Seb Coe

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.”

Thomas Bach pulls a George Washington -- he is not IOC king after all but president

Thomas Bach pulls a George Washington -- he is not IOC king after all but president

PARIS – As most everyone knows, George Washington is the first president of the United States of America.

One of the stories American schoolkids learn about Washington is how he decided to stop being president at the end of his second four-year term. The new country had broken away from Britain. There they had a king. The king is king until he dies. In this new country, Washington said, things were going to be different.

In 21st century jargon, we would call what Washington did an expression of best practices and world-class governance.

Speaking Saturday before the fuil membership of the International Olympic Committee, president Thomas Bach, nearing the end of his second term, pulled a George Washington. He said he would step down next year, at the end of his mandated 12 years.

Holy hell, but Thomas Bach is really out to get Seb Coe

Holy hell, but Thomas Bach is really out to get Seb Coe

Holy hell, but Thomas Bach really is out to get Seb Coe.

Anywhere and everywhere you go in Olympic circles these days, it’s the talk, and what transpired Friday – calling 911, Bach all but sticking a figurative knife into Coe in broad daylight, anointing Hugh Robertson, head of the British Olympic Association, an individual IOC member – was just the latest as the wheel of IOC presidential succession politics turns.

For months, Bach has sought to downplay the what-comes-next phase for International Olympic Committee leadership. His term, in theory, ends in June 2025. An election is purportedly set for sometime next year. If there is an election.

Scattergories bordering on idiocy: too many track meets, and in 2024, only two matter

Scattergories bordering on idiocy: too many track meets, and in 2024, only two matter

Attention, track and field nerds. This past weekend featured:

1/ the LA Grand Prix, on Friday and Saturday, at UCLA

2/ another Continental Tour Gold meet, in Tokyo, Sunday

3/ a Diamond League meet in Marrakesh, Sunday

4/ the Atlanta City Games, Saturday

5/ World Athletics Combined Events Tour (decathlon, heptathlon) in Götzis, Austria, Sunday

6/ and for the true specialists, World Athletics Race Walk Tour Gold meet in La Coruna, Spain, Saturday

The purist may say, look at the robust nature of the sport.

Anyone else says, this is scattergories bordering on idiocy.

The message the Olympic world needs to hear: Pay the athletes. Especially on the podium

The message the Olympic world needs to hear: Pay the athletes. Especially on the podium

Change or be changed, the president of the International Olympic Committee, Thomas Bach says.

Seb Coe, the head of World Athletics, must feel right now as if he’s living in parallel worlds.

He’s got his athletes telling him he’s, like, the greatest — amid a plan to pay $50,000 to winners at the Paris Games. That’s change. Big change.

Then he’s got critics. Lots of critics. Including institutional critics within the Olympic world.

The world has changed, Seb Coe says: track and field winners at Games to get paid

The world has changed, Seb Coe says: track and field winners at Games to get paid

A few weeks back came the announcement of the Friendship Games, to be held in Russia in September. Total prize money across all sports: $100 million. Winners get $40,000. Second place, $25,000. Third: $17,000.

On Wednesday, World Athletics, the No. 1 sport in the Olympic landscape, made a precedent-setting move, announcing it would pay gold medalists at the Paris Games. Total prize money: $2.4 million. Winners across each of the four dozen track and field events will receive $50,000 each. Relay teams will split the $50k. Starting in Los Angeles in 2028, silver and bronze medalists will also be paid. 

The timing may seem like World Athletics is following the Russians. To be clear, very clear: it is not. 

“I have to accept the world has changed,” World Athletics president Sebastian Coe said Wednesday in an interview with Steve Scott at ITV.

How does any of this make sense?

How does any of this make sense?

In 2024, it would make for an excellent debate at an Oxford or Cambridge about what constitutes a World Athletics-driven “boycott” of Russia and what amounts to a punitive exercise in keeping them out that is indisputably and irrevocably at odds with the fundamental principle of the Olympic charter, which calls for inclusion.

Because, in the end, who gets punished? Vladimir Putin? Or the athletes?

What would the 1980 version of Seb Coe say? What would the 1980 version of Seb Coe tell the then British Olympic Assn. chair Denis Follows, who defied the then prime minister Margaret Thatcher and ensured a British team went to Moscow? Maybe, you know, thanks for letting me live my dream? Which is what an athlete asks?

Track and field makes it so hard on itself. Why, why, why?

Track and field makes it so hard on itself. Why, why, why?

EUGENE, Oregon — On Sunday, the United States won nine medals, four of them gold, at the world track and field championships.

As track nerds knew and organizers helpfully reminded, this was statistically the greatest single-day haul by any nation in the nearly 40-year history of the championships.

On August 31, 1991, the Soviet Union won eight. The previous American best had been seven, on August 10, 1983. Kenya won seven medals on August 27, 2011. There have been 14 times a nation has won six.

The question is: does this nine/four performance move the needle when it comes to growing track and field in the United States? Nine and four are great, no question. But unless this meet kickstarts the sport, with an eye toward the Olympics in Los Angeles in 2028, then nine and four are just — nine and four. Numbers. Like those in that third paragraph. Stats. For freaks and nerds. Who are already on the I-love-track train.

83-year-old guy out, 84-year-old in: very definition of missed opportunity

83-year-old guy out, 84-year-old in: very definition of missed opportunity

One of my favorite memories of Gianna Angelopoulos, the dynamic businesswoman who rescued the Athens 2004 Summer Olympics, came the year before, at an International Olympic Committee session in Prague.

Holding court in the mezzanine area of the Prague Hilton, smoking a cigar (for real), she explained that running an Olympic organizing committee is, in fact, all about crisis management. In Athens, there were untold numbers of crises. Her job was bringing those crises to heel. Which she was doing — and, ultimately, did.

“The moment you understand that you actually do crisis management,” she was saying, “then it’s good.

“Then you feel control things. You can always expect the unexpected.”

The crisis right now in Tokyo, where the 2020/1 Games are due to open in five short months, is that the longstanding president of the organizing committee, 83-year-old Yoshiro Mori, will resign Friday over a sexist remark he made at a Feb. 3 meeting. He said that women talk too much.