Renata Simril

Here we go: back to LA, the one place a Summer Olympics should always be in the United States

Here we go: back to LA, the one place a Summer Olympics should always be in the United States

News alert: the Games famously were in LA in 1932 and 1984 and will be back in 2028. If you think Paris was the best ever, and it’s right up there with London, with the proviso that all Games have backstage glitches, and on TV you lived none of that, none of the Olympic Village food drama, the COVID cases or, anywhere, the signage that would send you on trips to nowhere — LA formally now has next.

To be clear, the bar is set high, International Olympic Committee president Thomas Bach calling these Games, which came Sunday to a close, a “love story.”

Here's hoping a U.S. panel on the 'state' of the Olympics thinks -- big

Here's hoping a U.S. panel on the 'state' of the Olympics thinks -- big

The United States Congress, in its infinite wisdom, has empowered a Commission to study the “state” of the U.S. Olympics and Paralympics.

Rather than surrendering to an avalanche of easy jokes, having covered the “state” of this enterprise for 25 years, having myself triggered the last major reconstruction amid Congressional hearings of the then-USOC board structure in 2003, sparked by a story I wrote in late 2002 for the Los Angeles Times, let’s simply note that the new USOPC board chair, Gene Sykes, is a man of uncommon decency and intelligence, so there’s hope.

At the same time, it’s not clear whether Congress, sparked by the Larry Nassar scandal, wants 1/ yet again to point fingers, or 2/ a report that like many things in Washington amounts to a lot of words but says nothing because 3/ something performative allows Congress to go, yep, we did something because we all know Larry Nassar was a really bad guy and, oh, China almost beat us in the medals count at the Tokyo Olympics, and what is that about?