What would Jackie Robinson want us to do?

A very few moments in sports have sparked change well beyond. For starters: Jesse Owens in Berlin, Jackie Robinson breaking baseball’s color barrier and Tommie Smith and John Carlos on the medals stand in Mexico City.

Saturday marked the 70th anniversary of Robinson’s Major League Baseball debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers. Now it’s time to pay it forward, and do the right thing by Robinson and get more young men, and particularly young men of color, back into the game.

A little personal history.

I grew up in Ohio, northwest of Dayton. This was Cincinnati Reds territory. My childhood hero was Pete Rose. Perhaps there's a direct line to becoming a skeptical sportswriter when, as a kid, Pete Rose is your idol — but I digress.

In the 1970s, the Reds and the Dodgers (by then well-established in LA) were rivals. I was all Big Red Machine. Even so, I knew all about Jackie Robinson, who had retired years before. If you know anything about baseball, and in southwestern Ohio it was a mark of respect to know baseball history, you especially knew about Jackie Robinson.

You knew, for instance, how in 1947, at a game in Boston, the opposing team’s players were heckling the Dodgers and in particular Pee Wee Reese, the stellar Dodger shortstop, for playing ball with a black man. Reese said nothing. He walked over to Robinson and put his hand on Robinson’s shoulder. That shut everyone up.

Reese was from Louisville, Kentucky. That was the South. But Louisville was also Reds territory. The people I was going to high school with often had relatives — if not parents — who came from Kentucky or Tennessee. Dayton is roughly 50 miles north of the Ohio River. (For those not familiar with American geography, the Ohio River separates North from South in the United States.)

Jackie Robinson’s story — the Dodger story in those years — is superbly told in Roger Kahn’s 1972 “The Boys of Summer.”

That book was the most excellent inspiration for a teen-age boy in the cornfields of southwestern Ohio who could only hope, one day, to be a sportswriter.

The book was published in February 1972. I read it and re-read and re-read it all that spring and summer. Jackie Robinson died that October, three days after my birthday.

“A life is not important,” Robinson once said, “except in the impact it has on other lives.”

Martin Luther King Jr. once told the pitcher Don Newcombe, another Dodgers star and, like Robinson, a former Negro League standout, “You’ll never know what you and Jackie and Roy [Campanella, the Dodger catcher] did to make it possible to do my job.”

Fast forward:

Every April 15, every Major League team honors Robinson, with every player on every team wearing his jersey, No. 42. On Saturday, the Dodgers unveiled a statue at Chavez Ravine.

https://twitter.com/ArashMarkazi/status/853378085089038337

It’s not much of a reach to suggest that it is because of Robinson's influence that baseball ultimately went global, why baseball (and softball) are back in the Olympics for 2020, why the president of the World Baseball Softball Confederation, the Italian Riccardo Fraccari, was recently in the east African nation of Mozambique for talks aimed at setting up a national federation there.

You know the saying: act global, think local?

Much has been written about the declining percentage in recent years of black players in the majors.

That percentage grew steadily from Robinson’s 1947 debut until the 1970s. At that point it stayed steady — about 16 to 19 percent — for about 25 years, 1972 to 1996. Since then, it has dropped significantly. In the 2016 season, the figure was 6.7 percent.

It is worth pointing out that for the past dozen or so years, more than half of all players in the major leagues have been pitchers — and there are now 10 times as many Latino pitchers as there are African-Americans.

It’s also worth pointing out something else.

If you are a talented 13- or 14-year-old African-American athlete, and you — and, especially, your folks — are looking up and out, there’s an elemental question: which sport offers the most economic opportunity?

Sifting the numbers and weighing the options, ask, too: isn’t there something pretty obvious that ought to be done here?

— Football.

Football is what’s called a “headcount” sport. One scholarship equals one guy. Math: 129 Division I schools, 85 full scholarships per school. Here you can read this, and more: the average FBS scholarship during the 2015-16 academic year amounted to just over $36,000.

— Basketball

Men’s Division I is also a headcount sport. A men’s team gets 13 full scholarships. There are 351 Division I schools.  The value of an average basketball scholarship: again, just over $38,000.

— Baseball

There are 299 Division I baseball programs. Each team can offer a maximum of precisely 11.7 scholarships. Baseball, however, is not a headcount sport. It is instead what is called an “equivalency” sport. This means those 11.7 scholarships can be divided between a maximum of 27 players, with all players on scholarship receiving at least a 25 percent scholarship.

This quickly becomes a math problem. Emphasis on problem.

With the increasing focus on concussions and other potential health issues in football, baseball has a huge opportunity to sell itself to young men and their parents. But only if some forward-thinking grown-ups at the NCAA, MLB, the Olympic world and private sector come together to figure out how to do what might right now might seem impossible.

Of course that’s what was facing Jackie Robinson in 1947, too.

Who is America's most famous Olympic athlete?

After doing this now for nearly 20 years, when asking casual (American) fans of the Olympics to name the most famous Olympic athlete who first comes to mind, the answer is invariably one of two:

Michael Phelps. Or, more likely, Carl Lewis.

It’s in this context that one is urged to take in the first in a series of promotional videos — featuring both athletes and venues — from the LA24 bid committee.

Released this week, this first mini-movie features Lewis at the scene of arguably his greatest triumph, the LA Memorial Coliseum, where in 1984 he won four Olympic gold medals. He has, over his Olympic career, nine golds and one silver.

Sports Illustrated named Lewis the Olympian of the 20th century. That list includes Jesse Owens, Jim Thorpe, Mark Spitz, Nadia Comaneci, Paavo Nurmi, Emil Zatopek and many more. Track and field's international governing body, the IAAF, named him male athlete of the century. The International Olympic Committee named him "sportsman of the century."

It would make for a long and fascinating discussion about why, despite his many achievements, Lewis is — still — viewed with something like suspicion in some quarters of the media. It’s a mystery, really. Ben Johnson is the guy who ran with stanozolol in Seoul in 1988, a steroid that turned his eyes yellow. If you have questions about Lewis’ stimulant tests back in the day: Lewis didn’t violate any rules then, and the levels wouldn’t be considered anywhere near a positive now. And, fast forward, maybe there are questions and maybe there aren't about clenbuterol and Jamaicans in Beijing in 2008.

So?

Carl Lewis sang the national anthem. He ran for office. Neither proved glorious. So what? Wasn't it Teddy Roosevelt who said it was the guy who was out there trying who matters? Lewis sometimes speaks his mind. Like last year, at a pre-Rio Games media summit, when he talked about Team USA relay drops. So what? Wasn't it Jack Nicholson who once said we couldn't handle the truth?

People: Carl Lewis has 10 Olympic medals. Nine are gold. And that's just the starting place. Some appreciation and respect, please.

When — not if — you watch this video, consider:

Phelps has won every single one of his 28 Olympic medals overseas. You can argue back and forth about whether Phelps is the greatest Olympic athlete of all time (yes) but this is just fact: eight medals in Athens, eight in Beijing, six in London, six in Rio.

Lewis stands at a different place in the collective imagination. Why? This has zero to do with Phelps, who over the years has come to represent consistent, if not amazingly ferocious, excellence. With Lewis, it's even more layered, and this is where things get even more interesting, and this is another reason why the Olympics -- despite all their problems -- matter, and a lot.

Lewis won those first four medals, again all gold, in LA: the 100, the 200, the long jump and the 4x100 relay, matching the four golds that Owens won in the same four events in Berlin in 1936. The Coliseum is where Rafer Johnson lit the 1984 cauldron, another on a list of enduring memories. The Coliseum was center stage not just for the 1984 Games but the 1932 Olympics, too. Of course, it represents, as Lewis says in the video, history. It's more, really: you can hear and feel there the echoes of history because the building has been around so long. That’s the point: as everyone who knows the first thing about the Olympics and track and field knows, the Coliseum is nothing less than sacred ground.

Our world could use a lot more of what the Coliseum is and always was. It is good, especially in the Olympic context, to walk on sacred ground. Better still to run.

U.S. No. 1 overall -- in fast-changing world

BEIJING — With images of Jesse Owens and Luz Long on the big screens, Owens’ grand-daughter kicked off the final night of the 2015 track and field championships by presenting Usain Bolt his gold medal from the men’s 4x100 relay the night before.

This was, in a nutshell, the past and present of the sport. The future?

This, probably more than anything, from Seb Coe, the newly elected president of the IAAF, the sport’s governing body, taking over from Lamine Diack of Senegal, who served for 16 years: “We are more than a discussion of test tubes, blood and urine.”

He also said at a Sunday news conference, “We have a sport that is adorned by some of the most super-human outrageously talented people in any sport. Our challenge is to make sure the public know there are other athletes,” not just Bolt, “in our sport.”

This is not — not for a second — to discount the import of doping in track and field. But it’s clear things are changing.

The men’s 100 is often thought to be the dirtiest race in the sport; not so; a read of the historical record shows that, without question, it’s the women’s 1500.

And now that times in that event are often back at 4 minutes and over — the final Tuesday saw a slow, tactical 1500, won by one of the sport’s breakout stars, Genzebe Dibaba of Ethiopia, in 4:08 — more women from more countries can claim a legitimate shot at a medal.

That, actually, is one of the two big take-aways from these 2015 worlds: more athletes from more countries winning medals.

And, despite a disappointing medal performance by the U.S. team, the other: the emerging political influence internationally, concurrent with Coe’s presidency, of USA Track & Field.

Despite the chronic backbiting within certain circles — sometimes, track and field comes off as the only major sport in the world in which its most passionate adherents seemingly find joy by being so self-destructive — the sport could well be poised for a new era in the United States.

That depends, of course, on a great many factors. But everything is lined up.

Next year’s Rio Games are in a favorable time zone.

USATF has, in the last three years, under the direction of chief executive Max Siegel, made significant revenue leaps.

Beyond that, Eugene, Oregon, last year played host to the World Juniors and a meeting of the IAAF’s ruling council; the 2016 world indoors will be staged in Portland, Oregon; the 2021 world championships back in Eugene.

The 2017 track championships will be in London; in 2019, in Doha, Qatar.

By comparison: the swim world championships have never been held in the United States. This summer’s FINA championships were held in Kazan, Russia; in 2017, the swim worlds will be in Budapest; in 2019, in Gwangju, South Korea.

In elections that preceded this Beijing meet, all five of USATF’s candidates for IAAF office won; USATF president Stephanie Hightower got the highest number of votes, 163, for any candidate running for the IAAF council.

“You’ve got Seb leading the way but the change in the USATF position internationally is extremely significant,” Jill Geer, the USATF spokeswoman, observed Sunday night.

She also said, “Our development has to continue, and we don’t take our status as the world’s No. 1 track and field team for granted, at all,” adding, “No medals are guaranteed.”

From 2013 going back to 2004, the U.S. has been a 25-medal average team at world majors, meaning the Olympics or worlds.

Here, 18 overall, six gold.

Kenya and Jamaica -- with a victory late Sunday in the women's 4x4 relay -- topped the gold count, with seven. Kenya, overall: 16. Jamaica, overall: 12.

The upshot: for the first time at a world championships, dating to 1983, the U.S. finished third or worse in the gold-medal standings.

The last worlds at which the Americans won so few medals: Edmonton 2001, 13 overall, five gold; Athens 1997, 17 overall, six gold.

Here, the Chinese showed they are an emerging track and field threat, with nine medals, seven of them silver.

Ethiopia, Poland, Canada and Germany won eight apiece. Canada won two golds, in men’s pole vault, Shawn Barber, and on Sunday in men’s high jump, Derek Drouin, with a jump of 2.34 meters, or 7 feet, 8 inches.

Some specific examples of how the world is changing in real time:

The women’s 100 hurdles, long the domain of the Americans (and, recently, Australia’s Sally Pearson, who was hurt and did not compete here)?

Your Beijing podium -- Jamaica, Germany, Belarus.

The women’s 200? Gold went to Dafne Schippers of the Netherlands in a time, 21.63, surpassed in history only by the Americans Florence Griffith-Joyner and Marion Jones.

Asked the inevitable question, Schippers said, I’m clean.

Allyson Felix, the U.S. 200 star, didn’t challenge Schippers in that race; instead, Felix ran the 400, cruising to gold Thursday in 49.26, the year’s fastest time. Coe said the conversation ought to begin in earnest now about the possibility of allowing Felix the chance — like Michael Johnson in Atlanta in 1996 — to double in the 200 and 400 next year in Rio.

Without question, Bolt remains the dominant figure in track and field, and has been since his breakout performance here at the Bird’s Nest seven summers ago. Indeed, Coe said no single figure in international sport had captured the public imagination like Bolt since, probably, Muhammad Ali.

Assuming Bolt can keep himself in the good health he showed here, the world gets at least one more run-through of The Bolt Show, next summer in Rio, now with a worthy rival, the American Justin Gatlin, who took silver in both the 100 and 200. After that? Bolt’s sponsors want him to keep going through the London 2017 world championships; Bolt said he will have to think about it.

That relay Saturday night capped yet another incredible performance for Bolt. But for his false start at the Daegu 2011 worlds, he has won everything at a worlds or Olympics since 2008 — 100, 200, 4x1.

That was a familiar storyline.

This, too:

Mo Farah, the British distance star, nailed the triple double — winning the 5 and 10k, just as he had done at the Moscow 2013 worlds and the London 2012 Olympics.

The American Ashton Eaton won the decathlon, setting a new world record, 9045 points. He and his wife, the Canadian Brianne Theisen-Eaton, make up the reigning First Couple of the sport; she won silver in the heptathlon.

Dibaba, after winning the 1500 on Tuesday, took bronze in the 5000 Sunday night, a 1-2-3 Ethiopian sweep. Almaz Ayana broke away with about three laps to go, building a 15-second lead at the bell lap and cutting more than 12 seconds off the world championships record, finishing in 14:26.83.

Senbere Teferi outleaned Dibaba at the line. She finished in 14:44.07, Dibaba seven-hundredths behind that.

For junkies: Ayana covered the last 3000 meters in Sunday’s final quicker than any woman has run 3000 meters in 22 years.

Dibaba’s sister, Tirunesh, had held the world championship record, 14:38.59, set in Helsinki in 2005. Tirunesh Dibaba holds the world record still, 14:11.15, set in Oslo in 2008.

Then, of course, Beijing 2015 saw this all-too-familiar tale:

The U.S. men screwed up the 4x1 relay, a botched third exchange Saturday night from Tyson Gay to Mike Rodgers leading to disqualification after crossing the finish line second, behind Bolt and the Jamaicans.

Going back to 2001, the U.S. men’s 4x1 has failed — falls, collisions, botched handoffs — at nine of 15 major meets. Not good.

Job one is to get the stick around. If the Americans do that, they are almost guaranteed a medal — and, given a strategy that now sees Gatlin running a huge second leg, the real possibility of winning gold, as the U.S. team did in May at the World Relays, with Ryan Bailey anchoring.

Bailey did not qualify for these championships.

It’s not that the U.S. men — and women — didn’t practice. Indeed, all involved, under the direction of relay coach Dennis Mitchell, thought things were lined-up just right after the prelim, in which the same four guys — Treyvon Bromell, Gatlin, Gay, Rodgers — executed just fine.

The plan, practiced and practiced: hand-offs at about 10 to 12 meters in the zone in the prelims, 12 to 14 in the final. The plan, further: 28 steps in the final, 26 in the prelim — the extras accounting for the faster runs in the final, adrenaline and other factors.

Rodgers took responsibility for the essential mistake. He broke too early.

I don't make to many mistakes and I never make excuses I'll take the blame for this one, Ima learn from it and move on!

— Mike Rodgers (@Mr_Rodgers_DAT) August 29, 2015

As Jill Geer, the USA Track & Field spokeswoman put it in an interview Sunday night with several reporters, “In the relays, there’s a lot of pressure. everybody feels it,” athletes, coaches, staff.

She added, “They don’t accept a DQ any easier than the public does.”

Geer also noted, appropriately, that medals at this level are a function of three things: preparation, execution and luck, good or bad.

In the women’s 1500 on Tuesday, American Jenny Simpson — the Daegu 2011 gold medalist, the Moscow 2013 runner-up — lost a shoe. She finished 11th, eight-plus seconds behind Genzebe Dibaba.

Men’s decathlon: Trey Hardee — the Berlin 2009 and Daegu 2011 champion — got hurt halfway through the 10-event endurance test. He had to pull out.

Women’s 100 hurdles: 2008 Beijing gold and 2012 London silver medalist Dawn Harper-Nelson crashed out; Kendra Harrison was DQ’d; and the 2013 world champion, Brianna Rollins, finished fourth.

Women’s 4x4 relay: the Americans sent out a star-studded lineup, 2012 Olympic 400 champ Sanya Richards-Ross, Natasha Hastings, Felix and Francena McCorory, who had run the year’s fastest pre-Beijing time, 49.83.

Before the race, the four Americans went all Charlie's Angels.

Felix, running that third leg, then put the Americans in front with a 47.7-second split. But McCorory, windmilling with 90 meters to go, could not hold off Novlene Williams-Mills, and Jamaica won in a 2015-best 3:13.13. The Americans: 3:19.44.

It was the first Jamaican 4x4 relay worlds gold since 2001. The Jamaicans have never won the relay at the Olympics.

In the men’s 4x4, LaShawn Merritt reliably turned in a winning anchor leg to lead the U.S. to victory in 2:57.82.

Trinidad and Tobago got second, a national-record 2:58.2. The British, just as in the women’s 4x4, took third. The British men: 2:58.51; the British women, a season-best 3:23.62.

Earlier Sunday night, Kenyan men went 1-2 in the men’s 1500, Asbel Kiprop winning in 3:34.4, Elijah Manangoi 23-hundredths back.

The U.S. got three guys into the final, including 2012 Olympic silver medalist Leo Manzano and Matthew Centrowitz, second in the 1500 at the Moscow 2013 worlds, third at Daegu 2011.

The American finish: 8-10-11, Centrowitz, Manzano, Robby Andrews.

Manzano said afterward, “The first 800 was fine, but I thought I was just going to gear up like I did two days ago,” in the prelims, riding his trademark kick. “Unfortunately it didn’t quite pan out like that. Sometimes it just clicks in place, and today didn’t quite fit in there.”

A couple hours before that men’s 1500, Geer had said, “We had an awful lot of 4-5-6-7 finishes,” adding that “those are the kind of finishes where we will be drilling in and saying, how do we turn that 4-5-6 into a 1-2-3?”

The men’s 5k on Saturday, for instance: 5-6-7, Galen Rupp, Ben True, Ryan Hill.

Beating Farah? That’s an audacious goal.

But, Geer insisted, there is “nothing systemically wrong” with the U.S. effort.

“Our performance wasn’t necessary all the medals we had planned for or hoped for,” she said.

At the same time, she asserted, “When you look at our performance here, where we did well and maybe didn’t do well, if we can fix, which we absolutely can, even half the areas we had execution mistakes or under-performed, we will be extraordinarily strong in Rio.”

Bahamas rocks, U.S. rolls

NASSAU, Bahamas — The crowd was loud for the local boys’ 4x400 race. That was with Thomas A. Robinson Stadium not even maybe one-quarter full. With 19 people in line downstairs for the Kings of Jerk chicken ($10) and pork ($12), it would be more than an hour until the pros took to the blue Mondo track, two more after after that until the Bahamas Golden Knights, with three of the four guys who won Olympic gold in London two years ago in the 4x4, lining it up. Then the place all but erupted.

It’s a no-brainer why the IAAF is coming back here next year for the follow-up edition of the World Relays.

Next year’s meet will be held earlier, the first weekend in May, straight after the Penn Relays. The Youth Olympic Games this summer in Nanjing, China, will feature mixed boys and girls relays, and who knows how that will play for the 2015 event in Nassau? Maybe, too, there might be medleys or sprint hurdles. It’s clear, too, that there need to be more women’s teams in the 4x1500.

But these are all nice problems to have.

Because, frankly, every track meet should be like this.

This meet had passion.

Unlike, for instance, the first few days of last year’s world championships in Moscow, where Luzhniki Stadium was way too empty, here Robinson was alive and jamming. It was 79 years to the day that Jesse Owens had done his thing, tying or setting four world records in the space of 45 minutes at the Big Ten championships, and all of a sudden Sunday track and field was vital again.

They went crazy here, cheering loud and long for the consolation final in the men’s 400, won by the Belgians. The consolation final!

Passion is what track and field needs.

Passion is what the Bahamas delivered, along with great weather, spectacular scenery, a Junkanoo band, fantastic hospitality, first-rate facilities and a fast track that produced three world records, 37 national records and, overall, saw the U.S. team — and especially the U.S. women — dominate the meet.

One world record came Sunday night in the men’s 4x1500, courtesy of — who else — the Kenyans. Two came Saturday, in the women’s 4x1500 and in the men’s 4x200.

The Kenyan men destroyed the 4x1500 record by more than 14 seconds. The new time: 14:22.22.

Asbel Kiprop ran a 3:32.3 anchor. He pointed the baton at the finish line. After the victory ceremony, the Kenyans threw their flowers to the crowd. More roars.

The U.S., anchored by Leo Manzano, ran an American-record 14.40.80. Ethiopia — which had to battle visa issues just to get here — finished third, in 14:41.22.

As for the U.S. women:

On Saturday, the 4x100 team won in 41.88.

Then came victories Sunday in the:

— 4x400, keyed by a killer third leg from Natasha Hastings, in 3:21.73.

— 4x800, with Chanelle Price leading off and Brenda Martinez anchoring, in 8:01.58. Kenya finished second.

"It started to get loud and I just wanted to bleed for my teammates,” Martinez would say afterwards.

— 4x200, in 1:29.45, with Great Britain second, 17-hundredths back. Jamaica took third in 1:30.04, Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce anchoring.

Gold in the 100, 200, 400, 800 — and silver, after a fall, in the 1500.

There was one other U.S. victory Sunday.

Just not one the crowd came to see.

The Bahamas’ line-up in the men’s 4x400 featured Demetrius Pinder, Michael Mathieu and Chris Brown, just like two years ago in London. LaToy Williams subbed for Ramon Miller. Williams opened it up; Pinder ran second, as usual; Brown, third (he had run first in London); Mathieu would close it out.

The U.S. countered with David Verburg; Tony McQuay; 2012 Olympic triple jump champion Christian Taylor, who also runs a mean 400; and LaShawn Merritt, who is the 2008 Olympic as well as 2009 and 2013 world champion in the 400.

Merritt is also a gold medalist at the 2007, 2009, 2011 and 2013 4x400 relays.

It takes nothing — repeat, nothing — away from the Bahamas gold in 2012 to note that LaShawn Merritt was hurt and did not run in London.

The Bahamas defeated the U.S. in April at the Penn Relays; the U.S. has never lost to the same team twice in a row in the men’s 4x4.

By the time Brown handed off to Mathieu, the Bahamas had a four-meter lead. The music was at full roar. The place was jumping. It was loud. It was exciting. It was great theater.

The men’s 4x4 was, simply put, an advertisement for track and field.

Merritt is 27, 28 at the end of June. He has been through it and come out the other side. Not just on the track but, as has been well-documented, off. He has matured and is as mentally tough a customer in not just this sport but any sport.

He tried a move at 250 meters. Nothing there. So he settled in and waited, behind Mathieu, for the turn.

And then just turned it on.

Down the stretch, LaShawn Merritt showed why he is one of the great 400 runners in history.

He didn’t just run Mathieu down, he buried him.

The clock read 2:57.25 when Merritt crossed first, the crowd suddenly very, very quiet.

Mathieu crossed next, in 2:57.59. Trinidad & Tobago took third, in 2:58.34.

Merritt’s final split: 43.8.

Mathieu’s: 44.6.

“Of course we felt some pressure,” Merritt said later. “It was a big business for us. The Bahamian guys sometimes do trash-talking so we wanted to come out here and, in front of their fans, prove that we’re the best in the world.”

The U.S. men didn’t get the chance to challenge almighty Jamaica in the men’s 4x1. Anchored by Yohan Blake, the Jamaicans won in 37.77. The Americans didn’t run in the final. They had been disqualified in the heats — the result of yet another bad pass, this time Trell Kimmons to Rakieem Salaam, Man 2 to Man 3 on the backstretch.

By the time the pass got completed, the guys were way out of the zone. Obvious DQ.

The men’s 4x2 team had been DQ’d Saturday for another out-of-zone pass.

It surely will prove little consolation that the Jamaican 4x4 team Sunday dropped the baton.

Some context:

Of the last 11 major championships, world or Olympic, including these Relays, dating back to 2001, the U.S. men’s 4x1 team has been DQ’d or DNF’d five times — again, out five of 11.

It’s six of 11 if you include the retroactive doping DQ for the 2001 team.

There is only one word for that: unacceptable.

What is far more problematic is that USA Track & Field has been down this institutional road before. See, for instance, the Project 30 report from 2009.

Looking ahead now to the world championships in Beijing in 2015 and to the Rio Summer Games in 2016, and even beyond, one of the key action points going forward for USATF has to be addressing its sprint relay issues.

Some of what happened here may be, simply, that runners took off too early. That can happen.

Then again, it may also be the case that USATF would be well-advised to name a relay coach — someone in charge of just the relays — and get this right.

There is ample history for any reasonable person to argue that USATF is dysfunctional and incapable of this or that.

There’s also the counter-argument that, at some level, USATF must be doing something right. The 29 medals U.S. athletes won at the London Games didn’t just happen.

Duffy Mahoney, USATF’s high-performance director, has been involved in track and field for decades.

He was alternately sanguine about the DQ’s and resolute about the need to get results.

“Life,” he said, “is what happens to you while you are making plans.”

He also said that the possibility of a full-on relay coach is “one of the beginnings of the solution.”

Who that might be, of course, is a mystery.

It’s hugely unlikely to be Jon Drummond. He is now enmeshed in all kinds of legal complexities involving the Tyson Gay matter. Beyond which — to think that Drummond is the only person in the United States who can coach up the relays is absurd.

Dennis Mitchell served here. On the one hand, the women won, and for the most part they were not the Olympic A-listers. But, again, the men had issues. And Mitchell has a significant PR issue because of his doping ties.

The relays involve timing, communication and confidence. And more.

As Manteo Mitchell, a courageous silver medalist at the London 2012 for the U.S. team in the 4x400 relay, posted on Twitter Sunday within minutes after the 4x100 debacle, without further comment, “Too many egos in one group.”

The Jamaicans seemingly have proven you don’t need group therapy to run the sprint relays. The Americans shouldn’t, either.

A light rain began to fall late Sunday as they wrapped it all up here, the Americans pondering what’s next, the IAAF exuberant.

“In the ‘sun, sea and sand paradise’ that the Bahamas markets itself, we have experienced a true sporting paradise which has excelled beyond our expectations,” Lamine Diack, the IAAF president, said. “The people have embraced the IAAF World Relays and the noise of their support will be left ringing in our memories for many years to come.”

As the rain fell, Timothy Munnings, the director of sports in the Bahamas’ ministry of youth, sports and culture, walked through the stands.

He stopped to talk with some journalists, asking — earnestly — how the event had gone.

“Thank you for coming,” he said. “Next year, you’ve got to be back.”

Eugene: track ghetto or capital?

Eugene, Oregon, is a beautiful little town. It has many virtues. The issue at hand is whether it ought to be the track and field ghetto of the entire United States. A more charitable way to put it, of course, would be to call it the track and field capital of the United States.

Because after the announcement this week that the NCAA Division I outdoor track championships from 2015 through 2021 will be held at venerable Hayward Field, there's little doubt that Hayward, and Eugene, and for that matter, Oregon, are poised to be -- if not flat-out are -- at the epicenter of the track and field scene in the United States for essentially the next decade.

Query: is that a good thing?

Hayward staged the 2013 NCAAs. It will play host to the meet next year. Going through 2021 will make it nine straight.

Each year in late May or early June, Hayward puts on a Diamond League meet, the Prefontaine Classic. In 2014, Hayward will be the site of the world junior championships; in 2015, the USA nationals; and in 2016 -- just as in 2012 and 2008 -- the U.S. Olympic Trials.

Meanwhile, Portland -- just up the road -- recently won the right to put on the 2016 world indoor championships.

In Portland, the Oregon Project, with coach Alberto Salazar, is home to some of the world's leading runners, including Mo Farah, Galen Rupp and, now, American teen sensation Mary Cain. Olympic and world decathlon champion Ashton Eaton and Nick Symmonds, silver medalist in the 800 meters at the 2013 Moscow world championships, headline the list of athletes who in recent years have come out of Eugene.

Depending how you see it, this week's NCAA announcement is either brilliant or yet another turn in a disturbing trend to further niche-ify track and field -- to consign the sport to a distant corner of America, to a remote college town in the late-night Pacific time zone where the sport is destined to get noticed every so often, if then.

It must be noted, of course, that track and field in Oregon revolves around Nike. Without Nike there is virtually nothing.

In its elation over the 2021 thing, the University of Oregon put out a news release that maybe was just a little bit over the top. It quoted athletic director Rob Mullens as saying, "Being the birthplace of running in the United States, Track Town USA offers the most unique experiences for both student-athletes and fans alike."

When the biographies of Jesse Owens, Glenn Cunningham, Jim Ryun, Billy Mills and other greats get around to claiming Eugene as the "birthplace of running," that will surely be news. As will the fact that the University of Chicago played host to the NCAA championships virtually every year, 13 times, from 1921-36 (they were at USC in 1934, Cal-Berkeley in 1935).

Meanwhile, giving credit where it is due: boosters of the move to see so much action in Eugene, like Vin Lananna, the farsighted senior university associate athletic director who is also president of the entity that is itself called TrackTown USA, envision Hayward being a permanent site for the NCAA championships, like Omaha, Neb., is for men's baseball, or Oklahoma City for softball.

And that's fine.

But there are two key distinctions.

One, Omaha's convention and tourism bureau, for instance, recognized that it was unlikely to be a so-called "big-league" town like nearby St. Louis or Kansas City. Those cities actually really do have NFL and Major League Baseball teams.

So to build the Omaha "brand," they aggressively sought the College World Series and have bid successfully in recent years for events such as the U.S. Olympic Trials in swimming. They are concededly after a wholesome, family-style vibe.

Eugene is hardly in competition with Portland or Seattle. And maybe track and field is after the family scene and maybe it's after the die-hard -- nobody is quite sure what audience it's after. That's for sure one of the challenges. Another of the many issues facing the sport is that, if you've never been to an evening at the track before, you often leave after three -- or more -- hours feeling you're not quite sure what you've just seen.

At any rate, the key distinction is this:

Track is the No. 1 sport at the Summer Olympics. You can like it or not, Omaha and Oklahoma City, but baseball and softball are no longer in the Games.

Moreover, everyone in Eugene and, for that matter, Oregon, you can this it or not as well, but the IAAF, track's international governing body, wants more in the United States. Way more. They look at this country, and they see New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Houston, Dallas, Miami, big cities, all these huge and important markets, and the only activity seemingly going on of note is in Eugene, or Portland, and Portland is hardly a top TV market, and they ask -- huh?

And that, friends, is altogether a reasonable question if you want track and field to stop being a niche sport in the United States.

Allyson Felix: the complete package

In some parts of the country, they know it's spring when the daffodils start poking their way out of the ground.

Or when the first red-breasted robins show up from warmer climes.

In Southern California track circles, it's the arrival of the Mt. SAC Relays in way-out-there Walnut, located precisely near nowhere. Despite the geographical undesirability, thousands of high school kids, college runners and several Olympic standouts make the Mt. SACs, testament in part to the efforts of long-time meet director Scott Davis, one of the all-time good guys. Scott died last August.

Two Saturdays ago, they held the 2011 Mt. SACs. Scott surely wouldn't have wanted it any other way. Allyson Felix, who by now has her pick of meets to run in, very deliberately ran at the Mt. SACs, leading the  "Kersee All Stars" to victory in the women's 400-meter relay in 43.1 seconds.

As was Scott Davis, so is Allyson Felix.

It's Allyson Felix's relative misfortune to be great, truly great, at a sport that gets remarkably little attention in a country seemingly desperate for genuine heroes.

I mean, what else would you want?

She ran on the 2008 Games gold-medal winning 1600-meter relay team.

She is the 2004 and 2008 Games silver medalist in the 200 meters.

She is the three-time world champion in the 200 -- 2009, 2007 and 2005.

Last season, she won the inaugural Samsung Diamond League titles in both the 200 and 400 meters, and was named the Jesse Owens Award winner as the top female athlete in the United States.

One of the sport's storylines for 2011, and probably 2012, is whether Allyson will run the 200-400 double at the world championships this summer in South Korea and then, presumably, at the London Games. She said she'll decide by this summer's U.S. nationals.

A back story: One of the Kersee assistant coaches, Valerie Briscoe-Hooks, was the first to do the 200-400 double at a single Games, at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics.

More Allyson:

She excels in the relays. Examples: She runs the second leg (2010 Penn Relays 400-meter relay). She runs anchor (2010 Penn Relays 1600-meter relay). She executes clean passes (both). She wins (both).

Allyson will run the Penn Relays again this coming weekend; her open season gets underway next weekend, in Doha, Qatar, the first 2011 Diamond League meet. In Doha, she will run just the 400.

Allyson runs clean. No one whispers about doping, the scourge of track and field, when it comes to Allyson Felix.

She has great form. The way she runs -- it looks almost effortless, which of course it's not. "I get that a lot," she said. "You have to watch the background. It's my long legs and long stride that make it seem like I'm not moving.

She runs with character. She serves on President Obama's Council for Fitness, Sports and Nutrition.

Allyson, who is University of Southern California through and through, said, "Sports are so uncertain. You work so hard but you never want to be in a situation where you can't do anything else. We," she and her brother, Wes, "were always encouraged to put academics first.

"It's great to make sure younger kids see that. To make sure kids who aren't so serious about sports -- to let them know that they can be great at anything. Having that complete package is a great thing."

Which, in its roundabout way, is why Allyson dropped in at the Mt. SACs a couple weeks back. Allyson is the complete package. And to get to where you're going you can't ever forget where you're from.

And, like thousands of other kids in Southern California, Allyson started at the Mt. SAC Relays.

"When I was in high school, Marion was running at the meet," she said, and that would be Marion Jones, of course.

"To me, she was everything. This was right before Sydney," when Jones would win five medals,  all of which would ultimately be given back amid revelations of doping, "and I remember I stood in line with all these little kids fighting to be in front to get an autograph.

"Just to be able to get close to someone I had looked up to was such a big deal. I think it's so cool to go back and see those kids. I would never have thought," Allyson Felix said, "I would be in that position."

The back story of the 1936 Winter Games

GARMISCH-PARTENKIRCHEN, Germany -- Most everyone knows how Jesse Owens went to Berlin and won four gold medals at the Summer Olympics in 1936. As the legend goes, Owens showed Adolf Hitler a thing or two about the Nazi myth about superiority. Birger Ruud of Norway is also one of the greatest Olympic athletes of all time, a great ski jumper who could also beat you at alpine racing. Moreover, his story is one of incredible personal courage. After his time in the Olympic spotlight, he spent 18 months in a Nazi prison camp and then, upon release, joined the Resistance, where he used his unmatched ski skills to find and hide ammunition dropped from British aircraft.

It is no accident that the photo of Ruud's moment of triumph in the ski jumping event at the 1936 Winter Olympics, here in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, high in the Bavarian Alps, makes for perhaps the emotional centerpiece of an unprecedented exhibition that brings to light not just the story of those Games – but, more importantly, the back story.

Here in the photo are the three Olympic champions: Ruud, the winner, just as he had been four years before, flanked by the bronze medalist, Reidar Andersen, another Norwegian, and the silver medalist, Sven Eriksson of Sweden. Here, too, is the then-president of the International Olympic Committee, the Belgian Count Henri de Baillet-Latour. And over on the right side of the photo -- here is the jarring note that underscores the great lie of the 1936 Winter Games, the notion that sports and politics don't mix: Karl Ritter von Halt, the organizing committee president, snapping a sharp stiff-armed Nazi salute.

It's not a pretty picture. Indeed, it's jarring. But it is an honest photo. It happened. And that is precisely why it's on display, now, after 75 years, along with dozens of other photographs and other materials that confront the ugly history of the 1936 Winter Games, the town's mayor, Thomas Schmid, said.

"We really said that for this 75th anniversary we need to talk about this openly -- the 'dark side of the medal,' he said, referring to the title of the exhibit, which opened here Feb. 15 and which the Museum of Tolerance has already expressed interest in bringing to Los Angeles.

"We can't make it go away," Schmid said. "But we can show how Garmisch-Partenkirchen has changed."

The 1936 Berlin Summer Games have, over the years, been the subject of extensive study. Not so the Garmisch-Partenkirchen Winter Games just months before.

Building upon the success of the 1932 Los Angeles Games, the 1936 Berlin Games announced the emergence of the modern Olympics as a worldwide phenomenon.

A confluence of factors explains why -- the expanding reach of communication technologies, the attempt by the Third Reich to use the Berlin Games as a massive propaganda exercise, the power of the film "Olympia" by Leni Riefenstahl, Jesse Owens' four medals and more.

To this day, of course, the 1936 Berlin Games remain a source of enduring controversy.

Again, the reasons are complex. The Riefenstahl film, for one. Just to pick another, many of the stories from Berlin have remained alive: Marty Glickman and Sam Stoller, the only Jews on the U.S. track team, were denied sure gold medals when they didn't run in the 400-meter relay; they were told the day of the race they would not run, for reasons never made clear.

In comparison, the 1936 Winter Games in Garmisch-Partenkirchen -- it's as if they hardly happened.

And yet, as Charlotte Knobloch, the leader of the Jewish community in Munich and Bavaria, put it, those Winter Games hold significance that deserves to be fully, deeply understood:

"People have, of course, gladly glossed over the fact that this was a most revolting show of propaganda, a nasty deception of public opinion worldwide, under whose guise the very first signs of the Shoah," the Hebrew word for the Holocaust, "could already be detected."

Why look back now at 1936?

Munich is bidding for the 2018 Winter Olympics. An IOC inspection team is in Germany this week; the full IOC will pick the 2018 site in a vote on July 6. Annecy, France, and Pyeongchang, South Korea, are also in the 2018 race.

The Munich candidacy proposes to hold ice events -- skating and curling -- in the city. The snow events -- skiing and so on -- would be in Garmisch-Partenkirchen.

Thus the impetus to re-visit 1936, the mayor and others stressing that the 2018 process affords the opportunity for reflection, perhaps even healing.

In February, meanwhile, the 2011 world alpine ski racing championships were held here in "Gapa," as Garmisch-Partenkirchen is colloquially known on the ski circuit. Some 100,000 euros, roughly $138,000, from the championships' cultural budget -- supported by the German federal ministry of the interior -- was allocated to fund the exhibition.

That took care of the logistics.

As for the will to get it done:

This exhibition is the first of its kind in Garmisch-Partenkirchen. Not once in 75 years has there been anything like it, according to Alois Schwarzmuller, a retired local high-school teacher, long-time community activist and one of the exhibit's primary curators.

For decades, he said, most of the archives were locked away in communist East Germany. It was only after the fall of the Berlin Wall that one could even get at the files, he said.

Then more time had to pass. It just did, he said.

"The first generation -- they were the Nazis ... They did not allow us to go behind the wall.

"The second generation -- in community politics, they told me it was only a sports event," Schwarzmuller said, meaning the 1936 Winter Games. "There was nothing else.

"Now I think it's time. We have a generation that wants to be informed."

The way the story has been largely understood for the past 75 years, Schwarzmuller said, is that the 1936 Winter Games offered near-perfect organization, an array of new buildings and impressive competition venues.

Reality check:

The Games served as cover for a brutal dictatorship that oppressed political opponents and that harassed, humiliated and disenfranchised Germany's Jews. That is "the dark side of the medal":

-- A photo depicts Gapa-area road signs above another announcing, "Jews not welcome."  Such "not welcome" signs disappeared by the Feb. 6, 1936, opening ceremony. They came right back after the Games.

Baillet-Latour, the IOC president, had encountered numerous such signs on a visit to the area just four months before the Games. He was "especially horrified," historian David Clay Large writes in the sole chapter devoted to the 1936 Winter Olympics in his first-rate book "Nazi Games," to see too that "the speed-limit markers on dangerous turns included explicit exemptions for Jews, thereby encouraging them to kill themselves."

-- A photo shows Hitler at the 1936 Winter Games opening ceremony. Some number of the Austrian team "unmistakably" shouted out, "Heil Hitler!"  as they left the stadium at the end of the ceremony, Large writes, causing Hitler to "gaze wistfully" across the border. Innsbruck is just a few kilometers away.

-- A photo of von Halt, the Winter Games organizing committee chief, is accompanied by a striking caption. It says, in part, that von Halt took part in 1936 and 1939 in visiting concentration camps in Dachau and Sachsenhausen. "As a convinced national socialist," it says, "he approved suppression of political opponents and the destructive anti-Semitism that was done by the brown dictatorship since 1941. At the collapse of Berlin he sent in the last hours very young soldiers and old men to fight hopelessly against the Red Army."

"We need to tell people what happened," said Christian Neureuther, who having grown up in Gapa is something of local ski royalty and whose voice thus carries locally, nationally and even abroad. He raced at three Winter Games. So did his wife, Rosi Mittermaier, and she won three medals, two  of them gold, skiing in 1976 in Innsbruck. Their son, Felix, skied at the 2006 and 2010 Winter Games.

"Everyone thinks the 1936 [Winter] Games were fantastic and beautiful," Christian Neureuther said. "The truth comes out here -- the two sides of the medal."