ever.
Russia — now with the cyber-stuff, on top of the doping? Here’s the dilemma. As Bach wrote in an op-ed published a few days ago in the Guardian, the 1980 and 1984 boycotts are central to his thinking. “They made it clear to me that the central mission of the Olympic Games is to bring together the world’s best athletes from 206 [national Olympic committees] in a peaceful sporting competition.” That means the Russians have to be at the Olympics, whether they are there under the Russian flag or otherwise. Anybody who doesn’t understand that is whistling into the wind.
Rule 50 — Despite considerable agitation from some in the United States and a bewildering public position from World Athletics president Sebastian Coe, who you’d think would know better, the Olympic podium cannot be a place for political protest. There’s ample off-field time, place and manner opportunity elsewhere at the Games to be political. The problem at the podium is twofold: your protest raises the very real issue of ruining another athlete’s moment and, moreover, your goose is someone else’s gander. What if someone from Iran stands on the podium and their first in the air signifies, “Kill all the Israelis!” Or, “Death to the Great Satan United States!” Or, someone from Armenia’s crossed arms means, “Azerbaijan no!” Or someone from Taiwan’s kneel means “China can respectfully kiss my backside!” The same op-ed from Bach, and here — despite his many vociferous critics — he is 100 percent right: “The unifying power of the Games can only unfold if everyone shows respect for and solidarity to one another. Otherwise, the Games will descend into a marketplace of demonstrations of all kinds, dividing and not uniting the world.”
Moving onto the federations and let’s be clear: because of the Tokyo uncertainty, most of the 28 Summer Games federations are running out of money and time. Just a few choice examples of some of the other issues:
Weightlifting — train wreck. Scratch that. Train wreck on fire heading off mountain cliff.
Boxing — see above.
Wrestling — United States, one of the world’s leading nations in the sport, says it won’t go to worlds in December, which are up in the air, anyway. While we’re at it, let’s examine this quote from Bernard Feldman, a member of the USA Wrestling COVID-19 Advisory Committee and a veteran doctor with both USA Wrestling and the UWW, with an eye toward the viability of Tokyo 2020 next year, particularly as case counts surge in the United States and across Europe: “The idea of bringing delegations from all parts of the world together at this time, each with a different situation concerning the virus, is of great concern and could put our U.S. delegation in harm’s way.”
How, materially, is that going to change by next July? “… Each [nation] with a different situation concerning the virus …”? You’re the parent of Athlete X from Wichita or Wuhan or wherever. How do you in good conscience say, sure, go to Tokyo?
Track and field — Diacks, doping, whereabouts, Russia (still), Kenya (I mean, really), no Bolt but absurd decision to allow shoes that like swimming in 2009 has meant destruction by seconds of world records and corresponding media attention but at a cost to the integrity of the sport.
Gymnastics — reeling from sexual abuse scandals not only in the United States but elsewhere.
Skiing — Sarah Lewis, one of the movement’s few female executives, was just unceremoniously deposed, and in full view of everyone. For what? Competence? Ambition? The very things that men are far too often cheered for?
Moving on to the NOCs:
There are, let’s say, 10 or 12, maybe fewer, that truly matter, that are expected to be the boss/es of their region: Saudi Arabia, Japan, China, Singapore, United States, Canada, Brazil, United Kingdom, France, Russia, New Zealand, Nigeria, South Africa. Leadership? Where?
Who is the president of ANOCA, the African confederation? No one, really. All the work Samaranch did in that continent would seem to have been undone, lost.
Asia? The president is persona non grata. Even though he’s really not. Which everyone knows. But can’t say.
See BTW ANOC, not ANOCA, and that’s enough Olympic alphabet soup.
The European Olympic Committees offers a window into the entire structural problem that besets the movement worldwide. The president died in office. So now there’s a power struggle, and nothing is getting done. Good lord. Samaranch would have solved this in two minutes. He would have invited the acting president to Lausanne for pleasantries and “suggested” he become honorary chair for life, or some such thing, and made it plain in no uncertain terms that Spyros Capralos of Greece would be elected, and would you like two sugars in your coffee or none, please?
In Oceania, you have Robin Mitchell and John Coates. Say this about Coates: he is brilliant and without question Bach’s No. 1 get-it-done guy. But this: Coates is 70, Mitchell 74.
The Americas is — OK, let’s focus on the United States. The USOPC is beset by a governance crisis stemming from the Nassar scandal, the NOC president is not an IOC member, its senior leadership has virtually no Games experience, the organization this year underwent a major staff cut because of pandemic and, to underscore its tragic sense of what today’s kids would laughingly call being a tryhard, a recent fundraising campaign raised a whopping $1.4 million for 1,220 athletes in training for Tokyo and Beijing, or $1,163 apiece, which admittedly is better than a sharp stick in the eye but ought to maybe pay the cell phone bill or a couple months’ rent if you’re sharing a house.
The Olympic committee in the United States had two months to raise money and couldn’t do better than $1.4 million? There are roughly 330 million people across the United States and this campaign attracted 6,000 donors? That’s a response rate of .0018 percent. What adjective would best describe that?
Back to Bach’s op-ed: “The Olympics are a reaffirmation of our shared humanity and contribute to unity in all our diversity,” the last few words an echo of his campaign motto when he ran for IOC president in 2013. He will run again next year, and surely be elected for a four-year term that will take him, and the IOC, to 2025.
It’s not his fault that he has been presented with the Russian scandals, the all-around mess that was Rio in 2016 and now a global pandemic. All the same — of all men, Bach understands legacy. He learned from Samaranch.
It is not just that Bach should put this crisis to good use. He must. The IOC is at an inflection point in its, and our collective, history.
As everyone who studies it knows, history is for those who act boldly and decisively, and with imagination. The 21st century is not just waiting. We’re 20 years in. It is now.