Like a plague of locusts, so predictable

Like one of those locust cycles that erupt with scientific predictability, here we are five months before an Olympic Games and, just on schedule, there’s an outbreak among the ladies and gentlemen of the press of OMG the-sky-is-falling. What, you say? These Rio Games are on track to be a disaster! Zika! Water pollution! Slow ticket sales! Ack! Danger, Will Robinson! Or maybe, you know, not.

It’s so foreseeable. It’s also eminently tiresome. This happens every single Olympics.

Here’s a call for reasonableness, a major dose of perspective and some balance. Not everything is a crisis, or needs to be treated that way.

It's elemental that there's no need to be Pollyanna.

At the same time, in advance of every single Olympics in recent memory, the press stirs itself — and consequently readers and viewers — into a gloom-and-doom, bad news-mostly frenzy.

Then the Olympic cauldron gets lit and, what do you know — the spectacle if not miracle that is the Games takes over and the next 17 days are predictably magic.

Bet that’s what happens in Rio, where the Games start on Aug. 5, roughly 150 days away.

In the meantime, and for entertainment purposes only of course, here’s a take on an old game — instead of a bean in a jar for every time a newlywed couple celebrates being married, put a dollar into a jar at each mention in the media between now and then of Zika and the Olympics.

By Aug. 5, you’d have enough to buy — well, so many mosquito nets you might do the honorable thing and send stacks to Africa.

"World Malaria Day" this year is April 25, aimed at focusing attention on that silent, relentless killer: 214 million cases of the disease in 2015, 438,000 deaths globally, 90 percent of which are in sub-Saharan Africa, 78 percent children under 5.

About 3.2 billion people are at risk, a little under half the world’s population, for malaria.

For sure not to dismiss anyone's suffering anywhere, but what's at issue is a major discrepancy in scale: 1.5 million cases against 3.2 billion people at risk. Why no slew of journalistically responsible stories about malaria?

For emphasis: Zika is assuredly important. Too, it is newsworthy.

Typically, Zika leads to a few days of aches and fever. But it has been linked to brain damage in roughly 650 babies. And a very few with the Zika virus also develop a paralysis called Guillain-Barré syndrome (the paralysis is normally reversible).

But, as the opening of the pre-Games U.S. Olympic Committee’s media summit Monday in Beverly Hills, California, underscored, the relentless focus on Zika is at least one and probably several degrees too many.

As things opened Monday, with a session involving several U.S. swim stars, including Ryan Lochte, Missy Franklin and Natalie Coughlin, the first question — with so many amazing stories sitting on stage — was about Zika.

Right after that came a session with USOC chairman Larry Probst, chief executive Scott Blackmun, high-performance chief Alan Ashley and marketing boss Lisa Baird — and a half-dozen questions about Zika.

The leadership group also got questions about doping in Russia, Kenya and Ethiopia. Including: what level of confidence does the USOC have that American athletes, particularly in track and field, will compete on a level playing field? And as a leader in the Olympic movement, does the USOC have any role in trying to shape a fix?

Hello? Don’t such questions pre-suppose that we in the United States are sporting the white hats and everyone everywhere else is not? Talk about short memories. It was only 12 years ago, before the Athens 2004 Games, that the United States, and in particular the U.S. track and field program — in the midst of the sordid BALCO mess — served as world poster child for dirty play.

Or maybe everyone has already forgotten that it was just three short years ago that Lance Armstrong, arguably the king of doping, had his memorable “confession” with Oprah Winfrey.

Oh, and inevitably, here came a question to the USOC leadership about whether the International Olympic Committee ought to consider an “alternate bid city” if “things start to fall apart.”

As if.

The USOC, remember, put Chicago up for the 2016 Games. It did not win. Rio did.

Just try to imagine the diplomatic, political and economic consequences of, for instance, yanking the Games away from their first edition in South America. Or, two years ago, amid the Sochi-is-not-ready whining and wailing, taking the Games away from Russia and Vladimir Putin.

The welcome turn finally came Monday afternoon with a group of track and field stars: Aries Merritt (looking healthy after a  kidney transplant), Meb Keflezighi (the marathon star still going strong in his 40s), Allyson Felix (trying to run both the 200 and 400), Alysia Montaño (a champion pre-, during and post-pregnancy), Dawn Harper-Nelson (thoughtful, eloquent gold-medal hurdler) and Ashton Eaton (decathlon champion and world record-holder who is, simply, one of the truly great guys in Olympic sport).

The track and field group got questions about doping, for sure (Montaño: “not really confident” the playing field is clean). But for the most part the questions were about the athletes, and their stories (who knew Felix loves Beyoncé tunes?).

There are way, way, way more things going on in advance of these Olympics than Zika.

Like Paralympic champion Tatyana McFadden, who — take that, Galen Rupp, with talk of a 10k and marathon double — said from the stage that she intends in Rio to go for seven golds on the track: the 100, 400, 800, 1500, 5k, marathon and relay.

"You have to transform perceptions," the head of the International Paralympic Committee, Sir Philip Craven, said from two places away. "You only do this with positive experiences."

"I think we have to recognize what our role is," Blackmun had said earlier on the stage. "We're one of 200 countries that participates in the Olympic Games. By definition, you have to have someone in charge of the overall project. Every single Games brings its own unique set of challenges that causes people to question whether the Games should've been awarded to 'X.' "

Fact: it’s going to be winter in Brazil during the Olympics. Zika risk will thus likely be way, way down.

Fact: after the Olympic circus packs up, the people who live in Brazil are still, for the most part, going to be living in Brazil. You want to talk about Zika? No problem. You want to do a story now? Sure. But — make a commitment to get back to the story in a year or two, when the Olympic spotlight is not on.

(Query: last story earning front-page attention about LGBT issues in Russia was — when?)

As Adeline Gray, the female U.S. wrestling world champion who took part in a test event in Rio in January, said afterward, referring to the threat of the virus, "It’s part of traveling. This is something that the people of Brazil have to deal with on a daily basis. The fact that I’m only here for a short time. It’s not really fair for me to freak out about it to that extent. I think if I was planning to have a child in the next month, I would be extremely uneasy about this.”

Fact: as the USOC’s leadership made plain on Monday, it’s up to every single athlete to decide for him or herself whether to go to Rio. Prediction: every single eligible athlete will go. That’s what Olympic athletes do. We all live in a world of risk; they live for a moment that comes only once every four years, and maybe just once in a lifetime.

Blackmun said he was not aware of “any single athlete” making the decision not to go.

It was up to Coughlin, the versatile and veteran U.S. swimmer, to put things in some perspective. She took that first question Monday morning about Zika, answering from the stage, “There are always things that are beyond our control at the Olympic Games. This is just one of them.”

Let us review many of the recent pre-Games hysterias:

Sydney 2000: calendared for September, not July or August. Would anyone watch? Well, yes. Remember Cathy Freeman? Lighting that cauldron of fire? And her 400-meter victory, just one race on what was an amazing night on the track? How quickly the narrative turned — Sydney, best Summer Games ever.

Salt Lake 2002, the first post-9/11 Games: terrorism. Everything turned out just fine.

Athens 2004, the first Summer Games after 9/11: again, terrorism. Many media concerns even put reporters and crew through gas-mask training. Everything turned out just fine.

Beijing 2008: Human rights. Cost overruns. And air quality, with a tornado of stories warning that the skies were going to be filthy and the athletes might not even, you know, breathe. The skies were mostly blue. As for athletic performance: Michael Phelps, eight gold medals. Too inside for you? Outside: Kenya’s Sammy Wanjiru winning the men’s marathon (on a hot, sunny morning) in an Olympic-record 2:06.32.

London 2012: again, terror (the July 2005 underground attacks). Cost overruns. General angst from the “forensic” British press, to use the term favored by now-IAAF president Sebastian Coe. Now London is, in the minds of many outside Australia, considered the best Games ever.

Sochi 2014: LGBT issues. Black Widow bombers. Putin. $51 billion. Hotel rooms not quite ready a few days before opening ceremony. Everything turned out fine.

No less an authority than the Economist — Nelson Mandela’s magazine of choice during his 27 years of imprisonment at Robbin Island — published a feature a few days ago under a headline that declared, “An Olympic oasis,” and, underneath, asserted in plain terms that Zika “will not be much of a threat to the Rio Games.”

It went on:

“There is already much to celebrate about the Rio Olympics, though with their city turned into an obstacle course of road works for the new metro and bus lanes, cariocas” — what the locals call themselves — “may not yet feel like cheering. There has been no obvious waste or corruption. The city has used the Games as a catalyst for a wider transformation.”

The mayor since 2009, Eduardo Paes, “tore down an elevated motorway that scarred the old port, burying it in a tunnel. The port area now hosts new museums and public spaces; next month a tramway will open there. Apart from better public transport, the Olympics may bequeath an overdue revival of Rio’s decayed and crime-ridden historic centre. If urban renewal were a sport, that would win a gold medal.”

You want a story, ladies and gentlemen? That’s a story.

How to view 28 medals

There are lots of ways to look at the performance of the U.S. team at the just-concluded Sochi 2014 Winter Games. The American team won 28 medals, nine gold.

The optimist says that’s great.

The realist says the U.S. not only could have done better but almost surely should have. The International Olympic Committee added 12 new events to the 2014 program, mostly in the so-called action sports, and in those 12 Americans won nine medals. So — what happened around so much of the rest of the team?

Starting with the optimist’s view:

Sochi marked the best U.S. performance at a non-North American Winter Games. Those 28 medals were second only to the host Russians, who won the overall count with 33. Nine tied the mark set in Vancouver four years ago for most-ever gold medals at a non-domestic Games. The U.S. team won 10 in Salt Lake City in 2002.

Mikaela Shiffrin, just 18, won the first gold medal in women’s slalom skiing in 42 years. Ted Ligety won the men’s giant slalom under extraordinary pressure.

The two-man bobsled team, Steve Holcomb and Steve Langton, won the first medal of any color — in this instance, bronze — in 62 years. Holcomb would later drive the four-man sled to another bronze.

Joss Christensen, Gus Kenworthy and Nick Goepper swept the Olympic debut of slopestyle skiing. That marked only the third time U.S. men have swept the podium at the Winter Games. The prior occasions: figure skating 1956, snowboard halfpipe 2002.

Alan Ashley, the U.S. Olympic Committee’s chief of sport performance, declared last Saturday at a news conference at the Sochi 2014 main press center that, overall, the American team had done a “fantastic job.”

The realist’s extrapolation:

Starting from the exact same place: 28 medals, nine golds, and comparing that with Vancouver: 37 medals, nine golds.

Should going to Russia instead of just across the border to Canada make so much difference?

If before the Games Americans would have been a known lock for nine medals in the 12 new events, experts in some circles would not have found it unreasonable to have predicted 40 medals overall for Team USA.

How, then, to appropriately assess 28?

The entire U.S. Olympic Winter team did not win as many medals as the U.S. track and field team did in London in 2012. The track team won 29.

For that matter, the U.S. 2012 swim team won 31.

Overall, there were 98 medal events at the Sochi Games. One potentially very useful metric is how many medal opportunities there were — that is, available spots for Americans to earn a medal.

It’s not a simple case of multiplying 98 times three (the number of medals per event). In some events there might only be one American available to earn a medal; in others, several.

Bottom-line: there were, by the end of the Games, 255 medal opportunities. Again, American athletes earned 28 medals. That’s a return rate of 10.98 percent.

Perhaps this, then, might offer the best measure of the 2014 U.S. team’s performance: is a return rate of 10.98 percent good, or can it — or better yet, ought to be — improved upon?

For comparison, the London track team’s return rate: 29 of 143, or 20.3 percent.

The gold standard is the 2012 U.S. swim team: 31 of 62, or 50 percent.

Of the nine gold medals, five came from new events; four from events that had been on the program before 2014.

As pointed out by Law Murray, a graduate student at the Annenberg journalism school at the University of Southern California who was a credentialed reporter at the Games, all nine of the gold medalists are under age 30.

Much of the pre-Games media attention focused on veterans such as snowboarder Shaun White and speedskater Shani Davis. Neither medaled. As Murray also noted, of the 20 individual medalists, 14 won medals for the first time in Sochi. Only the 20 new medalists from the 2002 Salt Lake Games exceeded that number.

The USOC looks at all these kinds of things, and more. It has two fundamental priorities. One, win medals. Two, inspire the American public. The inspiring depends on the medals. This is the mission. And the mission, so it’s clearly understood, can involve some serious money.

Strictly speaking, the USOC does not, in the manner of a traditional American business, seek ROI, or return on investment. But — when you are laying out $2,724,345 to US Speedskating, as the USOC did in 2012, the year for which disbursements are most recently available, according to the USOC’s tax returns, and the long-track team goes oh-for-Sochi, it’s reasonable to launch a far-reaching inquiry.

As first pointed out by Gary D’Amato of the Wisconsin Journal-Sentinel, the U.S. long-track team’s medal count since 2002 has gone like this: eight, seven, four, zero. That belies an institutional problem that, finally, exploded into the public domain in 2014.

USOC chief executive Scott Blackmun said last Saturday, “If you look at the speedskating results, we weren’t the only nation that got smoked,” the Dutch taking a torch to the rest of the world.

Echoed Ashley: “Our job now is to say, ‘What went wrong, what went right and how do we improve?’ “

Another program that figures to invite scrutiny: the figure skaters won a bronze in the new team event, true, but left Sochi without a medal in men’s or ladies’ singles for the first time since 1936. That is, in a word, unacceptable.

The USOC, according to its tax statements, gave the U.S. Figure Skating Assn. $842,486 in 2012; $866,966 in 2011; $1,023,025 in 2010.

The United States produced the men’s gold medalist in 2010, the women’s silver medalist in 2006 and gold medalist in 2002. Now?

The last U.S. woman to medal at an Olympics or world championships — in an Olympic year, the worlds come after a Games — is Kimmie Meissner, who won the world championship in 2006.

Since 2010, no U.S. man has finished higher than seventh at the Olympics or the worlds.

Figure skating’s scoring system is opaque, surely. But last Thursday, on a night when Americans Gracie Gold and Ashley Wagner were talked up big-time by many of figure skating’s most traditional U.S. supporters — Gold would ultimately would finish fourth, Wagner seventh — the TV ratings underscored the challenge:

The ladies’ free skate, traditionally a highlight of the Games, attracted 20.3 million viewers, as Russia’s Adelina Sotnikova won gold over South Korea’s Yuna Kim amid controversy. The comparable night in Torino, when American Sasha Cohen won silver, drew 25.7 million. That is 5.4 million fewer people, a drop of 21 percent.

The U.S. men’s hockey team came to Sochi proclaiming “gold or bust,” beat the Russians in one of the Games’ most dramatic moments and then, in a 5-0 bronze-medal loss to Finland, proved they really meant it — it really was gold or time to go into the tank. “We didn’t show up. We let our country down. That’s it,” forward Max Pacioretty was quoted as saying in the Los Angeles Times.

There were high hopes this might be the breakthrough year for both cross-country skiing (no medals since 1976) and biathlon (no medals, ever). Didn’t happen.

It’s easy to see how the U.S. team could have more than made up the medals it won four years ago:

Lindsey Vonn did not ski in Sochi because she was hurt. In 2010, she won two.

The Nordic combined team, altogether, won four in 2010. In Sochi, zero.

The long-track team, in Vancouver, four. In Sochi, zero.

Add those together and you get 10. Add 10 to 28 and 38 is almost the 40 that figured to come with the new additions to the program.

Of course, sports — particularly at the Olympics — can often prove a matter of woulda, coulda, shoulda.

For every medal the United States didn’t win, there’s one it surprisingly did — such as Andrew Weibrecht’s silver in the super-G, a reprise of his 2010 bronze in the same event.

Some would suggest that the move to 28 from 37 is also tied to the increasing globalization of the Winter Games. In the men’s snowboard halfpipe, for instance, traditionally the province of White and other Americans, no U.S. man medaled; two Japanese and a Swiss rocked the podium.

Then again, in Vancouver, 26 national Olympic committees won medals. In Sochi, exactly the same number, 26 NOCs, won medals.

“Things don’t always shake out the way you want to,” Ashley, ever diplomatic, said last Saturday. “The surprises are sometimes way more exciting than the disappointments.”

USOC's snapshot of stability

Financial documents, it is often said, are boring. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

They provide a wealth of clues about the performance and direction of whatever entity is at issue.

What the U.S. Olympic Committee's annual tax filing, its Form 990, made public Wednesday, underscores -- yet again -- is that, under the direction of board chairman Larry Probst and chief executive Scott Blackmun, it has reversed years of chaos and infighting and traded that for security, stability, growth and zero turmoil.

In combination with the medals tallies from the Vancouver 2010 and London 2012 Games -- the U.S. teams won the overall counts at both Olympics, with 37 in 2010 and 104 in 2012 -- these are, in many ways, glory years for the U.S. Olympic Committee.

Almost totally.

Now comes the next step: the USOC is quietly moving to forge partnerships within the international Olympic movement. Probst is thought to be a candidate for IOC membership, perhaps as soon as this year; meanwhile, he and Blackmun have, since 2010, assiduously been at work at relationship-building, and the USOC is eyeing a bid for the Summer 2024 or Winter 2026 cycle, probably 2024.

All this is rooted in the comfort of the documents that underpin the USOC"s standing.

On the very first page: total revenues of $338.3 million, up from $140.7 million in 2011.  This wide discrepancy is normal, due to the receipt of broadcast revenues in a Games year.

Similarly, expenses were up from $185 million in 2011 to $247 million in 2012 (also, page 1).

Revenues thus exceeded expenses by $91 million.

The timing of the lump-sum broadcast pay-out for the Summer Games forces the the USOC to shelter cash reserves so that it can have sufficient operating cash for the remainder of the four-year Olympic cycle.

The apples-to-apples comparison for 2012 is 2008, the final year of the previous four-year cycle, which in Olympic terms is called a "quadrennium." USOC revenue in 2008: $280.6 million. At $338.3 million, 2012 revenue marked a 20.5 percent jump.

As a continued sign of the stability the USOC has shown since Probst took over as chairman of the board and Blackmun came on as chief executive, the report lists no severance payments -- that is, no former employees were "highly compensated."

Compare that to the 2010 Form 990, which featured three chief executives on the USOC payroll  -- Blackmun, who had been hired that year, along with former executives Jim Scherr and Stephanie Streeter.

Alan Ashley, the USOC"s chief of sport performance, got about a 10 percent raise over 2011 (page 8). Based on the 2012 team's performance in London -- who wants to question that?

Blackmun's compensation (page 7), breaks down this way: $461,923 salary (page 64), $231,750 bonus (page 64) and $35,664 retirement income (page 64). Then there's another column of deferred compensation -- a long-term performance bonus plus non-taxable retirement and health insurance benefits.

For those tempted to look only at the first column (page 7) next to Blackmun's name and see the number itself, which says, $729,337, there's this:

He made less in 2012 -- a Summer Olympic year -- than he did in 2011. His 2011 total: $742,367. He got paid a bigger bonus in 2011 is mostly why.

Then there's this for context and comparison:

According to a database published last month by USA Today, here is what various athletic directors around the United States make: Shawn Eichorst, Nebraska: $1.123 million. Barry Alvarez, Wisconsin, $1.143 million. Tom Jurich, Louisville, $1.401 million.

David Williams at Vanderbilt: $3.239 million.

By any measure in the real world, Blackmun is a bargain.

Meanwhile, USA Ski & Snowboard got $4.3 million in grants from the USOC; it earned 21 of the 37 Vancouver medals. At the 2013 alpine world championships, Ted Ligety won three gold medals; Mikaela Shiffrin won the world slalom title; Kikkan Randall is a cross-country medals threat; and more.

USA Swimming got $4.16 million; it won 31 medals in London.

USA Track & FIeld got $4.692 million. It won 29 medals in London.

This is the USOC strategy: to invest in sports likely to bring back results. Given the U.S. team's world-leading performance in London -- all those who want to argue that the swim and track teams did not measure up, line up on the left.

USOC's "major growth opportunity"

DALLAS -- Five years ago, the United States Olympic Committee raised less money in major gifts than the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo, its sort-of neighbor in Colorado Springs, Colo. For fiscal year 2007, the USOC raised less than $1 million in major gifts. In a word: pathetic.

For fiscal 2011, under the direction of chief development officer Janine Alfano Musholt, the USOC raised a net total of $10 million in gifts of more than $1,000. In two words: major progress.

In a wide-ranging news conference here Sunday at the traditional media summit in advance of the Olympic Games, USOC leaders said that they hoped American athletes would win the medal count this summer in London and that progress is being made in their ongoing revenue dispute with the International Olympic Committee.

But the most intriguing thing that was said -- and which relates directly to the medal count at any Olympic Games and ultimately could prove the secret to any new Olympic revenue model in the United States -- relates to the USOC's development campaign.

It's a potential game-changer.

As USOC chief executive Scott Blackmun reminded everyone, the focus at the leadership level is "to generate resources." With that comes the ability to do all the other stuff the American public not only wants but expects -- like, for instance, win the medal count.

Of course, the ground rule, spelled out in a 1978 law enacted by Congress, is that the USOC must be privately funded.

This is what makes the USOC different from every other national Olympic committee in the world. In the rest of the world the Olympic committee is an arm of its government.

For emphasis: the USOC must raise every penny it spends.

To grossly simplify, the USOC largely depends on television and sponsor money.

The crux of the dispute with the IOC is that the USOC gets a special cut of the NBC and sponsor deals that no other NOC gets. The USOC gets 12.75 of the NBC money, $4.38 billion from 2014 through 2020, and 20 percent of the IOC's top-tier sponsor deals.

From the perspective of the rest of the world -- it makes sense that everyone else might be upset. Why should the USOC get special treatment?

From the USOC"s perspective -- it makes sense that the USOC is super-protective of its share. Everyone else is getting funds from their federal governments. The USOC isn't. What is the USOC supposed to do? Cut back? And let Russia and China roll over the American team?

It's not as if the USOC is in position to ask the federal government for money, either. For one, it's not the American way. For another, as Blackmun observed, "It's hard for us to make a case that we should receive government support when we have won the [overall] medal count at every Summer Olympic Games since Barcelona [in 1992] and won the medal count at Vancouver," a reference to the 2010 Winter Games.

As it is, it's something of a miracle that the U.S. teams do as well as they do. The USOC's annual budget is roughly $150 million, about the same as Ohio State spends on its athletic department.

Which is where the notion of an enhanced development campaign comes in.

Everyone knows football drives sports programs at Division I universities.

The amount of money that can get thrown around those programs is, in a word, obscene.

Just to take one example:

In 2003, Lewis Field at Oklahoma State was renamed Boone Pickens Stadium after alum and oilman T. Boone Pickens donated $70 million. That gift, $20 million of which was earmarked for stadium expansion, according to the OSU website, generated $100 million in gifts and pledges. In 2006, Pickens donated an astonishing $165 million more.

The stadium was re-dedicated in 2009. They set an attendance record there last fall. The OSU football team played in a BCS bowl game in January, the Fiesta Bowl, and won, beating Stanford and Andrew Luck, who would go on to be the No. 1 pick in the NFL draft.

That's called success breeding upon success.

Why can't the USOC replicate that kind of success?

If there are boosters willing to do that kind of thing for dear ol' alma mater -- why won't someone stand up and do that for the red, white and blue?

Because no one had ever really thought about it.

Which is crazy.

Why, in particular?

Because, as Musholt said, "We could change the way the movement is funded in the United States, in a good way."

About two or three weeks ago, about half the members of the USOC board of directors got together in Denver to talk about this very thing.

"When we talked longer-term, we talked orders of magnitude different than what we are talking now," USOC board chairman Larry Probst said.

Just to be imaginative, why couldn't 20 or 100 really rich people contribute fractional shares toward USOC financing?

Why couldn't life insurance policies or annuities be contributed? They do that in college development offices all the time.

This particular revenue stream is so obvious. It's just sitting there, practically begging to be tapped.

It is, as Blackmun called it, the USOC's "major growth opportunity."