There are 206 National Olympic Committees across our world. You know, Earth. The big blue ball that the NBA basketball star Kyrie Irving maybe thinks is flat.
All the committees in good standing (read: not suspended) get together once a year. It's a big deal. Because of the sheer size of it, it's arguably the biggest-deal meeting of the Olympic year.
It happened this week in Prague.
What a waste of a big-deal opportunity.
In the aftermath of last week’s U.S. presidential elections, the news has been filled with, among other things, journalistic autopsies: how did so much of the media miss something so obvious?
Same Tuesday in a different political arena — the race for the 2024 Summer Games, and the first presentations by the three bid cities to significant numbers of International Olympic Committee members amid a meeting in Doha, Qatar, of the 205-member Assn. of National Olympic Committees.
Los Angeles, Paris and Budapest got their 20 minutes apiece, and the focus afterward in media accounts from all over was on the LA presentation and U.S. president-elect Donald Trump.
Evoking the same regrettable horse-race style coverage that dominated the election reporting, that made for “news” tied to the first major Olympic gathering since last Tuesday’s balloting.
So what? It had nothing to do with what really happened.
Be sure key Olympic officials, and others with a sense of the dynamics of bid-city campaigns, understand this all too well.
Every Olympic bid has to have two essential qualities — how and why.
LA on Tuesday put forward its why.
A little background first about the how:
— There’s nothing in memory like the LA how. With the IOC confronting widespread dissatisfaction in Europe and Asia over the ballooning costs of the Games, the LA proposal is simple: with the exception of a canoe venue, everything else is or will be built in a city already alive with dynamism, downtown in particular exploding with construction cranes. That means no crazy infrastructure costs.
— Further, LA mayor Eric Garcetti is a real person. He for sure is one smart dude. He also is personable and relatable. A recent picture of the mayor on a skateboard is surely a first in the history of Olympic campaigns.
For LA, how was thus always the easy part.
The hard part, seemingly: the why. On Tuesday, the LA people made that easy, too, and by taking on the really hard stuff:
America is not perfect. Far from it. The Games — they can help.
To expand:
The United States is a nation of immigrants. Most came willingly. A significant number, not. We are all in this together, the LA bid made plain Tuesday — a connection with the very essence of the Olympic message in our world.
An African-American athlete, Allyson Felix, the most decorated U.S. female track and field star in Olympic history, offered up real talk Tuesday, no spin, about the most vexing dilemma that has been at the core of the American experience from the beginning.
Here is the gist of her remarks and because they are of such import, at some length:
“I’m here,” she said, “to talk about America.
“I want to tell you about the America that I love, and the America that needs the Games to help make our nation better — now, more than ever.
“America is diverse. We are a nation of people whose descendants came from all over the world for a better life.
“But we’re also a nation with individuals like me — descendants of people who came to America not of their own free will but against it.
“But we’re not a nation that clings to our past, no matter how glorious – or how painful. Americans rush towards the future.
“We just finished our presidential election, and some of you may question America’s commitment to its founding principles.
“I have one message for you: please don't doubt us. America’s diversity is our greatest strength.
“Diversity is not easy.
“Diversity is a leap of faith — that embraces all faiths.
“And that’s why I believe LA is a perfect choice for the 2024 Games, because the face of our city reflects the face of the Olympic movement itself.”
This had — correction, has — zero to do with Trump.
Yes, Felix acknowledged the election.
No, she did not mention Trump.
If Felix had wanted to say the words “president-elect” or “Trump,” she surely could and would have. How do you know this?
Because from among dozens of Olympic bids over the past 20 years, there have been a grand total of two that have cut the BS and told the members straight-up what was what. If you really insist on U.S. presidential politics, to borrow from John McCain and 2008 — the Straight Talk Express.
The first such bid: Almaty, two years ago, which straightforwardly made its case for the 2022 Winter Games, losing narrowly to Beijing.
And, now, LA.
If Garcetti — a political veteran — had wanted to mention Trump, he too surely could have. Instead, Garcetti said:
“… What I’m going to say is a little bit radical, and I’m pretty sure it’s the first time you’ve ever heard it from an Olympic bid.
“We believe our campaign isn’t just about the Games in our city in 2024. We believe this bid is about ensuring that the Games are sustainable beyond 2024 as well.
“In other words, this bid isn’t only about LA’s future – it’s about our collective future. This is a stark and unique difference about our bid.”
Look, most bids feature warm and fuzzy videos along with officials and politicians talking about kids and dreams and getting a couch filled with kids off that comfy couch. No one says what’s really what. This, not incidentally, is how the IOC got in the mess it’s in now — with cities all over western Europe abandoning Olympic bids for 2022, 2024 and even 2028.
Here is where this column acknowledges one more obvious piece: I live in Los Angeles. But I have no — zero — affiliation with the bid. At the same time, having covered every Olympic campaign since 1999, it's time now to get to it plainly. Here is what's what:
— This 2024 bid is it for Los Angeles and the United States. The time is now. If the IOC opts to go to Paris or Budapest, good luck, and enjoy the run afterward of Games in places like Doha and Baku, because the Europeans are already squeamish, the next three Games are in Asia (2018, 2020, 2022) amid financial and other challenges and the Americans won’t be coming back for a long, long time — not if the IOC were to turn down the three biggest cities in the United States, New York (2012), Chicago (2016) and then, in sequence, LA.
“We have learned many lessons from our previous bids,” USOC board chair Larry Probst said at Tuesday’s meeting, “and failure can be a great teacher.”
— Unlike in other nations, an American bid has no government money. None. It must all be privately funded. With that in mind, there is no chance — zero — that Casey Wasserman, the LA bid leader, can go back to the assorted business leaders who in just a few days donated the likes of $35 million toward this 2024 effort and gin up enthusiasm for another round.
— Oh, and if LA gets dinged, good luck with sponsor and broadcast interest going forward, too.
These things are by no means threats. There’s no gauntlet. But unless we are all willing — together — to speak, and hear, the truth, the IOC and Olympic movement assume serious if not critical danger of losing their relevance.
That is the real news from Tuesday in Doha.
When he was 13, Garcetti told the ANOC assembly on Tuesday, the 1984 Olympics came to LA. Here is what he said next, and again at length, because these words are not just heartfelt — they need to be heard:
“I saw the face of the world on the streets of Los Angeles and I became a believer in the power of the Olympic movement to transform the world.
“I still believe that today, more than ever. My first act as mayor on my first day serving,” three years ago, “was to write a letter to the IOC to pursue the 2024 Games.
“My vision of America is a country that is informed by that vision.
“I see an America that is outward-looking, ready to play its role alongside the community of nations to address our world’s most pressing challenges.
“Choose LA 2024 and help us show a new generation of Americans that our strength is being with the world, not turning our backs to it.”
When history writes the story of the drama that enveloped the question of what to do about the Russians for the 2016 Rio Games, the imperfect compromise issued Sunday by the International Olympic Committee will come to be seen for what it truly is: a marker for the ongoing vitality and relevance of the Olympic movement in every corner of the world. Make no mistake. The IOC made — mostly — the right call in seeking to balance individual rights against collective responsibility.
If this decision had gone the other way, if the IOC had imposed a wide-ranging ban on the Russians, there very well may have erupted an existential threat to the Olympic movement.
This is not to layer exaggeration or extra intrigue onto a situation that already has generated enormous controversy.
Rather, the mob that has largely looked past the precious value of individual justice in calling for collective responsibility failed, and hugely, to account for the peril inherent in such a decision for the present and the future of the Olympic enterprise.
The Russians, however, keenly understood. And they kept saying so — no matter the smugly furious, self-righteous echo chamber banging for wide-ranging sanction.
The IOC listened. It understood, and keenly.
To emphasize:
There is nothing wrong with that. Indeed, there is a lot that is right.
In ruling that the international sports federations hold the responsibility to decide whether the Russians could come for each of the roughly two dozen sports on the Olympic program, the IOC underscored not only the place of each and every person in the world but, as well, the possibilities inherent in empowering humanity to effect one-to-one change.
When everything else is stripped away, that is what the Olympics are all about. That is why the modern Olympic movement, a project born in the late 19th century, can still matter in our 21st-century lives.
“Every human being is entitled to individual justice,” IOC president Thomas Bach said after Sunday’s meeting of its policy-making executive board.
Almost immediately, the tennis and equestrian federations released announcements saying to the Russians, see you soon in Brazil. The judo federation put out numbers that made plaln a rigorous testing program aimed at each and every one of the 389 athletes from 136 countries who have qualified for Rio 2016.
Sheikh Ahmad al-Fahad al-Sabah, head of the Assn. of National Olympic Committees, said the organization “commends the IOC for favoring individual justice over collective responsibility and giving international federations responsibility to ensure clean competitions in their sports at Rio 2016.”
Life is not binary. It is not black and white, yes or no, a collection of 1s and 0s. Life is made up of shades of grey, and nuance, and compromise — especially in the pursuit of both a practical reality and a noble ideal.
Life is better when we — the collective we — are not implementing blanket action against a group of people. This is a basic of history. And the Olympic movement is, at its essence and at its best, not about being moralistic or sanctimonious. It appeals to our better selves.
As Anita DeFrantz, the long-serving IOC representative to the United States who sits on the executive board, said Sunday afternoon, “It takes courage to do the right thing.”
Even if it is imperfect.
Life is imperfect, you know? The Olympic scene is an imperfect vessel for our hopes and dreams.
The important part: the IOC action likely paves the way for most Russian athletes to march behind the Russian flag at the opening ceremony on August 5.
At the same time:
The IOC said the whistleblower Yulia Stepanova — a middle-distance runner who along with her husband, Vitaly Stepanov, sparked the controversy by alleging state ties to doping — is not eligible to run in Rio. There simply isn’t a vehicle to permit a “neutral” athlete to take part, the IOC said, and that’s true. It’s a fundamental that athletes compete as national representatives at a Games.
Except that there will be a “refugee team” in Rio made up of athletes from different countries.
And, perhaps more important, the symbolism of having Stepanova on the Rio track would have gone far in promoting the notion that anyone and everyone has to speak up when something might be amiss; overcoming the culture of keeping silent has proven a significant challenge in the anti-doping campaign.
Also, the IOC said that any Russian athlete who has ever done time for doping is ineligible for Rio. This misplaced notion is the 2016 version of what in Olympic jargon is called the “Osaka rule,” a notion advanced by none other than Bach nine years ago, when he was IOC vice president. It sought to ban a doper from the next edition of the Games on top of however many years he or she got in sanction.
The Swiss-based Court of Arbitration for Sport said, no dice — the Osaka rule amounted to double punishment.
The IOC, and the president, know all of this. A recent reminder: the case of South Korean swimmer Park Tae Hwan, a 2008 and 2012 medalist who tested positive in 2014 for testosterone and got 18 months. The Korean Olympic committee tried to tack on another three years. No go.
The Osaka rule could have been incorporated in the version of the World Anti-Doping Code that took effect this past January 1. But no. Instead, the code now calls for a standard doping ban of four years instead of two.
It’s now up to an individual Russian, if he or she wants, to go to CAS to challenge the IOC move regarding eligibility after a prior ban. There should be a rush to the proverbial courthouse steps; any such case would be a slam-dunk winner; all the IOC is trying to do is effect an end-around a play that already has been shut down.
More: the assertion that no already-served Russians can go — even though athletes from other countries who have served doping bans can, and will, be in Rio — cuts directly against the very thing the IOC sought Sunday to preserve: in Bach’s words, “individual justice.”
The remaining problematic element is the ban imposed on Russia’s track and field team by the IAAF, track’s governing body. It stands.
As Alexander Zhukov, the president of the Russian Olympic Committee, noted as part of a lengthy presentation Sunday to the IOC board:
“… We can never accept a decision that allows any international federation to legally force athletes to move from their native country in order to train abroad, so they can participate in international competitions. This contradicts basic human rights and essential freedoms. And it strays very far from the real anti-doping fight.”
This will be part of the historical legacy. And it won’t be pretty.
Sergey Shubenkov, the Russian champion in the 110-meter hurdles at last year’s world championships — “an absolutely clean one,” Zhukov asserted — can’t run in Rio. His mother, heptathlete Natalya Shubenkova, missed the 1984 Los Angeles Games because of the Soviet-led boycott, reprisal for the U.S.-led action against the 1980 Moscow Games.
“Now his dream is ruined and this ruin is dismissed,” Zhukov said, “simply as an ‘unfortunate consequence.’ ”
This, of course, is a reference to the answer given last Monday by Canadian law professor Richard McLaren when, in making public his World Anti-Doping Agency-commissioned inquiry into accusation of state-sanctioned doping in Russia, he was asked about guilt by association.
In 1980, the Australian IOC member R. Kevan Gosper supported the U.S.-led Moscow boycott. He says now he “wouldn’t have made that decision.” A silver medalist in track and field, Gosper served as an IOC member from 1977 to 2013 and retains considerable influence.
The McLaren Report allegations, Gosper said, make for a “very, very serious problem.” Even so, given the IOC’s turbulent history, in partiular the 1980 and 1984 Los Angeles Games boycotts, Gosper said, “To take a collective decision against Russia in a world that is very uncertain, I think, would be very wrong.”
This is what the Russians kept saying.
The president of Russia, Vladimir Putin himself, in a statement released last week by the Kremlin:
“Today, we see a dangerous return to this policy of letting politics interfere with sport. Yes, this intervention takes different forms today, but the essence remains the same; to make sport an instrument for geopolitical pressure and use it to form a negative image of countries and peoples. The Olympic movement, which is a tremendous force for uniting humanity, once again could find itself on the brink of division.”
The former Russian leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, who wrote a letter last week to Bach that said, in part:
“The principle of collective punishment is unacceptable for me. I am convinced that it contradicts the very culture of the Olympic movement based on universal values, humanism and principles of law.”
Zhukov’s presentation to the IOC board cautioned against what he called a “rush to judgment.” He said:
“Please allow me to begin by saying that I understand you will make today a fateful decision, which will determine the fate of not only Russian sport, but also of the international Olympic movement, of our Olympic family.
“The recent events have caused a significant split to open in the world of sport. We must remain united in our efforts to ensure integrity, united against the pressures that aim to replace constructive unity with destructive confrontation.”
Nearing the close of his remarks, he said:
“I urge you to consider this case independently of the mounting pressure from certain nations to issue a collective ban in relation to Olympic Team Russia.
“The calls for Russia to be banned from Rio 2016, before the McLaren Report was even published, clearly demonstrate that this goes beyond sport.
“I therefore urge you not to fall victim to geopolitical pressure.
“You can all be confident that Russia will change for the better and Russian sport will emerge cleaner.
“But that can only happen through engagement.”
Precisely.
Not through a far-reaching ban.
In noting “certain nations,” make no mistake about which nations those might be.
The calls for a ban, spun up by the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency in particular, beg fundamental questions about its role: Is USADA supposed to engage in such lobbying? Or Is it merely a provider of services — if you will, a contractor?
Too, the hypocrisy of certain political leaders in reacting to the IOC’s decision Sunday could not be more evident. The U.K. sports minister, Tracey Couch, said the “scale of the evidence arguably pointed to the need for stronger sanctions.”
This makes for empty rhetoric if not unintentional comedy — coming from a country where the government announced earlier this year it was cutting its 2016-17 contribution to WADA by roughly $725,000.
As for no-question irresponsibility — the Daily Mail reported late Saturday that the entire Russian team would be banned.
For a while, that Daily Mail story was the No. 1 story sweeping Reddit.
Oops.
And then there was the New York Times, in its reporting Sunday, saying the IOC move “tarnished the reputations and performance of all Russian Olympic athletes” while serving as a “strong affirmation” that Russia had cheated “under government orders.”
History will tell if that’s anything more than journalistic bravado — if ever the allegations delivered by Mr. McLaren lead to testimony under oath and thorough cross-examination of all the principal actors.
In the meantime:
No matter the circumstance, and especially in this one, groupthink can prove very, very dangerous. Turning toward reason and away from emotion, the way the IOC did Sunday, is almost always a way better option.
As Bach put it, “An athlete should not suffer and should not be sanctioned for a system in which he was not implicated,” adding, “This is not about expectations. This is about doing justice to clean athletes all over the world.”
Even if justice is, as history teaches, often imperfect.
