Once again, we turn to maybe the very best thing Mark Twain said, a turn of phrase I noted in a column a few years back and repeat for emphasis, because when it comes to Congress and the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee, you know:
“Suppose you were an idiot,” Twain said. “And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.”
In this context, we turn to the purported “reform” of the USOPC, its new members of the board of directors formally announced Monday.
After years of investigations and Congressionally mandated governance fixes purportedly designed to fix everything, this — this — is it?
The entire thrust of effecting reform, in theory, was to get more “athlete” voices on the board. Indeed, the USOPC news release was headlined this way: “U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee announces enhanced athlete voice through expanded board structure and addition of six new directors.”
Breaking it down, the expanded board structure includes two new “athlete-at-large” members. Both, it turns out, are swimming gold medalists. One is 73 years old. The other turns 65 next month.
There’s this, too:
You’ve got the once and future surgeon-general of the United States, Vivek Murthy, who, presumably upon being confirmed as surgeon general again will have to resign his position on the USOPC board. His USOPC tenure will have lasted about a year.
No, for real. As always with the USOPC, you can’t make this stuff up.
Donna de Varona, 73 // USOPC
John Naber, turning 65 in January // USOPC
Let me say right here that I have known both the 73-year-old, Donna de Varona, and the almost 65-year-old, John Naber, for 20, going on 25 years, a very long time in both instances, and have nothing but the highest regard — personally — for each.
Donna, first.
Donna won two Olympic gold medals in swimming at the 1964 Tokyo Games. She pushed Congress to pass Title IX in 1972 and has since spent years advocating for, educating on behalf of and helping to implement that piece of landmark legislation. In 1978, she helped Congress pass the law that governs Olympic sports in the United States. In the 1990s, she chaired the organizing committee for the 1999 FIFA women’s World Cup.
As a sportscaster, she has covered more than a dozen Winter and Summer Olympics and won numerous awards. Her sister is a famous actress. It goes on and on. You get the idea. Donna is a trailblazer and role model.
John, another of Team USA’s 20th-century swimming legends, lives in Pasadena, California, and, as one of the school’s most notable alums, is active in University of Southern California affairs. We live in Hermosa Beach, about 45 minutes from Pasadena if traffic was pre-pandemic, and this is my 10th year teaching journalism and sports writing at SC. John, typically very thoughtful, is active as a broadcaster, motivational speaker, activist and more. If John had done nothing else in his life, the way he advocated for Louis Zamperini in Louis’ later years underscores John’s highest moral and ethical callings. Zamperini, of course, is the subject of the 2010 Laura Hillebrand bestseller Unbroken, made into the 2014 film. Eighth in the Berlin 1936 5000 meters and so very much more, Zamperini is also famously an SC alum. He died in 2014 at age 97.
The issue with Donna and John being on the board — their terms are due to begin Jan. 1 — is, and I cannot stress this enough, neither Donna nor John themselves.
It’s the system that got them there.
The system is absurd and must be re-thought.
This is a process and procedure problem and the USOPC has to know — and do — better.
Or, better yet: if the fault lies with the idiots in Congress, then they must ask themselves what they have wrought. And who it is among the loudest of the voices they’ve been listening to that got us to this juncture, and to what effect.
On what theory are 60- and 70-something-year-olds “athletes” defined for service on the USOPC board as “athletes-at-large”?
Not to put too fine a point on it, but Donna qualified for Medicare eight years ago, and John gets there Jan. 20, the day Donald Trump is mercifully due to leave the White House
When Donna first swam in the Olympics, in 1960 in Rome, she was 13. When she won her gold medals in Tokyo, she was 17. When John won his five in Montreal in 1976, four gold, he was 20.
Just to show you how long ago 1976 was — the decathlon winner, from the United States, was a man named Bruce who now identifies as a woman named Caitlyn. More Bruce: Springsteen’s Born to Run, the album, had just come out the year before. Now that Bruce — still Bruce — is already two years past doing a one-man show of a career retrospective on Broadway.
In athlete terms, 1976 is two generations.
The LA84 Games hadn’t happened; Los Angeles hadn’t even been awarded those Olympics; that wouldn’t even happen until 1978 (when Teheran dropped out — the Iranian revolution took place the next year, 1979).
The 1996 Atlanta Games — now the most recent Summer Olympics in the United States — were still 20 years off.
Come on.
To get on to the USOPC board, Donna and John won their seats through an election conducted by a U.S. Olympic alumni association. This smacks of a popularity contest like something from high school. Seriously: this was the best way to measure candidates for one of this country’s most high-profile boards of directors? And let’s not even get in to the vetting concerns this election raised. Was this really what Congress intended? How by any standard can this be considered “best practices”?
And Americans want to lecture the world — the USOPC especially and increasingly wants to lecture the rest of the world about how to carry on — about governance?
Come on.
The previous column in this space asked if the USOPC thinks things through. How about this? Donna is by rule too old to be elected an IOC member. The IOC rule is that once you’re 70 you’re out. And yet she’s 73 and just now being seated to the USOC board?
That IOC rule, incidentally, was prompted by Salt Lake City’s scandal-tainted bid for the 2002 Winter Games. Let’s recall that the U.S. Congress was alone in the world in hauling the then-IOC president, Juan Antonio Samaranch, before it to explain the hows and whys of the Salt Lake affair, arguably the worst IOC governance scandal of the last 25 years. Now, 20 years later, amid a governance scandal in the USOPC, Congress, in the name of oversight of the national Olympic committee, creates a process that ends in a result that’s at odds with precisely the sort of rules that Congress was screaming to see the IOC enact in 1999 and 2000.
That’s — chutzpah.
Sanctimonious comes to mind, too.
So does — idiocy.
For that matter, the idea that “athletes know best” is itself suspect. This is a lot like those old TV commercials: because I slept at a Holiday Inn Express I’m therefore smarter and could therefore do brain surgery or stop a nuclear power plant from imploding or anything else.
What, exactly, about being an athlete equals smarter? About track and field, say, or swimming purports to expertise in governance or, for that matter, anything else?
This whole athlete equals “smarter” thing is not logically consistent. It’s like me, many years after having graduated from college, supposedly being “smarter” about what’s going on at Northwestern than either of my daughters — one of whom graduated from Northwestern in 2016, the other a senior there now.
To complete the analogy,: if Northwestern wanted now to pick one of the three of us as a board member to represent a current point of view — which in theory is the USOPC’s “athlete” framework — who would it be?
This is why, just for starters, there should be an age limit on the “athlete-at-large” position.
Suggestion: 10 years after retirement as an active athlete.
That’s just common sense.
The other thing about the USOPC’s “reform” is that it entirely misses the point.
The USOPC is not the driver of the Olympic system in the United States.
Congress may think so. And it’s easy to focus on the USOPC because it’s the flashpoint, the one entity that Congress, in its infinite wisdom, and most Americans have even heard of.
This is why Congress makes Mark Twain look like a genius.
The real driver in the system is — are — the national governing bodies.
Dexter Paine // USOPC
The USOPC gets its hands on the athletes once every two years, when the Winter or Summer Games come around.
The rest of the time, the action is at the NGB level. The NGBs are independent, autonomous entities with their own rights to the five rings. The USOPC’s role with regard to the NGBs is oversight, not (absent a crisis) day-to-day management or interference.
Given the pandemic, the current situation — financial and otherwise — in many if not most of America’s NGBs is knife’s-edge.
The real news in Monday’s announcement is the NGB representative to the new board, Dexter Paine, a businessman who for 13 years served as chair of the most successful winter sport, U.S. Ski & Snowboard, and who has had extensive international experience as an elected — repeat, elected — member of the FIS Council, the international ski federation.
At the risk of blowing his cover, Dexter is the best thing that can happen to the USOPC starting January 1. It needs a healthy dose of common sense.