The United States Congress, in its infinite wisdom, has empowered a Commission to study the “state” of the U.S. Olympics and Paralympics.
Rather than surrendering to an avalanche of easy jokes, having covered the “state” of this enterprise for 25 years, having myself triggered the last major reconstruction amid Congressional hearings of the then-USOC board structure in 2003, sparked by a story I wrote in late 2002 for the Los Angeles Times, let’s simply note that the new USOPC board chair, Gene Sykes, is a man of uncommon decency and intelligence, so there’s hope.
At the same time, it’s not clear whether Congress, sparked by the Larry Nassar scandal, wants 1/ yet again to point fingers, or 2/ a report that like many things in Washington amounts to a lot of words but says nothing because 3/ something performative allows Congress to go, yep, we did something because we all know Larry Nassar was a really bad guy and, oh, China almost beat us in the medals count at the Tokyo Olympics, and what is that about?
Ireland’s ‘Dare to Believe’ program — the Olympic values of friendship, excellence and respect in the schools — a proven triple, a win-win-win for kids, teachers and Olympic athletes who get to give back
The Commission’s co-chair, Dionne Koller, a University of Baltimore law professor who focuses on Olympic sports, rightly told Associated Press two weeks ago, “We tend to make sport policy in this country in a very reactive posture, a very crisis-oriented posture. We’ve made some very important policy changes that way. But this Commission is an opportunity to be proactive, and an opportunity to think big.”
In this case, big would be very good. To get there, we have to start from square one.
We have a super-complicated relationship in the United States of America with Olympic – Congress would call it “amateur” even though Olympic sports have been professional since 1992 – sports.
We are essentially the only nation in the world without a ministry of sports.
The USOPC and the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency are very deliberately private entities. Why? 1/ To highlight the difference between us and Communist regimes (and you thought the Berlin Wall fell 30-plus years ago – oh, wait, there’s still China) and 2/ to avoid triggering constitutional due process protections for American athletes.
I just finished my 12th year teaching journalism at the University of Southern California. I say all the time to my earnest college sophomores – when public officials say something, ask, really? When sports administrators say, it’s all about the athletes, ask – so you’re really telling me an American athlete fighting a doping case isn’t slam-dunk entitled to constitutional due process protections because USADA, even though it for sure has close ties to the federal government, isn’t a so-called “state actor”? Wow, what a great country!
When Congress created the then-USOC in 1978 with what is called the Ted Stevens Act, it said, in essence, you figure out how to finance yourself. This is why the now-USOPC depends on television (read: NBC) and on corporate sponsor money. This is also why it plays out at the Summer Games like this: we, Congress, expect you at Team USA to beat the Soviets (then) and the Chinese (now), and at the White House they will hold a big celebration for you when you come back from wherever, but no one in Washington is going to give you, like, a dime. U-S-A! U-S-A! What a great country!
On the other hand, our public schools – elementary, high school, public universities – provide substantial sports opportunities for children and young adults. When UCLA plays LSU, who’s paying for that? You are, taxpayer friend. And who supplies most of the athletes for the U.S. Olympic team? That college system. And who, in the name of friendship and American goodwill, supplies some big chunk of the athletes for Olympic teams all over the world? That same NCAA system. Who’s paying for that? Third time: what a great country!
This is catawampus. Our European and other friends cannot figure out our system. No wonder.
Perhaps the key issue before the Commission is whether it wants to recommend to Congress a thorough re-do of the Stevens Act, to bring it into the 21st century.
This requires, as Koller said, big-picture thinking.
Now some unsolicited input, offered from the experience of these many years observing and reporting about the movement: the Olympic values are elemental, friendship, excellence and respect, and there is now more than ever a place in the lives of our youth of America for these values, no matter your political, religious or cable news orientation, because:
1/ Four of every 10 Americans is clinically obese. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control says one in five kids is obese.
2/ Our gun violence is out of control. As of late May, the Gun Violence Archive had counted more than 260 mass shootings in the United States in 2023. In 2022, it counted, in all, 647.
Far too many occur at schools.
3/ On May 23, the surgeon general of the United States, Dr. Vivek Murthy, issued an extraordinary public warning about the effects of social media on kids and teens. He said, “The most common question parents ask me is, ‘Is social media safe for my kids?’ The answer is that we don't have enough evidence to say it's safe, and in fact, there is growing evidence that social media use is associated with harm to young people’s mental health.”
Murthy served on the USOPC board of directors immediately before returning to the post of surgeon general.
4/ Our homeless encampments are out of control, evidence of – among other matters – an entwined mental-health and drug-abuse crisis.
To get to USC from where we live, I drive north on the Harbor Freeway, the 110. At the base of the West 39th Street offramp, there’s an encampment immediately to the right. When I make a left turn off that ramp, it is exactly one block – straightaway – to the LA Memorial Coliseum. In front of me, at the famed peristyle, are the Olympic rings.
For the media, as the Los Angeles 2028 Games approach, homelessness is almost surely going to be issue No. 1. Per the Wall Street Journal, the number of homeless people in California grew about 50% between 2014 and 2022. California accounts for 12% of the population of the United States; it has about half of the homeless people in the entire country, about 115,000. The state has spent $17 billion – billion – on homelessness. As the headline of a recent Journal story said, “It’s not working.”
5/ Our use of prescription medicines is out of control.
It’s undeniable that Americans are the most medicated people in the world. Here’s a new stat from a Civic Science poll taken this year: the number of U.S. adults who report taking at least one prescription medicine per day is now 70%, up 14 points from 2019. One in four say they take four or more each day.
6/ Two-plus years ago, on Jan. 6, 2021, we endured at the U.S. Capitol what in another country we would call a coup attempt. A federal judge recently sentenced Oath Keepers extremist group founder Stewart Rhodes, convicted of seditious conspiracy, to 18 years in prison.
The question before the Commission, truly, is what it wants the USOPC to be – to be more precise, believes it should or ought to be.
This thought:
Especially now, the Olympic movement can be – should be – a uniting force in this (in any) country.
To reiterate a point noted often in this space: the USOPC’s key mission assuredly is to win medals at the Games.
But what’s missing, what needs to be rethought and, critically, funded, is how to get the values of the Olympic movement not just in front of but made central in the lives of this nation’s young people.
This is a charge the USOPC has never had. Maybe it’s time.
Only the USOPC — only it — can lead this mission. The NFL cannot. Nor can the NBA, MLB or any of the for-profit leagues. The USOPC is different and needs to say so, to lead an ongoing national campaign with genuine purpose, making clear that for every American, especially young people, being your best is like standing on the Olympic podium — the bedrock being healthy and treating all the people you encounter, everyone, with decency and respect.
But – key point – only if this element is funded. It’s neither right nor fair for this sort of Commission to recommend nor for Congress to mandate without making the dollars happen.
Understand: this is going to take time. But this investment is profoundly worth it. All around, we need more decency, tolerance and respect for each other, all of it rooted in physical activity.
With LA28 on the horizon and Salt Lake déjà vu all but a sure thing six years later, we have the chance to use two Games, Summer and Winter, to jumpstart any number of initiatives around two Olympics. Neither LA nor Salt Lake needs to build to put on either edition of the Games; thus they can focus their legacy component not on stadiums but on the human element.
In the modern history of the Olympics, this is all but a radical notion.
For the United States, it marks nothing less than a generational opportunity.
There are programs proven to work: in Ireland, for instance, Dare to Believe, run by Roisin Jones and Roisin McGettigan, both graduates of Providence College here in Rhode Island, McGettigan a steeplechase finalist at the Beijing 2008 Games. Dare to Believe brings Irish athletes into schools, gets teachers involved, gets kids up and moving.
This is a fact: almost all Olympic athletes would love to give back. Seldom are they asked.
Here in LA, the LA84 Foundation, the legacy entity of the 1984 Games, run by Renata Simril, does a heroic job of championing ‘Play Equity,’ the notion that girls and young women, especially of color, deserve the chance to take part in sports. Often, middle-school girls get stopped because they need something as basic as a sports bra. That this is still a thing in 2023 is an outrage.
What LA84 needs is more – a brighter spotlight, more funding.
This is the sort of thing the Commission ought to be focused on.
This is what will, in both the near and long term, make a difference. A big difference.
Because we seriously have very big problems in this country.
Big problems demand big thinking. But often, too, simple common sense: friendship, excellence and respect make for a combination everyone can rally around. U-S-A! Right?