A few days ago, the Borders Commission issued a year-after follow-on report into its road map — 39 different steps — for the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee in the aftermath of sex-abuse scandals involving gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar and others.
In essence, many of the 39 steps called for more athlete representation across the U.S. Olympic team and increased oversight over the national governing bodies, or NGBs, that are affiliated with the USOPC. Of the 39, the Borders group said the USOPC is on the way toward implementing 34 and at least part of the way on the other five.
Congress, meanwhile, has been moving ahead with legislation that would include many of the same changes but also include a feature that would give lawmakers the ability to remove the entire USOPC board.
“I give them a lot of credit,” Lisa Borders, the former WNBA commissioner who headed the panel, told Associated Press. “It’s hard for folks to admit they need help. The USOPC not only admitted they needed help, they solicited help, they took help, they embraced it and endorsed it and enabled it. That’s huge. Is it perfect? No. But hugely on track? Yes.”
This space begs to disagree.
The USOPC, heading toward the fall and the annual Assembly, this year to be held online, is a hot mess.
Kobe Bryant after the leading the US men’s ‘Redeem Team’ over Spain to gold in the Beijing 2008 men’s basketball final // Getty Images
Watching the USOPC from afar is like watching a whac-a-mole game — this person or that trying to put out one fire after another.
Serious, earnest question: what is the USOPC’s north star? What is it here to do?
It would appear the USOPC has completely lost the script, and in the midst of a pandemic that is changing and will change everything and, for emphasis, everything.
Another analogy: the USOC has become some old retail store’s customer service department, trying to solve that customer’s problem before taking the next number and trying to solve that one’s dilemma. It’s not an actual organization with a mission it’s trying to achieve. What, precisely, is its mission?
The USOPC likes to imagine itself as the bellwether Olympic committee among 206. If this is the USOPC’s plight, imagine: what is the situation elsewhere? Take Jordan — where the Olympic committee announced last Saturday it was calling a halt to “all sport activities for one week” because of the coronavirus.
To be clear, this column is in no way intended to diminish or demean the work of the Borders Commission nor the people who were called to serve in the name of the public good.
Further, the USOPC deserves credit for its recent publication of what it calls “sport benefits statements,” a financial breakdown of the funds, direct and indirect, it channeled to each of the national governing bodies, or NGBs, in 2019.
There were 61 such statements; the totals well exceed the (absurd) argument by some in the press, cherry-picked from the USOPC Form 990, that “just” $18.48 million out of $248.31 million in functional expenses was given to athletes in 2019.
Adding up the big three for the Summer Games (figures are rounded), that combo alone is $22.23 million:
— USA Track and Field $3.8 million direct, $6.69 million additional = $10.49 million
— USA Swimming $3.59 direct, $3.89 additional = $7.48 million
— USA Gymnastics $2.23 direct, $2.03 additional = $4.26 million
The statements are a goldmine of info. For instance, 246 USATF athletes received USOPC high-performance support.
Which leads, precisely and inexorably, to the crux of the matter.
That money went from the USOPC to USATF. Those runners, throwers and jumpers are not USOPC athletes.
So back to the central question: what is the USOPC’s north star? The stock answer from Colorado Springs surely would be, serve athletes.
Indeed, the newly updated Mission Statement now reads, “Empower Team USA Athletes to achieve sustained competitive excellence and well-being.”
But that is so much vapor.
So are so many of the words within the USOPC’s “strategic plan.”
Search them all you want for the word “win.” If you don’t think the point of going to the Olympics is to try to win, see if the USOPC and the NGBs don’t themselves measure high-performance medal-potential by whether an athlete ranks in the world top-eight and what it will take to get her or him into the top-three.
Or ask the athletes who go. Any of them — would they prefer to finish 1, 2, 3 or 11th? Or just remember the drama after the U.S. men’s basketball team lost in Athens in 2004, which led to the “Redeem Team,” headlined by Kobe Bryant, in 2008. In the wake of Bryant’s passing, we all celebrate his Mamba Mentality. What was that about? Coming in second?
“I always aimed to kill the opposition,” Bryant wrote in his 2018 book, The Mamba Mentality: How I Play. “The main thing LeBron [James] and I discussed was what constitutes a killer mentality. He watched how I approached every single practice, and I constantly challenged him and the rest of the guys. I remember there was one half when we were messing around. I came into the locker room at halftime and asked the guys — in a less PG manner — what in the hell we were doing. In the second half, LeBron responded in a big way. He came out with a truly dominant mindset. And I’ve seen him lead that way ever since.”
Ask the athletes — those Bryant may have inspired, for instance — training their hardest in Russia, China and everywhere else around the world. See if they want to beat the Americans. Ask if their mission statements dance around the word “win.” Please.
Back to the key point.
The USOPC doesn’t itself have any athletes. The athletes are affiliated first and foremost with the NGBs — to return to the USATF example, with that federation. Not with the USOPC. They are “Team USA Athletes” rarely in their careers, at a competition such as the Olympics or the Pan Ams. To continue with the track and field example — obviously, not all of those 246 would qualify for an Olympics. What are those non-qualifiers, then? Are they “empowered”?
The next key point:
The athletes the USOPC would appear to try to be serving, the ones with very loud voices, are not serviceable. They just want to complain.
We do not have a federal ministry of the Olympics in the United States. Unless there’s been a change since this morning, everything still costs money. Where is that money going to come from?
Especially in a pandemic.
Let’s say, for sake of argument, that the broadcast and sponsor revenue the USOPC expected to make in 2020 — if the Tokyo Olympics actually had been held — was realized.
For comparison purposes, Rio 2016 brought the-then USOC roughly $336 million in revenue, including $172 million in broadcasting rights. Let’s take that $336 million and divide by let’s call it roughly 4,000 athletes who might stake a claim to that money — from across the 61 entitles which, per the USOPC sport benefits statements, got 2019 funds. Let’s stay away from discussions about whether someone like the swimmer Caeleb Dressel, who broke Michael Phelps’ record in the 100-meter butterfly at the 2019 world swim championships, ought to share money with, say, the Lebowskis over at bowling. Everyone is in.
We’re talking $84,000 apiece.
That’s the loud athlete argument: cut me that check.
The follow-on is that team sport athletes would naturally pool their money rationally and efficiently and pay for gyms; coaches; flights; hotels; and everything else.
OK, sure. If you believe that, I’ve got some lovely beachfront property in Wichita I’d like to show you.
Isn’t it a more rational thought that having — as the USOPC does — sports scientists and psychologists and training centers, and making them available in a sensible fashion, are consequential in the big picture? Phelps didn’t use the Colorado Springs training center pool for altitude training as a then-USOC athlete; he went there via USA Swimming.
Of course, all this is moot because the Tokyo Olympics didn’t happen, and it’s unclear whether they will happen, and the money pool is — hello, make that money desert.
This is why earlier this year the USOPC said it was eliminating 51 positions and furloughing 33 more in a bid to trim up to 20% of its budget to respond to gaps caused by the pandemic.
At the time, chief executive Sarah Hirshland said in a letter, “I am overwhelmed by the magnitude of this change. It is significant.”
In an earlier letter, she had written that a cancellation of the Tokyo Games “would be devastating to our athletes, first and foremost, but also to our financial health and stability.”
The International Olympic Committee is pressing ahead with the notion that the Games can go forward next July in Tokyo. Hirshland is right to use the word “devastating,” though, because it is entirely unclear whether the USOPC’s funding model can, will or even should survive.
Were you to talk to sponsors, meanwhile, it would be entirely reasonable for them to assess the state of the leadership team in Colorado Springs and see that — if matters do indeed go forward in 2021, arguably the most complicated Games in the history of the Olympic movement — the C-suite at the USOPC is occupied by a bunch of executives whose collective experience at the Olympic Games can best be described as, and this is being gracious, limited. They haven’t seen the best (London 2012) of the Games or a rougher version (Sochi 2014) or anything in between.
Meanwhile, the coronavirus counts keep climbing, in the United States of course, but now in Russia, India, South Africa and elsewhere. Maybe there will be a vaccine; maybe not; if you’re the USOPC, make the argument that the Olympic team ethically, morally, legally deserves that vaccine ahead of, say, victims of Hurricane Laura, which is just about to level a direct hit on, among other places, Lake Charles, Louisiana — site last December of the USA Boxing trials.
And the U.S. Congress is pushing ahead with a bill to re-do the law that oversees the USOPC in a response to the Nassar scandal, a classic response of trying to fix a problem that can’t be fixed by legislation and that, moreover, addresses yesterday’s (let’s be clear: very serious) headlines when today’s and tomorrow’s is squarely confronting everyone in the Olympic movement right now.
This is not to diminish — in any way — the horrors of sexual abuse.
Again, let’s be 100% unequivocally clear: sexual abuse is abhorrent. Nassar was a monster. The girls and women he abused deserve empathy; support; and widespread recognition for their courage in coming forward.
What we have, however, is a multiplicity of challenges presenting themselves at the same moment, and the unforeseen dilemmas associated with the pandemic have brought the USOPC to the crossroads.
What is the role of the USOPC in American society? Who is supposed to pay for it? And why? What is the value proposition?
Which is why it’s fair to take a hard look at this legislation, and what’s what around it:
In the end, the NGBs are still themselves their own organizations. Each is complex. The USOPC itself has no athletes. It is a source that provides finance (if there is money) and services.
What is it about the Nassar situation that any one of these reforms would differentiate? Would the USOPC have any more control over USA Gymnastics, just to pick one, than it did before? How?
Moreover, what is it about an athlete per se that makes she or he so much smarter, makes their experience more relevant, in governance than someone who has spent years or decades in management? Why the insistence on more athlete representation, as if that’s a magic wand?
Further, as noted, the bill that is now moving through Congress would potentially give lawmakers the ability to remove the entire USOPC board. Plain and simple, that would give the IOC reason to suspend the USOPC, and don’t think it might not — just like laws that sought impermissible governmental intervention in Kuwait, and elsewhere.
How did the situation in Washington get to this? The USOPC doesn’t have a friend in Congress. Where is the 2020 version of the late Sen. John McClain? Of Rep. John Ryun? People who advocated for and told the story of the then-USOC? The only people in Congress now talking about the USOPC are critical.
How did the situation in Lausanne get to this? Well, OK, it has been like this for a long time. The high point in recent years was the 2017 awarding of Los Angeles for 2028 with Paris for 2024 — and that only after then-board chair Larry Probst and -CEO Scott Blackmun spent years rebuilding relationships frayed by the then-USOC’s take of broadcast and sponsor revenues.
In our USA-centric media world, we don’t see ourselves the way much of the rest of the IOC world does. If you want evidence of how they see us, look again at how President Obama got slammed in Chicago’s bid for 2016 or New York’s failed bid for 2012.
Hirshland and USOC board chair Suzanne Lyons had an opportunity to show real leadership this spring when the IOC was considering what to do about Tokyo 2020. Instead, the Aussies and Canadians seized the high ground, with Lyons explaining that she had IOC president Thomas Bach’s cellphone and could be in touch with him whenever so all good. That was funny.
You know what rhymes with funny?
Because of money, Stanford announced significant cuts to its athletic department, cutting nine Olympic sports from its roster of 36. The AP’s Eddie Pells recently wrote a clever story noting, in part, that if Stanford had been its own country it would have tied with South Korea for 11th place in the medal standings at Rio 2016.
Stanford may be getting the most attention but the cuts across the college landscape have been both wide and deep. Since the pandemic began in March, more than 200 sports programs have been cut across the NCAA’s three divisions and the NAIA. Because there is no federal Olympic ministry, and there is unlikely ever to be one, college is traditionally the path to the Olympics in the United States.
The USOPC has made much in recent months about moving away from what was dubbed a “money for medals” strategy.
So, again, what is it here to do?
The answer used to be easy: beat the Soviets. Er, the Russians.
What now? Is it to fund mental-health programs for Olympians? Former Olympians? Where is that money supposed to come from?
Crucially, even the Borders Commission had no answer. It had no suggestions for how to pay for its many recommendations.
This question — what is the USOPC’s mission — needs an answer that, like Voldemort, people ought to be allowed to speak of in public without reprisal, even if the answer is obvious. So does the corollary: how to pay for it.
Assuredly, neither the USOPC nor the American public does not want to wait to see if — or should that be when — in Paris in 2024 the Chinese fulfill the prophecy that was ordained at the stroke of 8:08 p.m. on August 8, 2008, in the Bird’s Nest, when 2008 drums told the world that they were coming … to rule the medals count. What then?
Keep this quote from Han Xiao, chair of the USOPC athletes’ committee, tucked away. In that article on Stanford cutting funding, he told the AP’s Pells, “If you look at where the pipelines are in the U.S., in most sports, at a certain age, it becomes the NCAA. If you take that away, it’s devastating. It’s an existential crisis if your goal is to win.”