No-brainer: only way to make Agenda 2020 real

From the Department of Olympic Smack Talk, and you would think that International Olympic Committee president Thomas Bach’s much-vaunted Agenda 2020 40-point purported reform plan would have taken care of this kind of thing:

Tony Estanguet, the co-president of the Paris 2024 bid, was giving an interview to the Reuters correspondent Julien Pretot in mid-December when the topic turned to politics, French and American.

“We are supported by the city,” meaning officials in the municipality of Paris itself, “the region and the state, who are not on the same political side,” Estanguet said, and no problem with any of that.

“We’ve met several candidates,” a reference to the forthcoming French presidential elections, “and we have the feeling that they all support the bid.” Also no problem. But, then: “There is stability, which may not be the case for Los Angeles, who have a municipal election,” scheduled for, as it turns out, March 7, meaning Tuesday.

Dude. Seriously.

There wasn’t a cloud in the sky Monday in Southern California ahead of Tuesday’s balloting, at which LA mayor Eric Garcetti is widely expected either to be re-elected outright or put in solid position to do so at the May 16 general election. Everything seemed pretty, you know, stable. Even the usually crabby LA Times said a few weeks ago in a piece on the mayor that the city is in the midst of a “renaissance” and in a separate endorsement offered this: “Garcetti is the best — really, the only — choice on the ballot.” Garcetti faces 10 opponents — one nicknamed “Zuma Dog,” another nicknamed “Pinky,” typical LA, typical California — so it’s unclear whether the mayor avoids the May runoff simply because a ballot with that many people is a ballot with that many people.

At any rate: you wonder why Agenda 2020 is in most precincts viewed as rhetoric without reality?

Politics, whether the mayoral election in Los Angeles or this spring’s seemingly volatile presidential race in France or the race for the 2024 Games pitting LA against Paris, is politics.

Though there have been stabs at implementing the reforms, the 2024 campaign marks the first Agenda 2020 race.

In December 2014, the IOC members unanimously bought into Bach’s 40-point plan.

As Bach emphasized in a far-ranging Q&A last week with a German-language outlet, “The Olympic Agenda [2020], initiated by me, [will] for the first time [be] fully applied to the Summer Olympics in 2024.’

To be fair, Bach’s instincts are solid.

The package could — should — have proven itself to be way ahead of the power curve.

To date, however, Agenda 2020 has been mostly noise devoid of substance.

Just words on a page.

In Lima on September 13, when the members make their 2024 choice, the question is whether Agenda 2020 will mean anything more than the paper it’s written on.

Put another way:

Do the members genuinely care about the future, about the strategic vision of the IOC?

The core issue is whether they get — that is, whether Bach can make them understand — that for Agenda 2020 the time is now or never.

The IOC is a multibillion-dollar global entity with a variety of stakeholders. Its primary goal is spreading its values — respect, excellence, friendship— through sport, and particularly its franchise, the Games. Its key mission is figuring out how to stay relevant with its key audience, teens and 20-somethings.

All this makes 2024 a classic case study, and if September 13 in Lima were not a secret ballot but a straightforward corporate-way decision, the sort of thing McKinsey or Bain or Deloitte get hired all the time to assess and provide consulting-style strategic roadmaps for, this would be a no-brainer.

Paris would simply be more of the same — like Athens, Beijing, London, Sochi, Rio and, now Tokyo, government-run bids and follow-on organizing committees that see huge cost overruns skyrocket into exorbitant billions, the No. 1 shock to the system the reputed $51 billion associated with the Sochi 2014 Games.

Paris needs to build an athletes’ village, along with media housing and a swim complex. These three cost centers have repeatedly proven problematic, and the history of recent government-underwritten Games — see the list over the last 20 years from the previous paragraph — shows definitively that the bills inexorably get fat.

When a 17-day sports party ends up costing $51 billion, $40 billion, $30 billion, $20 billion or even *just* $15 billion, you can trace a direct logic line: this is why taxpayers across Europe are now in revolt against the IOC.

Too, this is why, increasingly, social media and the threat of referendum make for an existential threat to the establishment across Europe, in particular the juicy target that is the IOC.

LA, a privately run bid (and, like 1984, Games), stands out as the change option.

Now is precisely the time for that change.

The model of Games as urban development catalyst is — done. That is over.

To reiterate:

That is exactly why taxpayers are so completely and thoroughly pissed off. They don’t want the Games to be a blank check anymore for roads, airports, metro lines and more.

Bach knows this. Again, the logic line: the drafting and enactment of Agenda 2020.

To be explicitly clear, the president has not — and will not — play favorites in public in this 2024 race. He cannot afford to be seen to be favoring Los Angeles or Paris, and will not be seen favoring either. He has not, will not express a position and nothing in this column should be inferred or implied that he has, or will.

That said, he assuredly has a vital interest in making concrete the Agenda 2020 reforms.

He clearly has some work to do in this area — let’s explore — but you can see he is trying to find ways.

In that German-language interview last week, Bach tried out, again, this trial balloon:

“Without Olympic Agenda 2020, we would not have a single candidate for the Games in 2024.”

This is just not true, not helpful and that balloon should be let go.

The truth is that Bach had five candidates when the race formally kicked off in September 2015, and three have already fallen by the wayside: Budapest, Rome and Hamburg.

Agenda 2020 did not save them. If the reforms were of demonstrable utility, maybe the IOC could have helped the respective bid committees better press their cases. But no.

The further truth is that Los Angeles does not in any way, shape or form need Agenda 2020.

Just the opposite: the IOC needs LA to make Agenda 2020.

That IOC evaluation commission team that’s due in town in April is going to find what — that Los Angeles is capable of hosting the Games? Duh.

Let’s explore another tack, please, Mr. President.

“We have to reduce the planning costs,” Bach said, meaning the bid costs. Therefore, “Every facility on which a world championship or a World Cup took place is considered approved. This will determine the discussions of the next time in the IOC.”

This is flawed, too.

Like Staples Center in downtown LA, which has not played host to a world championship but puts on Lakers, Clippers and Kings games on a nightly basis, would have to be approved — but Kazan, Russia, which put on the 2015 world swim championships in a temporary pool in a soccer stadium, would be automatically in?

Beyond which:

The cost of bidding is a problem but it is not the problem. Let’s say you’re a European government. Bach also said, “Europe is the core continent of the Olympic movement. It would not be wise to ignore this,” and as an aside this is indisputably the case but also not the sort of declaration that means going somewhere else (Asia, Australia, the Americas) is mutually exclusive.

Anyway: let’s say a bid campaign runs to the range of 75 million euros. If your federal budget is — pick a number — 2 trillion euros, 75 million is a sneeze.

From the government finance minister’s office, that is.

Not, though, for the taxpayer or the local community organizer. That is an entirely different prism.

Again, the challenge is not those 75 million euros. It’s the $51 billion, $30 billion or $15 billion in infrastructure costs tied to the Games.

This is the thing that must be confronted.

It is the collection of white elephants in the room.

If you prefer, the Olympic Voldemort. Who dares speak out about this thing?

OK, here goes:

These infrastructure projects are the primary drivers, the elemental reason that — since the transformative makeover of Barcelona for 1992 — governments worldwide have sought the Games, because an Olympics as public-works catalyst comes with a fixed seven-year deadline.

In the real world, presidents, prime ministers, governors or mayors have to deal with wonky parliaments or state assemblies or city councils for 20, 30 or 40 years to try to get stuff done, if then.

Bach, same article, trying to have it both ways, acknowledging that the entire thrust of Agenda 2020 is to move away from these projects and yet:

“You have to see the whole picture. This is like in Munich in 1972. Munich might not have a subway today without the Olympic Games. And Rio would not have a functioning transport public transport system. Before the Summer Games, 18 percent of citizens in Rio had access to a proper urban transport system. Now, 63 percent. Tens of thousands benefit from the legacy of the Games day after day.

“In addition to this, a newly designed harbor district, a few hotels with their jobs, the Guanabara Bay is not perfect but much clearer than before because the introduced dirty water is now clarified. The handball hall will be converted into schools.

“The mayor of Rio recently said something that is equally true of the IOC: it was never claimed to be able to solve all political and social problems in Rio with the help of the Olympic Games. But through the Games, investments could be made, investments the inhabitants of Rio could only dream about for 50 years.”

See the conflict?

The problem is, genuinely, the IOC can’t figure out — without going to Los Angeles for 2024 — how to bring Agenda 2020 to life.

From the same article, Bach sought to explain how, after the passage of Agenda 2020 back in December 2014, the IOC almost immediately sought to pressure — my words, not his — the Korean organizers of the PyeongChang 2018 Winter Games to consider moving the bobsled track to Japan.

That would have given the IOC something to show the world. Agenda 2020! See! It works!

“This almost led to an insurrection,” Bach said.

To be honest, this sort of belittling observation does not reflect well on the president or the IOC nor does it constructively serve anyone’s interest.

Facts:

When the IOC approached the Koreans, it was three-plus years after the July 2011 IOC selection for PC for the 2018 Games. The bobsled track was already well past design and into construction. In practice, sunk costs were considerable. Plus, hundreds of people were at work on a job site.

The IOC was asking the Koreans to consider going to Japan — Japan ruled Korea from 1910 until 1945 — meaning Nagano, site of the 1998 Winter Games. Would there be refurbishment costs for the Nagano track? If so, how much? How much would it cost to transport and house athletes? What about TV? What about a range of other issues?

In the end, timing and financial issues made it all, roughly, a wash. So: why would the Koreans invite domestic fury by 1. having to essentially bow to wartime masters 2. on a project, the Winter Olympics, of immense domestic pride, just like 1988 in the summer in Seoul 3. and being made to appear inferior by far-away Europeans on, of all things, precisely the sort of thing Koreans typically do extremely well, a design and manufacturing project?

Better: how could the IOC (first word “International”) not have taken into account these factors in a seemingly blind rush to make something of Agenda 2020? When these Winter Games were in — 2018? Which is two years before (Agenda) — 2020?

Bringing Agenda 2020 forward since:

For Tokyo 2020: the Japanese bid, won in 2013, promised all-in costs of $7.8 billion. Now estimates out of Tokyo are floating around the $25-30 billion range. (Back to PC 2018 for a note of irony: the Koreans in 2014 were suddenly supposed to agree that the Japanese way would be superior because — why?)

For Beijing 2022: the Chinese, $40-billion spenders for 2008, must build a high-speed rail line from the capital up to the mountains, where there is no snow. To keep the financial reporting numbers down, the Chinese have said they have no intention of disclosing the costs of that rail project as part of Olympic spending.

If you wrote all this as fiction — who would believe it?

But it's real, which is why Agenda 2020 — so far — is not.

The Olympic movement, the interviewer in that German-language Q&A piece, said to Bach, “has the impression of the monstrous.”

“Olympic Agenda 2020 will pay for the organization of Games and sustainability,” Bach said. “What we have not foreseen is the change in the process of candidacy — namely, the use of the Games by political anti-establishment movements.”

Such drives “do not work with facts but with slogans — such as ‘gigantism’ or ‘money-laundering.’ We can complain but not change [that]. That is why we have to do something ourselves.”

What the IOC has to do — besides maybe advising Tony Estanguet to play fair — is, again, a no-brainer.

Here’s to the next six months and the notion of the IOC making Agenda 2020 real, and doing just what it did in 1984. Which, not coincidentally, will buy itself time and what it really needs — stability.

Social media and the referendum: made for sharing

Snap Inc., the Venice, California-based parent company of Snapchat, went public Thursday. It’s now worth $34 billion.

As the Washington Post pointed out, that’s more than Macy’s and American Airlines. The New York Times noted that $34 billion is more than “the old-line media company CBS,” and about three times the value of the social-media presence that is Twitter.

What does this have to do with the Olympics?

Everything.

Snapchat, for the unfamiliar, is the mobile app that allows you to send pictures and videos that, after a few seconds, self-destruct. Once you learn the basics, you can add filters, everything from rabbit ears to dog noses to whatever. You can also add tags that show where in the world you are.

Grown-ups go — what’s the big deal? Teens go — awesome, mom and dad can’t figure it out.

Snapchat is actually way more. There’s another part to the app, and its NFL content during the recently concluded season drew 42 million unique viewers. Translation: a lot of people. Snapchat literally has changed the way people shoot pictures — as Ad Age pointed out, brands and publishers wanted to reach that sort of massive audience, which in turn meant shooting vertically instead of horizontally for video on mobile phones.

When it comes to Snapchat and social media, the signals of change are all around us. But most grown-ups within the Olympic scene — the International Olympic Committee in particular — have proven way too slow on the pickup.

The ongoing campaign for the 2024 Summer Games, down now to just two candidates, Paris and Los Angeles (see above, Venice, California), is in every way the very first real social-media bid race.

Snap is now worth crazy money. Twitter is the essential news feed. There are roughly 7 billion people on Planet Earth, and Facebook had 1.86 billion monthly active users as of the fourth quarter of 2016. Let’s not forget the pretty pictures on Instagram, the recipes on Pinterest and on and on.

What does this mean?

For a global enterprise such as the Olympics, there assuredly are positives to the way social media can crush time and space. But as the 2024 bid campaign has made abundantly plain, there are negatives, too, with which the Olympic movement must reckon.

Instead of doing so, it is instead facing grave risk.

And its most senior officials barely comprehend what is it at issue.

This is not hyperbole.

Paris is very fond of its bid slogan: “Made for Sharing.” It is super-clear that bid and government officials think it’s super-positive. But history shows that construction and infrastructure costs inevitably skyrocket. What happens when concern over such costs reaches a trigger point? Cue — on social media — outrage, grievance, agitation. What if “Made for Sharing” flips into a negative, and quickly?

Never have the Games been awarded in an era when social media has shown how easy it can be to amplify such grievance and conflict.

See two of the other cities that started this 2024 race: Budapest and Hamburg, Germany.

Both are now out because of social media and, in Hamburg’s case, an attendant referendum, in the case of Budapest, the threat of one.

The warning signs are all blinking red for Paris, too.

To be blunt: the IOC does not fully appreciate this.

Nor does it understand the essentials: how itself to use the power and reach of social media and, on the other hand, how to help those within its orbit blunt or confront social media when employed as an attack on the Olympic movement.

You see this in so many ways.

The IOC’s most important communications outreach remains stuck in 1982 if not before: a beautifully designed and elegantly produced quarterly coffee table-style magazine called Olympic Review.

The IOC says it wants to reach the kids. The kids are glued to their phones. And the IOC puts out a magazine that arrives by snail mail every three months, and then only to a selected mailing list.

Wait, counters the IOC: we have 4.9 million Twitter followers.

That’s not anywhere near top 100 in the world.

The Barcelona soccer team has 20 million. Real Madrid, 22.3 million. LeBron James, the basketball star, has 34.3 million. The soccer star Cristiano Ronaldo, nearly 50.2 million.

Top 10 starts with Justin Timberlake (58.1 million) and goes up to Justin Bieber (No. 2, 91.9 million) and Katy Perry (No.1, 96 million).

Katy Perry says on her bio, “Artist. Activist. Conscious.”

The Olympic values: “Respect. Excellence. Friendship.”

Why is she so big and the IOC so — not?

The Olympic charter is, essentially, a rough facsimile of one of the American organic documents, the Declaration of Independence.

What makes the Olympic movement different from for-profit sports entities is the values at the core of the charter. Those are democratic values — democratic with a little d.

Right now, again no exaggeration, all this is at risk.

The proof is in the races for the 2022 and 2024 Games.

For 2022, five cities in western Europe dropped out of the running, put off by the costs of an Olympics, in particular the $51 billion figure associated with the 2014 Sochi Games.That left the IOC to choose between Beijing and Almaty, Kazakhstan.

The members chose Beijing, site of the 2008 Summer Games, by four votes. The Chinese figure to keep infrastructure outlay down by not including however many billions it’s going to cost to build a high-speed rail line up to the mountains — where there’s no snow.

If you take away a fair accounting of what's what and the humanistic ideals that underpin this entire Olympic thing, you very quickly have to ask what this is all about— and, of course, if this Olympic thing isn't really dealing from a position of weakness.

It’s entirely reasonable to ask what position the IOC is in now.

Two surviving bids. (2024, 2022)

"Choosing" between a totalitarian or autocratic regime. (2022)

In December 2014, the IOC, urged by president Thomas Bach, passed a 40-point purported reform plan dubbed Agenda 2020. Virtually nobody believes that any of the reforms, particularly as they relate to Olympic bids, are meaningful. Why? Because there’’s no factual evidence any of them are real.

Instead, what we have is blather and puffery.

The Rio 2016 Games were nothing less than an organizational and financial calamity. Yet the IOC, in December, called them the “most perfect imperfect Games.”

This sort of thing is why, even before Rio but amid the 2022 campaign implosions, the locals in Boston said no — social-media agitation playing a key role. The U.S. Olympic Committee made the dumb choice early on to go to Boston before reversing course and heading to LA.

Boston’s no-Games activists took their social-media expertise to Germany. A 2015 referendum there sank the Hamburg bid.

It can hardly be coincidental that over time the results of these referendums are, for the IOC, getting worse. A vote four years ago in St. Moritz — in Switzerland, of all places, the IOC’s longtime base — asked voters if they wanted 2022. No, by 53 percent. They tried again last month, again in St. Moritz, for the 2026 Games. No, by 60 percent.

Rome pulled out last fall for different reasons: the mayor said the city had better things to spend money on than the Olympics.

Who, on January 1 of this year, thought a Budapest referendum might be in the offing?

Now the Budapest bid is dead. Layers of government had spent years putting together investment, strategy and branding. It all blew up that quick.

A campaign stitched together by local organizers, Momentum Mozgalom, in a matter of weeks — weeks! — managed to collect 266,151 signatures in favor of holding a referendum on the bid.

Blather:

“It is disappointing that this [Budapest] decision had to be taken — the candidature committee had presented an excellent project, which was built on the reforms contained in Olympic Agenda 2020,” IOC spokesman Mark Adams said, and poor Mark Adams, because if the “reforms” were truly meaningful and the bid truly was so “excellent” it’s hard to see how 266,151 people thought maybe they ought to have a vote on that, and nonetheless he has to get up and say this sort of stuff.

So what is the lesson of Boston, Hamburg, Budapest and, perhaps, Paris?

It’s not who is president of the United States or France or wherever. Donald Trump, whatever. Marine le Pen, François Fillon, Emmanuel Macron, Benoit Hamon, whoever.

Presidential politics matters, but not now in the way most in the media are trying to wrap their minds around. That was then, so 2007, and this is now:

The real threat to the Paris bid — and it is potentially lethal — is social media and the possibility if not probability of a follow-on referendum.

That threat is immediate. It is, too, this spring and summer. It is even after September 13, the day the IOC is due to meet in Lima, Peru, to decide the 2024 winner.

To explain:

In 2017, the ability to communicate directly via social media— and, critically, to organize — is more ready than at any time in human history. See Trump’s presidential campaign. See the so-called women’s marches upon the Trump inauguration. See any number of other examples.

Practically, what this means — for the Olympic scene — is this logic tree:

1. Any democratic society that has a 2. government-run Olympic bid and/or organizing committee but at the same time 3. community activists who 4. are fired up over something, whatever that may be 5. with unfettered access to the internet 6. will inevitably, and probably sooner than later, figure out that they can leverage that activism and gain not just political notoriety but power through social media by seeking a referendum on the Olympic project. Consequently, 7. the referendum absolutely, positively will significantly threaten if not sink the project.

This sound overly dramatic?

It’s not.

This is what the IOC needs, and now, to take stock of.

Social media is not just Katy Perry or Justin Bieber’s marketing fun. It is a tool for political activism and organization. If people sniff out a con or a problem — even if it is not true — it can, and will, explode. If there is concern or anxiety, it can — and will — explode.

Hungary, a democratic parliamentary republic since just 1989: 266,151 signatures on a Budapest 2024 referendum in a matter of weeks.

Just imagine what could be done in France, where democracy has been in action for considerably many more years. That is a powder keg waiting for the spark.

Maybe it’s already lit. Activists say they have collected 5,000 signatures toward a referendum.

The Paris 2024 argument can essentially be boiled down to two factors: One, we’re Paris. Two, it’s 100 years since we held the 1924 Games.

To be clear, there has never been a legitimate poll in Paris assessing public support for the 2024 project.

Let’s say a poll comes out and the yes numbers are at 60. A no campaign that starts looking up only at 10 points — that, given social media, would be so easy to wipe out. The bid would essentially be DOA.

Let’s say further that the IOC were to foolishly opt for sentiment instead of common sense. Even so, the risk to the Paris project extends beyond September 13.

By no means would an IOC vote for Paris in any way stop the prospect of a referendum. Has the IOC even paused for a moment to consider this notion?

Over seven years, the time from awarding a Games to opening ceremony, governments change. If a referendum passes, what is the IOC going to do — go where it’s not wanted? Sue? Oh, sure — litigate (in some forum) and then force the French government to pay, because that is just the thing to make other governments want to take on a Games down the line.

By contrast: LA.

The difference between LA and Paris is as obvious as it is critical.

Paris for 2024 is a government-run enterprise. To reiterate the point made in this space over the past several weeks, recent editions of government-run Olympics have been bloated, and that is why taxpayers are mad as hell and that is why in the west they are both turning on the IOC and turning to social media to agitate: Sochi $51 billion, Beijing 2008 ($40 billion), Rio 2016 (projected $20 billion), Tokyo 2020 (now looking at $25-30 billion when the bid promised $7.8 billion). Given this record, there is no reason to expect anything but the same from Paris.

Los Angeles, the bid and, if it wins, the organizing committee, is privately funded. (Just as in 1984, which produced a $232.5 million surplus.)

What that means: a privately run LA 2024 project is, for the most part, out of the reach of government.

This is why surveys consistently have shown incredible taxpayer support for LA 2024 — 80 percent and higher.

In any democracy, there are always some people who don’t like something. That’s just life.

But if you wanted to start a referendum against LA 2024, it wouldn’t make any sense.

That would be like voting on whether you want the neighborhood grocery store run by Cousin Marvin to be open or closed. What? He’s a private business, just like Mrs. Anderson's bakery down the street. Leave him alone. And her, too.

Beyond which, mindful both of 1984 and of the Boston experience, the LA 2024 people at the outset went around town to hold 30 community meetings — not only to gauge but to build community support.

Did Paris have community meetings in every arrondissement? Hmm. Here is Danielle Simonnet, a Paris councillor for the city’s 20th arrondissement, telling Le Monde in its February 23 editions, “Of course we need a referendum,” later in the story calling Games costs “enormous,” adding, “The bill is going to be salty.”

Also, and this is just common sense talking along with some 30 years of journalism experience, if the LA plan was dicey or not well-cooked, and there needed to be a journalist to expose it, you can believe that journalist would already have found someone in that LA 2024 bid team. Or some soul within the bid team would have reached out to the journalist.

That has not happened, is very unlikely to happen, in Los Angeles.

Because, one, of that neighborhood reach-out in LA and, two, the LA plan is solid and privately funded. Example: the original thinking was, let’s build an expensive athletes’ village downtown. The bid team thought it through and shifted course, to the already-existing dorms at UCLA.

The Paris plan, again to contrast, calls for building a hugely expensive village in what is now a violence-marked banlieue called Seine-Saint Denis.

Wait until someone on the ground in Paris or elsewhere in France, angry about something, figures that out.

That’s what referendums are for: made for sharing, indeed.

'The perception and the reality of the Olympic Games must change'

Every now and then the Olympic movement produces one of the really good guys. (And women, too. Stand down, politically correct police.) The Budapest 2024 bid came Wednesday to a crashing end. It became the latest, if predictable, victim of a taxpayer revolt in Europe tied to obscenely bloated and, no coincidence, government-funded Olympic-related infrastructure costs.

Balázs Fürjes led the Budapest 2024 effort. He is one of the world’s really good people. Smart, clever, imaginative, dedicated, devoted, resourceful, patriotic, the vision thing.

It may seem perhaps a small note amid a very big problem confronting the International Olympic Committee that Balázs Fürjes will likely be sidelined, at least for a while, from the Olympic scene.

But it is altogether exceptionally telling.

Ladies and gentlemen, this column marks another in a recent series dedicated to developments in the campaign for the 2024 Games. It is straight talk; there is zero point in anything else at such a critical juncture. Apologies in advance for the length.

It’s not just that the Olympic movement is reeling from the fallout of yet another city from its last two bid races, for the 2022 Winter Games and 2024 Summer Games.

Voters in Europe are, in a phrase, pissed off, and the IOC is at an inflection point, the question being whether the members will do the only sensible thing at their assembly this September — that is, pick a privately funded entity, Los Angeles, for the 2024 Summer Games. The only other candidate left is Paris, another government-funded outfit.

Along with the assembly-line disappearance of so many cities goes a corollary, if little noticed, piece: the human capital that animates the bids, the campaigns, the would-be organizing committees.

This is, in a word, a disaster.

The Olympic movement depends on a lot of things.

It needs money, of course. A significant chunk of which, it should be noted, is American.

It needs technology and other resource.

Mostly, though, it needs people, and what people of goodwill from all corners of our imperfect world can bring to the table: creativity, innovation and inspiration.

That is why the IOC needs LA for 2024.

Yet again, here goes the disclaimer:

Yes, I live in Los Angeles, and have since the end of 1992. I married an LA girl. Our kids were born and grew up in Southern California.

For all that:

I am not an agent for the Los Angeles bid.  I am not a consultant for the Los Angeles bid. I am not being paid by them. I am not, in any way, working for or on behalf of the bid.

If you know anything about the politics and geography of Los Angeles, this would be manifestly plain.

The LA 2024 people are, generally speaking, UCLA people. I teach at the USC journalism school. I live in Palos Verdes, about a half-hour south of USC on the 110 Harbor Freeway. Palos Verdes is USC country. Very close family friends are such USC freaks that they get up every USC football Saturday to claim a Coliseum tailgate space at 3 in the morning. Wednesday is trash day in our neighborhood; when I went out at 6:55 this morning to take our trash cans to the street, I said hi to my neighbor, Richard, who as ever was walking his two dogs; Richard was wearing his cardinal-and-gold USC sweatshirt.

The LA24 bid has been up and going for roughly 18 months. In that time, I have not had one coffee, one lunch, one dinner with the bid team. We have kept a respectful professional distance.

Ed Hula of Around the Rings and I are perhaps the only American reporters to have covered in depth every single IOC bid contest since 1999. I am highly confident I know what I’m talking about when it comes to these campaigns.

This is why — and even if you are a critic of my work, totally fine, you nonetheless ought to acknowledge I have at the least been thoroughly consistent — I was the first journalist anywhere to say that Boston was doomed, that the U.S. Olympic Committee had made a huge mistake and that the USOC needed to re-group and come to LA. That was way back in March 2015.

My French friends in particular may not like how explicitly straightforward this column has been in expressing why, for two years now, LA was the plain answer to the Olympic movement's obvious problem.

C’est la vie. Reminder to all: this is not personal. This is journalism.

The IOC has got itself — and this is its own damn fault — in a crack.

For roughly the past 20 years, the IOC has turned to government-underwritten Games that, time and again, have proven hugely, inappropriately expensive.

This model can be traced to Barcelona in 1992. Those Games jolted mayors, governors, prime ministers and presidents into this realization: the Olympics could serve as a seven-year public policy (that is, public works) catalyst to get built what would otherwise take 20, 30, 40 or more years to get done, if ever.

Short list from many examples: Athens (2004) metro and airport, Beijing (2008) building spree, Sochi (2014) literally two new cities (Adler, Krasnaya Polyana) from scratch.

The problem with government-funded Games is easy to explain. It's a three-step follow:

One, over the seven-year stretch from when the IOC awards a Games to the moment the cauldron is lit at an opening ceremony, governments typically can — and do — change. (See South Korea political turmoil, Winter Games 2018. Same, Rio 2016.)

Two, over those seven years, economic conditions can — and do — change. (See Rio, 2009-16).

Three, as a consequence, government commitments can — and do — change.

What this means, again in easy-to-explain language:

The bill for all those infrastructure projects, which were the in-fact underpinning of everything that led to that cauldron lighting, inevitably become grotesquely fat like yo mama.

Numbers:

$12-15 billion Athens 2004, $40 billion Beijing 2008, $15 billion-ish London 2012, presumed $20-billion Rio 2016, worries over $25-30 billion for Tokyo 2020 when the bid said it would be done for $7.8 billion, and the No. 1 monster, $51 billion, Sochi 2014.

When a bid and follow-on organizing committee are government-financed, who gets stuck with these bills?

This is elemental: taxpayers.

Now, taxpayers in western democracies are saying, no more.

Layered on to the cost concerns:

As events keep proving, taxpayers are fed up to here with the establishment and the “elite.”

The IOC — right or wrong — is the very definition of that.

In a move that underscores the IOC’s ongoing disconnect, president Thomas Bach announced a huge sponsor deal with Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba at last month’s World Economic Forum in Davos. Of all places. Davos, symbol of the global elite.

This is why taxpayers, particularly in Europe, are telling the IOC to go, you know, itself.

This past Sunday, voters in Davos/St. Moritz, in a referendum, said no to the notion of a 2026 Winter Games. Four years before, they had said no to the idea of a 2022 Winter Games.

Indeed, for 2022, six cities in Europe dropped out, five put off to varying degrees by the $51 billion 2014 figure: Oslo, Munich, Stockholm, Davos/St. Moritz and Krakow, Poland. A sixth, Lviv, Ukraine, fell out because of war.

Five cities started for 2024 in September 2015: LA, Paris, Budapest, Rome and Hamburg, Germany.

Hamburg went out in a referendum. With it went the likes of the bid's creative chief executive, Nikolas Hill, and a hugely talented spokeswoman, Susanne Jahrreiss.

Rome pulled out because the mayor said the city had other priorities. Just like, four years beforehand, the prime minister had said the country had better things to spend money on.

Now Budapest is out.

“Many of us are already thinking of when next and how next,” Fürjes said in a late Wednesday night telephone interview from Hungary, adding, “The perception and the reality of the Olympic Games must change.”

This makes for the natural bridge to why LA for 2024.

There is now considerable worldwide talk — look it up, last September I was the first in the press to write at length about this notion — of awarding two Games at one time.

My point was LA 24 and Paris 28, not the other way around.

If there is to be a two-fer, it has to be that way: LA 24, Paris 28.

This space has made this point before so here it is again: the IOC formally accepts bids via national Olympic committees, and 2024 is the end-game for the USOC.

The IOC can not ding the United States of America’s Olympic committee three times — New York for 2012, Chicago for 2016, LA for 2024 — and expect the Americans to keep coming back. That story will be done. Finished. Over. For a long time.

If you want to believe otherwise, fine, maybe you want to believe in unicorns or fairies, too. Line up here: I have a bridge in Brooklyn for you.

Everybody needs to wrap their heads around what is, truly, reality, and the sooner the better, because in the United States it takes private money to run bids and private money to run Games and after $240 million in private money over three bids and some 14 years devoted to the three largest cities in this country, the USOC and all those generous donors would be spent, financially and, probably more important, emotionally. Done. Finished. Over.

That said:

It seems increasingly unlikely there would be a 2024-2028 two-fer. Why? There’s all kinds of resistance.

• From other would-be bidders in Europe: if the French go down for 2024, a bunch of cities would love to bid for 2028. These would likely include Madrid, Budapest, Milan, even St. Petersburg (laugh if you wish but Mr. Putin, still, tends to have significant influence in the Olympic orbit) and, let’s face it, Paris. You can throw all the Brisbane talk you want onto the barbie but no way the IOC is going to Australia in October — not with the way television ratings tanked in September in Sydney in 2000.

• From the IOC members: there was no two-fer in the 2022 Winter Games race, when the race got down to two, just Beijing and Almaty, Kazakhstan, so why a Summer 2024 two-fer? Many of the IOC members already complain they do less than Tarzan’s tailor. Voting on the site of the Games is their one big responsibility. Taking that away would be yanking away the essential perk of membership.

• From LA24: if you are the LA people, why hedge? In a two-dog race, if you are LA, you would have to quietly and humbly like (to take) your chances against Paris.

Why?

What is the IOC’s No. 1 problem?

Again, keeping it simple: as this taxpayer revolt has proven, the IOC has a massive credibility problem.

At the core of that credibility problem is a branding problem.

Let’s put sentimentality away. You like French wine? Awesome. There’s great wine in California, too.

At issue is what is best for the Olympic movement, not just for 2024 but for years into the future.

Paris is talking only 2024. LA is talking 2024 and — beyond, well beyond. That is what is at stake.

Let’s frame what’s what this way:

• Does the IOC want a 2024 Old World Games … in an older city … that will be paid for by government … a government almost surely subject to change/s over seven years … when Frexit is suddenly a major issue … when the government will have to build an athletes’ village … that if history is a reliable guide will cost way more than budgeted … in a precinct that is currently being rocked by violence … not far from where the central stadium was hit by a terror attack … in a city where over seven years the city will no doubt endure public strikes … and the weather every summer, which is why the locals flee, is hot and muggy?

Or:

• Does the IOC want a privately run Games that, because it’s privately run, has no margin for error and has to come in at or under budget, just like 1984 … with an already-built village at UCLA where thousands of college kids happily come and go every day … in perfect California summer sunshine …  in a city where the Olympics have an approval rating nearing 90 percent … in a region and state that’s full of youth, tech and social media and that will, like 1984, kickstart it all over again for the movement for an entire generation?

To reiterate: in Europe, the IOC is getting thrashed but in LA, based on sunny memories from 1984 and 1932, the locals when most recently polled said yes to the Olympic Games to the tune of 88 percent.

When logic is applied, what about this is even remotely a remotely difficult choice?

Earlier this month, the Paris bid unveiled its slogan on the Eiffel Tower to what officials thought was great fanfare: “Made for Sharing.” In English. With great respect to the French academy, because its job is to protect the French language, next came the howls of protest. The next thing you knew, the slogan was suddenly “Venez Partager” along with the English version.

What 16-year-old skateboarder or surfer would possibly care?

https://twitter.com/TonyESTANGUET/status/834374881919762432

In announcing that "sharing" slogan in English, our Paris friends had a good laugh at American expense, they thought, because it was a not-so-subtle play on bridges and walls and the American president. Then it turns out the French authorities are, for security purposes, going to build a wall around the Eiffel Tower.

Karma, people.

Back to Rio, and the government chaos that bedeviled nearly everything there. Whether Marine le Pen wins the French elections this spring or not, who wants to believe that for the next seven years the French government is going to rest in a state of calm serenity?

Rail on Donald Trump, or whatever. A privately funded Los Angeles enterprise means that whatever is going on in Washington is, for the most part, going in Washington. LA is LA is LA. This is the key distinction that underpins a privately organized American bid, and right now this is the secret to what the IOC needs — it needs time, it needs stability and it needs all the other stuff LA and California can bring to the table, in particular creative energy.

The world’s leading brands are based in California. More logic and rational thinking — ask whether this isn’t precisely what the IOC needs a little or maybe a lot of for 2024 and beyond:

The range of Hollywood studios. Disney. Snapchat. Facebook. Apple. Twitter. Netflix. Electronic Arts. Oracle.

Feeling a little more creative? Annex Oregon and Washington just up the Pacific coast: Nike and Microsoft, for starters. Throw in Starbucks. Or, back to LA, The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf (big in Asia, too).

Seriously, why the Olympic movement doesn’t have an association with Starbucks or Coffee Bean — where do young people hang out and soak up the free WiFi, for god’s sake — is beyond common sense.

Balázs Fürjes was careful on the telephone not to endorse either of the remaining two bids. Even so, the IOC president, executive board and members — for that matter, anyone with an interest in the Olympic movement’s future — ought to pay careful attention to his words.

“Something,” he said, “is going in the wrong direction.”

More 2024 straight talk: the hits keep coming

The hits keep coming for the International Olympic Committee, and we are not talking Top-40 radio.

On Sunday, voters in the Swiss Alps — for the second time — said no thanks to an Olympic bid that would have been staged in the posh mountain resorts of St. Moritz and Davos. A state in Switzerland is called a canton. That canton is called Graubuenden. Asked about financing a candidacy for the 2026 Games, 60.1 of voters there said, nope.

Four years ago, the vote against a 2022 bid was 53 percent.

Trend line: not positive. The Swiss say they'll keep exploring 2026 options in another mountain town, Sion, but whatever. In 1999, Sion was the 2006 IOC loser, to Turin, Italy.

Making Sunday’s balloting all the more a disconnect: voting was held amid the two weeks of the 2017 world alpine ski championships in St. Moritz. If ever conditions were ripe to highlight the cool stuff of a high-profile event in a ski resort that twice before had staged the Winter Games, in 1928 and 1948, it was all there.

Instead, disaster. Sixty-forty is a blowout, people.

Actually, Sunday’s balloting makes for the latest in a string of lectures — sorry to use that word, IOC friends, because the good lord knows you don’t like to be told much, if anything — that taxpayers all over Europe have been screaming now for years from the rooftops.

Here is the question:

Are you listening?

Better:

What, finally, will make you hear?

What, ultimately, will make you realize what is what?

The Olympic movement is at — pick your phrase — an inflection point, a turning point, a tipping point.

Voters are not just rejecting the costs of the Games, though that is the biggest factor.

This is also an uncomfortable let’s look-in-the-mirror moment for the members of the IOC.

Voters — see Brexit, Trump, Olympic-related balloting, maybe next the upcoming elections this spring in France — are rejecting everything that goes with what they perceive to be the “elite.”

There could be no more glaring example of the “elite,” right or wrong, fair or not, than the IOC, particularly the IOC going to Davos for a three-week party at what taxpayers perceive to be their expense.

Davos! It was at the super-glitzy Davos get-together just a few weeks ago that the Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba announced a long-term sponsorship of the IOC. To be both clear and fair, from the perspective of the IOC and Alibaba the deal is a coup. Terms were not announced but it reportedly is worth a reported $800 million to an entity, the IOC, that over the four-year cycle 2013-16 announced it intends to take in revenue worth $5.6 billion.

And you wonder why taxpayers are revolting against the Games?

Once more, it is worth heeding the words of Marius Vizer, the president of the International Judo Federation, who said in a speech in Sochi in April 2015:

“History demonstrated that all the empires who reached the highest peaks of development never reformed on time and they are all headed for destruction. The IOC system today is expired, outdated, wrong, unfair and not at all transparent.”

For these remarks, the IOC and president Thomas Bach tried (unsuccessfully) to all but excommunicate Vizer from the Olympic movement.

Time keeps proving Vizer all the more prescient.

In December 2014, the IOC, at Bach’s urging, passed a purported 40-point reform plan dubbed Agenda 2020. To date, as Sunday’s balloting in Switzerland made plain yet once more, Agenda 2020 has proven thoroughly unconvincing to taxpayers anywhere. The reason is clear: there is no fact-based evidence proving that Agenda 2020 amounts to anything but lip service.

Bottom line: the IOC simply cannot carry on the way it has been doing business since the 1992 Barcelona Games ushered in the notion of Games as catalyst for wide-ranging urban transformation project.

That era has come to a crashing, sudden end.

That is what voters in western democracies are saying, and emphatically.

And it’s easy to understand why:

Games-associated costs have become obscene.

$12 to $15 billion in Athens in 2004, $15 billion in London in 2012, a presumed $20 billion in Rio in 2016 (bid documents said $14.4 billion, and that was before a series of delay-related cost overruns), $40 billion in Beijing in 2008 and the killer, a reputed $51 billion in Sochi in 2014.

The Associated Press reports out of Rio recently have just been -- in a word -- grim:

https://twitter.com/StephenWadeAP/status/830584108350849024

https://twitter.com/StephenWadeAP/status/830411202488582146

For 2022, six cities in Europe dropped out, five put off to varying degrees by the $51 billion 2014 figure: Oslo, Munich, Stockholm, Davos/St. Moritz and Krakow, Poland. A sixth, Lviv, Ukraine, fell out because of war.

In Oslo, they didn't just complain about the money -- they complained about stuff like IOC protocol and how many cocktails, fruits and cakes were supposed to be on hand for visits. When Oslo dropped out, the IOC issued a statement that called it a "missed opportunity" and chastised the Norwegians for taking "their decisions on the basis of half-truths and factual inaccuracies."

You wonder why the perception persists -- despite the considerable on-the-ground good work the IOC does around the world each and every day -- that the IOC is elitist?

That 2022 race left the IOC to choose between Beijing, with no snow in the mountains, and Almaty, Kazakhstan. It chose Beijing.

The 2024 race in 2015 started with five cities. It is now down to three.

Hamburg, Germany dropped out after voters said no in a referendum.

Rome dropped out when the mayor said the Games were too expensive amid other priorities. Rome similarly dropped out of the 2020 picture.

Los Angeles, Paris and Budapest are still in.

The IOC will pick the 2024 winner on September 13 by secret ballot at an assembly in Lima, Peru.

September is a long way from February. A lot can, and doubtlessly will, happen.

Even so, the conversations that typically don’t happen in IOC bid campaigns need to happen. Because this campaign can’t be like the others. The Olympic movement literally cannot afford it.

The government-backed Paris 2024 bid, for instance, says its infrastructure costs would total $3.2 billion.

This total ought to be viewed with extreme suspicion. It is the nature of government-backed winning bids in the past 20 years to have made similar we’ll-keep-costs-down promises: Athens, Beijing, London, Sochi, Rio …

Take another look at that Rio athletes' village. Paris needs to build one, too.

Our Paris 2024 friends recently, so everyone should know, have been trying another tack. The Games have never been away from Europe for more than 12 years; the last Games in Europe were in London in 2012; 2024 would obviously be 12 years. Our French friends say, it’s precisely because the crisis is in Europe that the IOC ought to come to Europe for 2024. If the IOC doesn’t come to Europe for 2024, they ask, when will it ever come to Europe again?

Easy: 2028.

When these cities will be lining up because they already have expressed interest: Madrid, Budapest, Milan, St. Petersburg and Paris.

Also, probably some city in Germany.

In case this is not clear: Budapest wants to be the first city in Europe to stage the Games after London. And they have a good story to tell.

In any case, in virtually every country but the United States, sport is an arm of the federal government. Thus bids and Olympic Games tend to be the purview of governments. The logic tree goes like this:

It’s one thing for a federal government somewhere to put up, say, $50 or $80 million to organize and run an Olympic campaign. It’s quite another, as is the case in the United States, to have to raise that money from private donors.

When I wrote a few columns ago that Casey Wasserman, the LA24 bid chair, had gone about raising $35 million, I was wrong.

It was more like $50 million, maybe even a little more.

If Los Angeles does not win for 2024, Wasserman just cannot go back to all those people and say, looking at 2028, “OK, let’s do it all over again because now I think we really might win.”

Not going to happen.

Indeed, we all need to be as crystal clear about these things as possible:

To make Agenda 2020 anything more than just so much talk, the IOC needs for 2024 to grab onto the very thing that for years it has found so sour about the American bid: the fact that it is privately funded instead of government-backed.

A privately funded bid has no wiggle room. When the LA24 people say the bid will be $5.3 billion, it will — just like Peter Ueberroth proved in 1984, when there was no room for error — be $5.3 billion, if not less.

Moreover, this needs to be explicitly understood as well. Plain, forthright talk serves everyone’s interests:

If Los Angeles does not win for 2024, there will be significant resistance where it counts to the notion of there being an American bid for an extremely long time.

By significant, I am being gentle.

By where it counts, I mean U.S. Olympic Committee leadership, the USOC board of directors and at the highest levels of politics and government in the United States as well.

Even the winter sports people get it. They’re in for 2024. They’re not yapping about Denver or Salt Lake for 2026 or 2030.

This is it. 2024. The United States is in for 2024. Only.

This is it.

This is the message that needs to get out, to percolate, to be readily and well understood and absorbed, not just the message but the consequence that the Americans are exceedingly likely not to bid again for a long, long time if 2024 doesn’t go their way.

This is a very different bid campaign than any of the past 20 years. The stakes could not be more significant, perhaps existential, for the modern Olympic movement.

This is it.

Straight talk from SoCal on 2024: it's LA's time

Dear friends around the world,

Hi from Los Angeles! It has been raining a lot here this winter, which is cool, because we need the water. That drought and everything. We got lucky Thursday morning. It was cool but dry — well, actually cold for us, about 56 degrees Fahrenheit, puffy down jacket weather unless you were dancing — as the local bid committee held a mellow, only-in-California sunrise party at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum to mark the coming of the third and final phase of the International Olympic Committee’s campaign for the 2024 Olympics.

They lit the Coliseum cauldron, just like Rafer Johnson did in 1984. This being 2017 and a 2024 thing, there was electronic dance music along with before-dawn fitness, a little sunrise volleyball and, 'cuz this is SoCal, some ginger shots to promote your most excellent vibe and good health. Yo, dude. All good.

So along with the mellow, everyone, this third and final phase marks an occasion, and here we have to shift gears, for some serious straight talk. Sure, the scene Thursday at the Coliseum was crunchy groovy and for sure Santa Monica can be, like, zany, and Venice, like, wacky, but, you know, we can be dead serious here, too.

And the time is now to be straight-up.

First, the disclaimer: I have lived in Los Angeles since the end of 1992. If you want to think this column amounts to nothing but a homer talking, go right ahead — there’s likely nothing I can say or do to change your mind and, honestly, I’m not even going to try because that kind of thing gets tiresome. To be abundantly clear: I have no connection, zero, with the LA24 bid committee. We have a normal professional relationship. That’s it.

Here is the truth: I have covered every Olympic bid campaign since 1999. It is crystal clear what is at stake. That is why I was the first journalist, in March 2015, to say that the U.S. Olympic Committee had made an inexplicably bad initial choice for 2024 in Boston and needed, as soon as possible, to get back to LA. Which, later in the year, it did.

So what is at stake?

The Olympic movement, meaning in particular the International Olympic Committee, is at a critical inflection point.

Over the past 20 years, Games costs have become not just gigantic but obscene. In turn, the number of countries — in particular western democracies — willing to spend millions on the chance to win an Olympics has all but evaporated. 

Bottom line: the IOC is facing a grave credibility problem.

This credibility problem makes for a serious threat to the vitality if not the relevance of the movement.

This 2024 race thus offers the IOC a chance to re-calibrate.

The only — again, the only — way the IOC can emerge a winner, however, is if it goes to LA.

At prior moments in its history, in 1984 and 1932, the IOC has faced similar turning points. At these junctures, it also went to Los Angeles. Now, again, for 2024 it must come once more to California.

One more thing, please: this column will take a few minutes to read. No way around it. That's the way straight talk sometimes has to be.

We get that maybe you don't understand us Americans

Even way out here in California, watching the sun set drop each day into the blue Pacific, we get that you maybe don’t understand us Americans.

We get that here in the United States we are surrounded by oceans and just two other countries and our time zones are far away from pretty much everyone else’s and soccer is really not even much of a thing. We even call it soccer, not football. Football is something entirely different here, and we have a super big game, more or less an unofficial national holiday, coming up Sunday.

We get that the way we measure distance and temperature and all that — it’s different (if you’re wondering: 56 degrees F is 13 degrees C, more or less).

We get that you love our movies and our music and especially our money, like when NBC pays $7.65 billion for the U.S. rights to televise the Olympic Games from 2020 through 2032.

Remember, I said this was going to be really straight-up.

In that spirit, we get that sometimes you don’t really like us very much. We’re Americans and for some reason we like ice in our drinks, like a lot of ice, and for many if not most of you that’s just weird.

We get all that.

In the spirit of gentle and constructive suggestion: you, wherever you are, just have to like us enough right now to give Los Angeles the 2024 Summer Games.

For that matter, the very thing that a lot of you have (in some cases defiantly) held against us for many years — that our governments, local, state and federal, are not underwriting the LA bid — is, in fact, this bid’s strongest asset. That’s because we are American and we do it differently here.

We even get that our new president is like no one you have maybe ever seen before on the world stage. A lot of us didn’t vote for him, especially in California. Mrs. Clinton won the state by 61-33 percent.

We, too, get that Donald Trump is different. You don’t have to like him, either, though to be honest, you might, because he and Vladimir Putin over in Russia seem to get along just fine, and most of you members seem to get along just fine with Mr. Putin’s Olympic vision.

At any rate, Mr. Trump is the president of the United States. And behind the scenes, President Trump has already made it very well known that he wants Los Angeles to win.

This 2024 race, at its core, is — and always has been, from Day One — a referendum on the United States.

Not per se on President Trump.

Again, you have to like us just enough to get to yes. Because, as ever, we will save your bacon.

You may not like hearing or reading that. But, again, it's straight-up time.

Revisiting history, or why the IOC's bacon is in the deep fryer

Here is why the IOC’s bacon is shriveling in the deep fryer, and apologies for the lengthy recitation, but this is the context that makes plain why it must — repeat, must — be LA for 2024:

Athens 2004:

After-Games cost estimates ran to $11 to $15 billion. Security costs for the first post-9/11 Summer Games ran up the numbers significantly. The years since have been punctuated by pictures of the Olympic venues in sorrowful disrepair.

Beijing 2008:

$40 billion, all-in. Nobody really knows. Accounting transparency is not a thing in China, at least for international consumption.

London 2012:

Roughly $15 billion, including infrastructure costs.

Sochi 2014:

A reported $51 billion.

$51 billion?! This is what you get when, like the children of Israel in the Exodus story who built the cities of Pithom and Ramses for the Egyptian Pharaoh, you build two cities literally from the ground up. For the 2014 Winter Games, the Russians built Adler (the ice venues, a few miles away from Sochi itself) and, up in the mountains, Krasnaya Polyana (ski, snowboard, biathlon), from scratch.

Add in some roads, rail lines, electricity, sewage, water and whatever else figures in to the cost of doing business in Russia and there you have it, the reported $51 billion.

Rio 2016:

In December, nearly four months after the closing ceremony in Brazil, the IOC floated a new tagline for South America’s first Olympics: “the most imperfect perfect Games.”

Ha! Here is perhaps a more direct insight, courtesy of Bill the Cat, one of the main characters in “Bloom County,” which in 1987 won Berkeley Breathed the Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning. Bill pretty much says one thing, and one thing only, in reviewing the many obviously perplexing developments in our crazy world:

“Ack.”

A brief Rio review: did the thousands of us in attendance endure Zika or water poisoning or get mugged in the streets? Largely, no.

Then again, that’s a pretty low bar.

The IOC expects in the coming weeks to release figures showing that the Rio operational budget would come in close to the originally estimated figure, $2.9 billion.

So what?

That number, even if accurate, is both misleading and irrelevant.

When Brazil bid for the Games in 2009, it presented an all-in budget to the IOC of $14.4 billion — operations and infrastructure.

When the Games were awarded to Rio, the Brazilian economy was going great guns. By 2016, the economy had tanked. The government said it would backstop the project. Problem: the government ran out of money.

The final Rio number remains fuzzy. A reasonable estimate: maybe $20 billion.

Tokyo 2020:

Scary budget! Scary like one of those bad black-and-white Godzilla movies from back in the day!

Tokyo won the Games in 2013 promising an all-in budget of roughly $7.8 billion.

Last September, a local review panel said drastic changes had to be made or the whole thing might cost, ah, $30 billion. That would be roughly four times as much as $7.8 billion.

In December, the IOC said it could not, would not accept a revised budget of $20 billion.

Beijing 2022:

See $40 billion, above, and an appreciation of the accounting skills of our Chinese friends, who must, after winning the Games in 2015, build a high-speed rail line from the capital, where the air pollution could choke a duck, up to the mountains two hours away, where there is barely snow but they are nonetheless going to hold the alpine events there because, well, because.

At any rate, the Chinese — having learned from their Russian friends — are not going to count the costs of the railway in their Olympic accounting. Which both in the official records as well as media such as this will, you know, keep reporting of the costs down.

This brings us, naturally enough, to 2024.

But wait.

In December 2014, the IOC passed a 40-point series of purported reforms championed by Thomas Bach, the German elected president the year before, a good number of the 40 aimed at the bid process. The package goes by the name “Agenda 2020.”

The Agenda 2020 vote came amid the 2022 Winter Games bid campaign. That 2022 campaign made it abundantly clear how flawed, if not irretrievably broken, the bid process stands.

Six would-be bid cities in Europe dropped out of the 2022 campaign, five put off to varying degrees by the $51 billion figure associated with the 2014 Sochi Winter Games: Oslo, Munich, Stockholm, Davos/St. Moritz and Krakow, Poland. A sixth, Lviv, Ukraine, fell out because of war.

That left Beijing and Almaty, Kazakhstan. The members went for Beijing.

The 2024 race formally began in September 2015, with five cities: Paris, Los Angeles, Rome, Budapest and Hamburg, Germany. In a conference call as it launched, Bach said he looked forward to the race, calling it a “very, very strong and fascinating one.”

But wait.

On the very day it began, in this space, I offered these words:

“Would anyone be surprised, really, if as soon as six months from now, this 2024 race is already down to three?

“Or, when it comes to legitimate contenders, practically speaking, two?”

November 2015: Hamburg drops out. Residents vote against hosting the Games.

September/October 2016: Rome, after weeks of dithering, drops out, too, the mayor saying the city has other priorities.

February 2017: in Budapest the locals are gathering increasing numbers of signatures for a referendum as well, so many signatures that the bid is delaying what would have been Friday’s start of its international promotional strategy. It’s unclear when — if — any promotional activity will begin.

That leaves, then, practically speaking, two: Paris and LA.

LA and Paris are both fine cities. But any reasonable observer can see that the Olympic bid process needs a fix.

"Casablanca," Bogart and Bergman are swell but we're taking 2024

All of us will always have Paris.

But Paris is not what the Olympic space needs right now.

What it needs — what Bach needs, what the IOC needs — is for Agenda 2020 to be more than just so much more than lip-service if not outright BS.

Remember: straight up.

As much as this 2024 race is a referendum on the United States, it is almost as much a referendum on Bach, and his ability to deliver on his vision.

Make no mistake: that is why he made a trip last year to California, and in particular to Silicon Valley. He knows all too well that young people are immersed in their phones and screens and the IOC needs to figure out how to merge that world with sport to keep the Olympic Games relevant with the world’s teens and 20-somethings.

This is why, right now, out of the 40 points in Agenda 2024, there’s one — one — that so far has proven meaningful, and that's the launch of the Olympic Channel. This is why there's urgency in linking the 2024 campaign to Agenda 2020.

Back to Paris for the purpose of getting the sentiment out of the way, and quickly.

Paris played host to the 1924 Games; 2024 would be 100 years later.

The IOC, though, is not in the anniversary business. Ask Athens. It sought 1996 after 1896. Those Games went to Atlanta.

The thing about Paris, and sentiment: I lived there for a summer and have been privileged since to visit several times. I have gone for early morning runs down the Champs-Élysées, looping across the Seine and around the Eiffel Tower. Memories. I get it. Totally.

Typically, a major factor in these IOC bid campaigns is where the members’ spouses would like to be for 17 days. There’s a cogent argument to be made that, you know, you could find worse places to be for nearly three weeks than Paris.

But maybe not when the entire nation of France has been under a “state of emergency” since 2015 and anxieties are high at even the most senior levels of government over the risk of another terror attack. Or when one of the attacks was directed at the national stadium in suburban Saint Denis that would be the emotional center of a 2024 Games.

To be truthful, security matters, and it may matter a lot in deciding 2024, but the IOC must itself confront an issue more under its own control.

Take a moment, please, to re-read those dollar figures: $51 billion for Sochi 2014, $40 billion for Beijing 2008, probably $20 million for Rio 2016, an advertised $7-plus billion for Tokyo 2020 already up to maybe $30 billion with the IOC insisting that $20 billion just won’t do.

Take another look at all the cities that have dropped out for 2022 and 2024.

This is why, all around the world, the IOC has a huge or, if you prefer, bigly credibility problem.

Bids want to say, we can do the job for x. Seven years later, reality check: the cost is x-plus-plus-plus and in western democracies there’s taxpayer freak-out, and understandably and appropriately.

LA 2024 is the turnkey solution to the IOC’s credibility problem.

Emotion and math equal LA24

That LA24 is the turnkey answer is so obvious. That solution is rooted in both emotion and logic. Or, if you prefer, emotion and math.

Math:

The LA24 budget calls for $5.3 billion of revenue and costs, with a $491.9 million contingency stash.

With the exception of a slalom canoe venue (no big deal), everything is built. The bid gets the use of an about-to-be-built, privately funded $3-billion stadium for the NFL’s Rams and Chargers. Southern California is — Olympics or no — in the midst of a massive public transit upgrade, with $88 billion in ongoing public transit investment as well as a $14 billion modernization of LAX (thank the lord) in addition to $120 billion in funding that LA County voters (me among them) approved in November.

Read that last bit again: $120 billion in transit funding that’s happening without reference to the Olympics. 

The Paris 2024 people say, ”95 percent of our venues will be existing or temporary facilities.”

Indeed, as Table 22, “Venue Funding and Development,” in Part 2 of its Candidature File delivered last October to the IOC makes clear, the Paris 24 bid calls for just three new items to be built.

The catch is that these three items are, with the exception of what would be the Olympic Stadium itself — standing, as noted above — pretty much the most expensive things there could possibly be:

A new athletes’ village. A new media village. And a new aquatics palace, for swimming, synchro and diving.

Just to take the last of those three:

With all due respect to friends at the international swim federation, which goes by the acronym FINA, a new structure for swim sports, even if not really a "palace," is gonna cost a ton of money and be about the most unsustainable venue you might ever want to build.

There are two events in which you draw sustainable numbers of people (that is, say, 15,000 or more)  to watch swimming: the U.S. Olympic Trials and the Games. OK, maybe three: perhaps the evening finals of the FINA world championships, and then if someone like Michael Phelps is on the blocks.

Get back to me if the U.S. Trials are going to be in Paris in 2024.

This elemental math is why USA Swimming has, for its last three Trials, plunked a temporary pool in an already-built basketball arena in Omaha, Nebraska.

This is why FINA, at its last worlds, in 2015 in Kazan, Russia, plunked a temporary pool inside a soccer — er, football — stadium.

This is why the LA24 plan is to plunk a temporary pool on a baseball field at the University of Southern California.

This is why the LA24 bid abandoned its initial plan to build a new (would have cost $1-billion) athletes’ village in downtown LA in favor of (already there) dorms at UCLA.

Our French friends might say, OK, but the government guarantees the costs, and we promise to keep them down.

Of course.

They say the Paris 2024 infrastructure budget would be 3 billion euros, about $3.2 billion USD at current exchange rates.

Of that 3 billion euros, they say, the national government would pony up 1 billion; the city of Paris, 145 million; the Paris regional government another 145 million; the region of Seine-Saint Denis 135 million. That totals 1.425 billion euros.

The remaining funds — easy math, 1.575 billion euros — is, according to Paris 2024, “already secured and guaranteed by various other public authorities and institutions.”

For purposes of discussion, let’s take our French friends at their word.

Here, though, is the lesson from prior Games that are not the model of Los Angeles 1984 — that is, that are not privately run and that depend in part or, more likely, in significant measure on government dollars, as a Paris 2024 Games would, and this is why the IOC needs Los Angeles now and not Paris.

As London 2012 and Rio 2016 proved and Tokyo 2020 is proving again, if the government is a democracy and not a more authoritative if not autocratic institution — think China or Russia — commitments change. 

It may be worthy of an academic or journalistic panel in these early days of 2017 to have a discussion about what is a “fact” and what makes for the “truth,” but it is a damn fact and that is the straight-up truth: commitments change.

That is what the past 20 years have proven, and unequivocally.

The consequence of that fact and that truth is the follow-on taxpayer freak-out.

There is the equation.

That equation needs to be broken.

That's what a private-sector bid like Los Angeles — in 2024 just as in 1984 — does. 

In LA, 2024, 1984, math is math.

What does that mean?

It means, simply, the math is certain. There is no other option because there is no government money. For taxpayers, that means there is no risk of having to siphon off monies that would otherwise be designated for, say, some social service.

Thus: no freak-out.

The LA24 plan says $5.3 billion. It will be $5.3 billion.

Actually, costs probably won’t even reach $5.3 billion. They probably will total less. And the “fact” is, which the bid committee can’t say for political reasons but this space can because it’s patently obvious: the Summer Games haven’t been in the United States since 1996 in Atlanta, which means pent-up sponsor demand. That means all involved are virtually certain to make tons of money.

IOC friends, to reiterate: all involved are likely to make money instead of reading bitter news reports about overruns and deficits.

Again, even if you might be inclined not to like us Americans all that much, everyone can get behind certainty and surplus.

Relevance is good

Which brings us to the next element:

Along with certainty and surplus, you also get everything that makes California, the world's sixth-largest economy, so relevant. The IOC’s No. 1 objective is to be relevant with young people. What, especially, do they like? Tech and media. That’s why the IOC launched the Channel. California means tech and media like nowhere else. Here, then, is the opportunity to combine tech and media with sport. So obvious.

Hollywood. Facebook. Apple. Snapchat. Google. Twitter.

These companies and industries, genuinely, want to get involved. Why? An Olympics in Los Angeles in 2024 would not only be prestigious, interesting and unusual. It’s a vehicle though which these companies could reach literally billions of people. In Olympic speak — they could grow not just the IOC brand but, as well, the individual sports themselves that make up the Olympic Games.

Straight up: it's not just the companies and industries of California but the people of LA who would like to have you. Like nine of 10 say, yay for the Olympics! In a democracy, those numbers are all but unheard-of. 

More, and IOC friends: you really do want to be on Mr. Trump's good side. Because if you turn down Los Angeles after dinging Chicago for 2016 and New York — Mr. Trump’s kind of town — for 2012, it really might not go so well for you. This means you and the IOC itself.

Just something to think about.

While you wonder why we like ice so much. We're different. Different doesn't need to be better or worse. Just different. 

By 2024, it will have been 28 years since Atlanta, 40 since the last time you were at the Coliseum like the daybreakers were at sunrise on Thursday.

Straight up: it’s time to come to California. Dude, kind of a no-brainer, really.

What's really what: from Doha, LA's why

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.”

The Olympics and President-elect Donald J. Trump

A Romanian friend and I were talking the other day about the campaign for the 2024 Summer Olympics.

If Paris wins, he said, it will be a thoroughly French Olympics. But if it's Los Angeles — that, he said, would be an international Games with the potential to prove truly transformational for the Olympic movement in the 21st century.

Maybe Tuesday’s election of Donald J. Trump has changed everything.

Or maybe — actually, probably — it has changed nothing.

Take a deep breath. Things tend to work out.

Are there any guarantees? No. Promises? No. But that’s not the way life is. And, again, things tend to work out.

Did Trump say all kinds of rude, belittling and worse things during the campaign? Absolutely. Since his election, has he struck a more conciliatory, encompassing tone? For sure. On Thursday at the White House, he met with President Barack Obama, the president saying, “I want to emphasize to you, Mr. President-elect, that we are now going to want to do everything we can to help you succeed because if you succeed, then the country succeeds.”

The last time this sort of weirdness settled over a significant portion of the United States if not beyond, it was January 1981, and Ronald Reagan, a former movie star, was being inaugurated. We all lived through that. Indeed, Reagan was president during the 1984 Summer Games in LA, which all but saved the movement. How much did he personally have to do with those Games? Very little.

If you stop and pause for just a moment, it’s actually quite possible a Trump presidency could be good for the Los Angeles 2024 bid. The committee issued a statement Wednesday that congratulated the president-elect, noted the bid’s “strong bipartisan support at the local, state and federal level” and said it was looking forward to working with Trump to “deliver a ‘new games for a new era.’ “

OK, good PR move. Even so, the Olympics, and particularly the bid process, is all about connections. Here’s what that statement didn’t — couldn’t — say:

Angela Ruggiero, the U.S. women’s ice hockey star, is now chair of the International Olympic Committee’s athletes’ commission. She is also a former contestant on “The Apprentice,” the TV show that Trump starred in for years. Trump was so impressed with her that, afterward, he offered her a job.

So — now the IOC has a direct conduit to the president-elect of the United States. What more do you want?

IOC president Thomas Bach on Wednesday offered a brief statement to Associated Press that said, “Let me congratulate President-elect Trump on his victory and wish him all the best for his term in office for all the people of the United States and of the world.”

Would it have been “better” for the American 2024 effort if Hillary Clinton had prevailed in the electoral college as well as the popular vote?

To be sure, she was, in Olympic circles, something of a known quantity. She led the U.S. delegation to the 1994 Lillehammer Games. She and President Bill Clinton led the American side in Atlanta in 1996. When the 2012 Games campaign was going on, Hillary Clinton, then a senator from New York, traveled to the IOC session in Singapore to lobby for New York.

No disrespect intended whatsoever to Mrs. Clinton but New York got crushed and Atlanta is hardly remembered fondly in many senior Olympic circles.

At any rate, there’s little question that California wanted Hillary. The state went for Mrs. Clinton by roughly 2-1, 61 to 33 percent. The U.S. Olympic Committee turned to LA for 2024 for a variety of reasons — one of which is precisely that California is different, about as far away from Washington, D.C., another potential 2024 candidate, as possible. Far away -- literally and figuratively.

Reflecting on Trump’s election, Stanford political science professor Bruce Cain told the New York Times, referring to California, “We will go back into the mode that we were in during the Bush administration,” meaning George W. Bush, “which is we were the kind of the rebel state.”

We got through the Bush years, too, it should be pointed out. The American experiment did not collapse in on itself. For what it's worth, Bush is a huge proponent of the Olympics, traveling to Beijing in 2008 to watch Michael Phelps and the rest of the U.S. team after opening the 2002 Winter Games in Salt Lake City.

At any rate, who is the former governor of California? Arnold Schwarzenegger. We all lived through that, too.

Who is replacing Trump as host of the successor show “The Celebrity Apprentice,” his debut set for January 2017, just a few days before Trump is due to be inaugurated as president? Schwarzenegger.

People, the world turns in mysterious ways.

Here are some factors that remain immutable:

-- The United States is not Russia nor China, where the strong hand of the national government plays a key Olympic role.

— As the IOC well knows, western governments have a rude habit of change in the seven years between the time a city wins the Games and the opening ceremony. See, for instance, Brazil, the United Kingdom, Greece, Japan and others, including South Korea, site of the 2018 Winter Games, where hundreds of thousands are expected this weekend in the streets in protest against the current president.

And, for that matter, the United States.

Who knows whether Trump would even still be president in 2024?

— The recent demise of the Rome 2024 bid proves emphatically that the mayor — who killed off that bid despite national government and Olympic committee support — is more important in the Olympic bid process than anyone at the national level.

LA mayor Eric Garcetti is a rock star. Indeed, with Clinton’s defeat, a loss that simultaneously made plain how few young Democratic stars there are, Garcetti is uniquely positioned to assume an even more prominent profile.

What tends to win Olympic votes is connection and relationship. The USOC chairman, Larry Probst, and chief executive, Scott Blackmun, along with Ruggiero and longtime IOC member Anita DeFrantz have spent the past several years seeking just that. Along with, now, Garcetti and LA 24 bid leader Casey Wasserman.

For all this, if you were the bid committees in Paris and Budapest, the two remaining 2024 candidates, you might well be feeling suddenly frisky at the prospect of a Trump presidency.

To be super-American about this, and quote Lee Corso, the former American college football coach turned ESPN television personality: not so fast, my friend.

One way to interpret Tuesday’s result is that it makes for a rebuke of multiculturalism and globalization — the very things purportedly at the core of the Olympic soul. If that’s the way the IOC ends up looking at it, that’s going to be very tough for the LA effort. Or, simply put, if the members want to punish the United States for its choice of president -- see Bush 43 -- that's going to be tough, too.

Perhaps, though — “drain the swamp” and all that — it’s more a rejection of Washington and its elites, and by extension global elites. Look, there is no bunch more perceived as a bunch of global elites more than the IOC, a point proven repeatedly in recent months and years with western European rejection of bids in — deep breath — Munich, Hamburg, Stockholm, Oslo, Krakow, St. Moritz, Vienna and, now, Rome.

This is a matter about which the IOC ought to be paying rapt attention. Its increasingly urgent mandate: to remain relevant in our obviously changing world.

So American voters just elected a rhetoric-spewing avowed nationalist?

This bears all the signals of the second act in a global three-act play.

Act One: Brexit. To put an Olympic spin on it, the British vote to leave the European Union came in the aftermath of what many consider the finest Summer Games in recent memory, in London in 2012.

Two: Trump.

Three: next year’s presidential election in France. Would anyone be surprised if the third domino fell, with the candidacy of Marine Le Pen?

Her tweet Tuesday, even before all the votes had been counted stateside:

https://twitter.com/MLP_officiel/status/796235915387699200

Translation: “Congratulations to the new U.S. president Donald Trump and to the free American people.”

As for Hungary:

This past summer, Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán said, referring to Trump, that the ideas of the “upstanding American presidential candidate” and his opposition to “democracy export” could also apply in Europe. Orbán, who has ordered fences built at the Hungarian border in a bid to stop migrants, also said in July, “I am not Donald Trump’s campaigner,” adding, “I myself could not have drawn up better what Europe needs.”

Amid the Trump victory, here was Orbán on Facebook:

Then, speaking Thursday at a European conference, he echoed, “We are two days after the big bang and still alive. What a wonderful world. This also shows that democracy is creative and innovative.”

In even more-important news within the Olympic bubble, the government is due Jan. 1 to take over much of the authority of the Hungarian Olympic Committee. The IOC has long frowned on such intrusions in what it likes to call “autonomy,” meaning appropriate independence from government.

France is not Hungary. But with the French Olympic committee comes a big dose of French government. That's the way things are.

That’s the farthest thing from an issue in the United States. By 1978 law, Congress maintains USOC oversight. But the USOC must run and fund itself.

If all this makes anyone squirm about the rise of “populism” if not nationalism, if there is suddenly a tinge of forlorn regret for the Obama years, let’s have — once more — an Olympic reality check.

Copenhagen, 2009. The president is the new winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. He comes to Denmark to lobby for his hometown, Chicago, in the race for the 2016 Games. Chicago gets kicked to the curb in the first round, with fewer votes even than New York got four years before.

“… I think we’ve learned,” the president said in an interview published last month in New York magazine, “that [the] IOC’s decisions are similar to FIFA’s decisions: a little bit cooked. We didn’t even make the first cut, despite the fact that, by all the objective metrics, the American bid was the best.”

Coincidence or not: since then, it’s Obama’s Justice Department that has gone after FIFA and has opened a criminal investigation into allegations of state-sponsored Russian doping. Coincidence or not: Loretta Lynch, the former head of Justice’s Eastern District of New York, the office that is leading the charge, is now the attorney general of the United States. She reports to Obama.

It was Obama, recall, who opted to make a political statement in advance of the 2014 Sochi Games by sending a U.S. delegation that was to be headed by the tennis star Billie Jean King and two other athletes. King had to bow out of the opening ceremony delegation because of her mother’s death; she later made it to the closing ceremony.

In three years as IOC president, Bach has met with more than 100 heads of government and state. A notable exception: Obama.

Politicians come and go. That is a vivid lesson of Olympic history. The issue that matters is elemental: where is the best place for the Olympic movement to reimagine its future? That starts with 2024.

Ask your kids.

If you can get them away from their election chatter — and how it’s going to impact their lives, the very currency with the very audience the IOC is chasing — on Snapchat.

Snapchat — which of course is based in the hipster LA neighborhood of Venice Beach.

Rome 2024: it's about time

Maybe corruption is everywhere within and around the Olympic movement. Or maybe not. Maybe an Olympic Games is a financial boondoggle. Or maybe not.

The International Olympic Committee needs to better understand — and then confront — the perception, widely held around the world and particularly in its longstanding base in Europe, that the movement stands not for inspiration but distress. This is a huge problem. This problem is now playing out in the campaign for the 2024 Summer Games. Real life has revealed Agenda 2020, the IOC’s 2014 would-be reform program, for what it always was, mostly lip service. The institution needs big changes in the way in which it selects cities to stage the Games, in particular its franchise, the Summer Olympics.

The ugly implosion over the past few days of the Rome bid for 2024 underscores the seismic fractures.

Virginia Raggi, a 38-year-old lawyer, is Rome’s first female mayor. She was elected in June. Part of what carried her to office was no to the Olympics. So it can hardly be a surprise that this week she made that position formal.

The dig is that she wouldn’t even meet with sports officials before the news conference at which she described the bid as irresponsible. She kept them waiting for 35 minutes. They left. Then she showed up a half-hour late to that news conference, declaring, "In light of the data we have, these Olympics are not sustainable. They will bring only debt.”

In response, those officials, in a lengthy and bitter statement, couldn’t even bring themselves to utter her name.

The statement goes on at length in explaining why the bid team was “disappointed”:

That “prejudice and superficiality have won.” That “this same political force has transformed an extraordinary opportunity for youth and the city into an ideologically, politically and demagogically based decision, and that rather than taking action they have opted to do nothing.” That this “new political force” did “not want to take advantage of the opportunity to launch a significant project of urban redevelopment, as was the result of the 1960 Games in Rome.”

That “the rhetoric around wastefulness has won out over the new, important IOC regulations, created specifically to address waste and projects that are not beneficial for citizens and to involve other cities in the hosting of the Games.”

Italian Olympic Committee president Giovanni Malago further told reporters that Italy — Rome has now dropped out of two races in four years, for 2020 and 2024 — isn’t likely to bid for perhaps the next 20 years.

He also said during the week, “We’ve lost all credibility if we pull out. Because they’ll think people in Italy are not serious.”

Well, no. At least not about staging the Olympics. The Torino 2006 Winter Games were pretty much a logistical train wreck.

But that’s not the point.

The point is that Italy has long been an IOC member stronghold. And yet the “new, important regulations,” meaning Agenda 2020, couldn’t convince the mayor of Rome that an Olympic bid might be worth it.

And she is far from alone.

The underlying cause of the mayor’s concern amounts to the same thing that, to varying degrees, caused no fewer than five European cities to drop out of the 2022 Winter Games campaign, leaving only Beijing and Almaty, Kazakhstan. A sixth, Lviv, Ukraine, dropped out because of war.

It’s all about money and the perception that an Olympics costs way, way, way too much and amounts to way, way, way too much trouble.

The cost figure commonly associated with the 2014 Games in Sochi is $51 billion.

Rio 2016 ran way over budget. London 2012 ran way over budget. Tokyo in 2020 had to start over from scratch with the stadium because it started costing way too much.

Beijing in 2008 ran to a reported $40 billion.

In China, perhaps $40 billion against the national budget amounts to a rounding error. Maybe that’s why last summer the IOC opted for Beijing for 2022.

If money isn’t a problem in China, there’s this: snow. Like, there isn’t really any in the far-off mountains where the 2022 snow events are due to be held.

A system that produces this sort of process and result is irrational if not worse.

Agenda 2020 was supposed to be the answer, at least according to the IOC. And the 2024 race was due to mark the test of the 40-point reform plan.

In the bid context, Agenda 2020 was supposed to turn the tables. Instead of the IOC setting forth a list of demands, cities were supposed to come to the IOC with competing visions for what a Games could and should be.

The evidence clearly shows that politicians and voters understand that Agenda 2020 is not any sort of fix.

Boston opted out -- which at least paved the way for Los Angeles, what should have been the U.S. choice all along.

Hamburg, Germany? Out in a voter referendum.

Now Rome.

That’s three total, and two of the five formal candidates. Left standing, for now: LA, Paris and Budapest, and only the first two are widely viewed as serious contenders. Budapest may yet face a referendum.

And read again that Rome 2024 exit statement — with a focus, at least in significant part, on the idea of an Olympics as an “opportunity to launch a significant project of urban redevelopment.”

No.

The era of the Games as urban catalyst, launched in Barcelona in 1992, is done.

Again: done, finished, no mas.

The day after rejecting the 2024 Olympic bid, meanwhile, Raggi said Rome would be “honored” to help stage the Euro 2020 soccer tournament at Stadio Olimpico — which, it should be obvious, is on the ground. It was extensively rebuilt for the 1990 World Cup and was the site of that tournament’s final.

It’s curious that the lengthy bid committee's exit statement did not address two essential facts noted in the Associated Press report about the mayor’s decision: the Rome 2024 candidacy had been allotted a budget of $27 million and much of that had already been spent.

The IOC won’t make its 2024 decision until next September 13, and yet a bid has already blown through, say, $25 million?

That just highlights, again, the serious disconnect at issue.

To reiterate the premise launched in this space a few days back: the IOC needs to buy itself time to study the bid process from start to finish, with help from leading experts and the aim of making it workable and, more, appealing. This is, at the core, both a governance and PR problem.

The IOC still won’t let its members visit cities bidding for the Games, a result of the late 1990s Salt Lake City corruption scandal. It’s little wonder officials and voters in so many cities don’t trust the IOC when the IOC won’t even trust its own members.

Plus, there’s the FIFA scandal. The allegations of state-sponsored doping in Russia. And more.

The IOC needs time to address these challenges.

The logical way to buy that time is for the IOC to award the Games to Los Angeles in 2024 and Paris in 2028, and in that order.

Budapest is a lovely, lovely city. But it’s not what the IOC, and the Olympics, need right now.

What the Olympics need is a place where 95 percent or more of everything needed for a Games already exists. (Los Angeles, the bid committee this week announcing the intended use of more venues that are already on the ground.) Where the mayor, governor and federal authorities are on board. (Los Angeles.) Where polls show public support at nearly 90 percent. (Los Angeles, and it would be curious indeed to see the results of an independent survey of residents of the city of Paris — not a France poll and not an online survey.)

Where, moreover, the national Olympic committee and bid team have forged a real partnership. (The U.S. Olympic Committee and LA 2024 announced Friday they have come to agreement on the key issue of what’s called a joint marketing agreement. Fights over this agreement produced bid-threatening friction for the Chicago 2016 and New York 2012 efforts. “We talk repeatedly about a high-quality partnership this is, and this is a demonstration of the quality of the partnership,” USOC board chair Larry Probst said.)

California has 12 percent of the American population but accounts for 20 percent of the public companies on the major American markets, including Google, Facebook and Apple, a column in the New York Times reported this week. It’s zero wonder why the IOC president, Thomas Bach, made a visit earlier this year to Silicon Valley.

Because all these conditions are real, a Los Angeles organizing committee would be free to use the Games not as a catalyst for urban renewal. Appropriately, it could reimagine the Games for the 21st century.

There’s this, too, even if few want to acknowledge it in the public space. The IOC has over the past several cycles dismissed the first- and third-largest cities in the United States. LA is the second-biggest. You want to say no thanks to numbers 1, 2 and 3 and somehow expect the United States would come back for another try in 2028? The chances of that are — slim.

Paris is a lovely city as well, rich with Olympic history, and a 2024 Games there would mark the 100th anniversary of the 2024 Games.

But the IOC is not in the anniversary business.

It’s in the relevancy business. And it needs to go where conditions are ripe to sustain — better, advance — that relevance with young people.

LA for 2024, Paris for 2028. It’s about time.

What IOC should do: LA for 2024, Paris for 2028

The Rio 2016 Paralympic Games end Sunday. That’s the 18th of September.

Let’s see if by October 1 the Rome candidacy for the 2024 Summer Games is still alive.

It’s just now under a year — next September 13, at a general assembly in Lima, Peru — until the International Olympic Committee picks the 2024 winner. This can, and should, be a turning point for the Olympic movement.

The question is whether the IOC has the creativity, courage and conviction — basically, the cojones — to do what must be done.

The IOC ought to declare that the next two Games, 2024 and 2028, are going to Los Angeles and to Paris, and in that order, and then spend the next few years figuring out how to make this process work in and for the 21st century.

As it is now, the bid process needs fixing, and in significant ways.

The IOC is by nature traditional if not conservative. Even so, now — now — is the time for the IOC to be bold and brave, to be pro-active. The IOC needs to take back way more control over the thing that is at the core of what it does before events conspire, as they always do, to force institutions into panic and reaction mode.

Better, way better, to take that pressure out of the equation. And confront this:

A Games is supposed to be a celebration. The world has changed around the IOC and the IOC needs to figure out how to better offer its value proposition — one that focuses on celebration, inspiration and innovation.

Three candidates, and maybe two

Next Sept. 13, Los Angeles will be a viable candidate.

Paris, too.

Rome increasingly looks like it’s out. The mayor is on record, many times over, as saying the Games are not her priority.

The feeling is that the Italians are waiting to make an exit announcement simply out of respect for the Paralympics.

If Rome leaves, that would leave three cities.

Or maybe just two.

Budapest may now be facing a voter referendum.

Such ballot measures in Europe have consistently in recent years led to the abrupt end of bids.

A consistent sense is that the Rio Games made for an escape from disaster — as the president Thomas Bach put it in a speech delivered at the opening of the IOC session immediately before the Games, a “long and testing journey.” That is not a good sell to voters.

Nor is it a way to run a franchise — which is, make no mistake, what the Summer Games are to the IOC.

To be clear, this is not a knock on the Budapest bid team. They are a with-it bunch of people. Nor is it a knock on Budapest. It is a very cool city. The 2017 world judo championships will be there. The 2017 swim championships, too.

But the lesson of Athens and 2004 is that the Games make for a major test for a small country, and Hungary is a small country. The lesson of Rio, loud and clear, is that the Games have to stop being the impetus for a massive urban development project. A city has to be ready, with everything, or almost everything, set. From Day One.

Like, for instance, LA. Where 98 percent of stuff is already on the ground and polls consistently show ridiculously high support for the Games.

That way the IOC, and local organizers, can spend the seven years building not buildings but the Olympic spirit.

That spirit — the promotion of friendship, excellence and respect — is what the Olympic Games and the Olympic movement are supposed to be about. It’s the power of one-to-one change for the better in our fragile world, and how that spirit can amplify that very change in a city and country and, by extension, around the world.

That is what is missing when you spend seven years leading up to a Games worrying about construction deadlines and infrastructure budgets.

The real Rio 'legacy'

For emphasis, the Rio experience is likely to have long-lasting import within and on the IOC.

You can see how over and done the IOC is with Brazil, and the headaches that have attended 2016.

Consider things from the IOC perspective:

There essentially was no money; the IOC helped. It helped, too, by sending its top expert, the former Games director Gilbert Felli, to basically live in Brazil for two years to get the project across the finish line. So how do the Brazilians express their appreciation? By seeking to make Bach a witness in a ticket case involving a senior IOC member, Patrick Hickey of Ireland. Hickey says he’s innocent. Maybe he is. Or not. Whatever. Until he was detained in Rio, Hickey served on the IOC’s policy-making executive board. The Brazilian authorities, for whatever reason, have sought to make an example out of Hickey. He was dispatched, like the worst sort of criminal, to a maximum-security prison (without being convicted of a thing), then released to a version of home arrest. He can’t leave Brazil while the wheels of justice grind along.

To summarize:

After everything the IOC afforded Brazil just to get through this "long and testing journey" — time, money, expertise, patience — the payback is an IOC board member up against it and the locals making it such a big deal they want the IOC president himself to answer questions?

This in a county where politics and justice are, to be kind, a little wobbly? The former president of Brazil was just impeached. The president before her, the charismatic guy who cried with passion the day Brazil won the Games in 2009, is now facing criminal charges himself.

You wonder why — despite what he has said about being anywhere else for whatever reason — Bach didn’t attend the opening ceremony of the Paralympics? Don’t wonder.

Which leads to the easy question: looking ahead to 2024 and 2028, who in their right mind wouldn’t want something a whole lot easier?

The signals have been there since the 2022 race

The race for the 2022 Winter Games made it abundantly clear that the bid process is flawed if not irretrievably broken.

Six cities in Europe dropped out, five put off to varying degrees by the $51 billion figure associated with the 2014 Sochi Winter Games: Oslo, Munich, Stockholm, Davos/St. Moritz and Krakow, Poland. A sixth, Lviv, Ukraine, fell out because of war.

By the end, IOC had only two left: Beijing, where there’s virtually no snow in the far-off mountains, and Almaty, Kazakhstan. The members, in a vote last summer, went for Beijing.

Once more: a Games cannot be primarily a catalyst for urban improvements. That’s the notion the 1992 Barcelona Games ushered in, and when mayors, governors and prime ministers saw how the Games transformed Barcelona, they all wanted a piece for themselves of that 1992 magic.

That model, as the 2022 and 2024 races underscore, is no longer attractive. For sure, Rio has better transport now than before. But nobody goes into a seventh-grade classroom and says, do you want to know why the Olympics are so great? Because you can ride the bus!

So:

Los Angeles and Paris, and in that order.

Doubtlessly there would be sentiment to award 2024 to Paris because it would be the 100th anniversary of the 1924 Paris Games.

Appropriately, however, anniversaries count for little to nothing. See Atlanta in 1996 (Athens 1896, tried for 1996). And not that security isn’t a real issue everywhere but going to France for the nearer future would only invite screaming headlines for seven years about terrorism instead of, again, inspiration and celebration.

LA and Budapest are the only two cities that over the past several months have been telling a legitimate story. Here’s one way you know: LA’s tagline is “follow the sun.” On Twitter, a Paris consultant has been posting pictures of sunrises and sunsets from around the world accompanied by the hashtag #CelebratetheSun. One even shows the sun in Brazil and observes “it’s everywhere!”

Wow! Really?! Imitation, flattery, all that. But not exactly original.

And the Olympic movement, right now, needs original thinking.

Just to get this out of the way: Yes, live in Los Angeles. No, I am not working for the bid committee. I have covered every single IOC election since 1999. Maybe I have observed and even learned a few things along the way.

Big changes, literally and figuratively

Once 2024 and 2028 were settled, that would give the gift of time. Then the IOC and, as well, governance experts can think about how to reform the process to get good if not great options for the rest of this 21st century.

Again, the time is now. The IOC is staring at three successive Games in Asia — Pyeongchang in 2018, Tokyo 2020, Beijing 2022.  And as NBC’s depressed Rio ratings make clear, big changes in the way people view the Olympics — literally and figuratively — are emerging.

It’s not, by the way, that viewers don’t want live sports. NFL and college football ratings in the United States are still insane. Just to take one example: the overnight number for the New York Giants-Dallas Cowboys game this past Sunday on Fox, a game shown to 90 percent of the country, hit a 16.9. Compare that to the 2015 Giants-Cowboys game, shown to 100 percent of the United States on NBC: 16.7.

Summary: shown to fewer viewers and yet more people tuned in.

The Olympics are not, however, football. And the Usain Bolt and Michael Phelps years are just now, at least purportedly, coming to a close.

This is why, for instance, the Olympic Channel is now up and running online.

That’s an excellent first step. Still, the IOC needs to do more.

The IOC needs to get in way better touch with the technology that is an intuitive part of the youth audience it is trying to reach. That’s why Bach made a tour last year of Silicon Valley’s leading companies.

In that same speech to the members on the opening of the IOC session in Rio, Bach confessed that on that Silicon Valley trip, he was introduced to Vine, the six-second video-sharing app. Before that moment, he had no idea what it was. “Skeptical” at first, he said, he was “converted in about six and a half seconds” after seeing the “fantastic images and emotions,” adding that Vine “completely captures the magic of the digital world.”

Bach is only 62 years old. It’s cool that he doesn’t do skateboarding tricks himself for his squad on Vine. But it’s inexcusable that, as the chief executive of an entity whose mission is connecting with the world’s young people, he had to be virtually smacked upside the head to get to know an app that is central to mainstream youth culture.

Same goes for the bid process. Rio is that smack upside the head. Let’s focus on those “fantastic images and emotions,” and on putting the “magic of the digital world” front and center — that is, inspiration and celebration.

LA for ’24, Paris for ’28. In combo, that would make for a big, and appropriate, first step.

The incredible Aries Merritt, and more

A dozen musings on track and field, on the 2024 Summer Games bid race and more:

1. At a news conference Friday in Eugene, Oregon, before Saturday’s line-up of events at the 42nd annual Prefontaine Classic, the question went out to Aries Merritt, the 2012 London men’s 110-meter hurdles champion who is also the world record-holder, 12.8 seconds, in the event: on a scale of one to 10, where did he fall?

Heading toward the U.S. Trials in a month and, presumably, beyond to the Rio 2016 Summer Games, Merritt has probably the most unbelievable, incredible, authentic story in track and field. He had a degenerative kidney condition. With almost no kidney function, he somehow won a bronze medal in the hurdles at the 2015 world championships. Thereafter, with his sister as the donor, he underwent a kidney transplant. It required not just one but two surgeries.

So — one to 10? “Ten,” he said. Which means that the hurdles, always one of the best events at the track, figures to be that much better. And, America and beyond — get ready, via NBC and every outlet out there, for the Aries Merritt story. He deserves every bit of good publicity he gets.

2. With all due respect to the sainted Steve Prefontaine — no snark or sarcasm intended, only a full measure of respect — a significant chunk of the problem with track and field in the United States is Steve Prefontaine.

Every sport needs heroes. Not just legends.

The elements of the Prefontaine story have been well-chronicled: the U.S. records at virtually every middle- and long distance event, the fourth in the 5k at the Munich 1972 Games, his life cut short in a car crash at 24.

The legend of Prefontaine, and appropriately, has had a longstanding hold on the U.S. track and field imagination.

But imagine if, say, baseball was stuck in the Roberto Clemente era. Or the NBA fixated on Reggie Lewis, Len Bias, Malik Sealy or, for that matter, Drazen Petrovic. Or the NFL on Junior Seau and others.

One of the major challenges with track and field now is that there is no 2016 version of larger-than-life Prefontaine. No one is that guy (or that woman). Ashton Eaton could be and maybe should be. But who else? Merritt? It's anyone's guess.

Most Americans, asked to name a track and field star, will answer: Carl Lewis.

It has been roughly 20 years since Lewis made any noise on the track itself, more than 40 since Prefontaine was alive. Meanwhile, fourth-graders all around the 50 states can readily debate (pick one) Peyton Manning or Tom Brady, whether Derek Jeter was the best Yankee ever, whether they would start an NBA team with (pick one) LeBron James or Steph Curry.

Every sport, to repeat, needs heroes. Not just legends.

3. Earlier this year, the former 800-meter world champion Caster Semenya made even hardened track geeks go, whoa. She raced, and won, three events — on the same day — at the South African national championships, the women’s 400 (personal-best 50.74), 800 (1:58.45) and 1500 (4:10.93, outside Olympic qualifying time).

So much for the theory — oft-advanced by track freaks who never bother to, say, watch swimming — that a world-class athlete can’t race, and win, multiple events on the same day.

From start to finish, Semenya ran the three races in about four hours.

She went 1:58.26 to win the Doha Diamond League meet in early May, winning by nearly an entire second.

On Sunday, and she wasn’t even really going all out, Semenya ran 1:56.64 for the win at the first IAAF Diamond League meet in Africa, in Rabat, Morocco. She won by more than a full second.

For comparison: on Friday night, on Day One of the 2016 Prefontaine Classic at historic Hayward Field, American Alysia Montaño-Johnson won the women's 800 in 2:00.78.

Semenya doesn’t deserve to do anything but get to run, and run as fast as possible. At the 2009 world championships in Berlin, she ran away with the 800, in a crazy-fast 1:55.45. Then it was disclosed that she had elevated testosterone levels. The gender testing — and, more, the shaming — that she endured thereafter proved unconscionable.

The rules are the rules. The rules say she can run in women’s events.

The real question is: what should be the rules?

Because it’s perhaps not that difficult to explain why Semenya is — after silvers in the 800 at the 2011 worlds and 2012 Olympics and then injuries and subpar performances since — running so fast again now.

It’s all about testosterone levels.

Because of Semenya, track and field’s international governing body, the International Assn. of Athletics Federations, as well as the International Olympic Committee, put in place a new policy: you could run in women’s events if your testosterone levels fell under a threshold of 10 nanomoles (that’s what it’s called) per liter. In scientific jargon: 10 nmo/L.

Context: as the South African scientist and writer Ross Tucker points out in a brilliant Q&A on what is called “hyperandrogenism” with the activist Joanna Harper, 99 percent of female athletes registered testosterone levels below 3.08 nmo/L.

From the science department, part I: “hyper” is science talk for what in ordinary speech might be described as “way, way more.” The primary and probably most well-known “androgen” is testosterone.

Part II, simple math: the upper limit of 10 is more than three times higher than for 99 in 100 women.

Last year, in a decision that pleased human rights advocates but left knowledgable track observers puzzled (to say the least), sport’s top court, the Swiss-based Court of Arbitration for Sport, ruling in the case of sprinter Dutee Chand from India, said the IAAF (and IOC) could no longer enforce the testosterone limit.

In real life, and particularly as we look toward Rio, this means what?

The IAAF and IOC are trying to come up with a new policy.

In the meantime, Semenya, “plus a few others,” as Tucker writes, “have no restriction.” The erasure of the limit has “utterly transformed Semenya from an athlete who was struggling to run 2:01 to someone who is tactically running 1:56," Tucker goes on to say, adding, "My impression, having seen her live and now in the Diamond League, is that she could run 1:52, and if she wanted to, would run a low 48-second 400 meters and win that gold in Rio. too.”

He also writes that Semenya is “the unfortunate face of what is going to be a massive controversy in Rio” — my words here, not his, about who is a “female” and gets to run in “women’s” events. He writes, "It won’t be any consolation to Semenya, [that] the media, frankly, have no idea how to deal with this – nobody wants it to be about the athlete, and it certainly is not her fault.  However, it is a debate we must have, and I want to try to have it from the biological, sporting perspective, and steer clear of the minority bullying that so often punctuates these matters.”

Tucker is right. The debate — calm voices only, please — needs to be held, and in short order.

4. UCLA, per a report first from ESPN, landed the biggest college sports apparel deal ever, with Under Armour. Terms: 15 years, beginning in July 2017. The deal is believed to be worth $280 million.

Biggest-ever is likely to be relative, depending on what comes next.

Because, in recent months:

Michigan, 11 years (option to extend to 15), Nike, $169 million,

Texas, 15 years, Nike $250 million.

Ohio State, 15 years, Nike, $252 million.

Boosters of these schools, and others, typically tend to react with glee at these sorts of numbers.

Rhetorical question, part I: why, when USA Track & Field chief executive officer Max Siegel scores a $500 million, 23-year deal with Nike, do some number of track fans bemoan Nike’s influence as a death star of sorts and claim the federation is verging on stupidity if not recklessness?

Rhetorical question, part II: how is it that dismissive claims about the USATF/Nike deal become gospel among the disaffected when track athletes actually get paid to run for a living but college athletes, as UCLA quarterback Josh Rosen noted in a Tweet that quickly got deleted, don’t — and likely won’t —get to see a dime of any of those millions?

Just a thought here: maybe Siegel was, you know, ahead of the power curve.

5. More on USATF, now on the dismissal this week per 11-1 vote of the federation’s board of directors of the Youth Executive Committee and its chairman, Lionel Leach:

Many, many things could be said here about Leach and the conduct that led to this action.

For now, this will suffice:

This is a movie whose ending we can all know, and now.

Why?

Because it’s a re-run.

What’s at issue, at the core, is a power struggle between the volunteers and professional staff.

Here’s news: the professional staff is going to win. As it should.

It used to be that the U.S. Olympic Committee found itself consumed by precisely this sort of petty, personalized politics. That changed when governance reforms became real; when the board empowered the chief executive to run the show; and when the chief executive proved professional and hugely competent (USOC: Scott Blackmun, USATF: Siegel).

It's a fact that USATF has a long and contentious history. But this is a fact, too: Siegel's first four years have shown dramatic, and consequential, improvement for the federation, and the sport.

6. Moving along, to an international sports federation president who also gets it, even if the IOC often doesn't want to admit so: Marius Vizer, president of the International Judo Federation.

Vizer, in advance of the start Friday of a major IJF event in Guadalajara, Mexico, spent about two hours doing a live Q&A on Twitter.

https://twitter.com/MariusVizer/status/736270089708703744

Imagine: actually doing exactly what the IOC says it wants to do, to reach out to young people in those ways, like Twitter, by which young people connect with each other.

Far too many federation presidents might have something resembling a panic attack at the thought of entertaining questions about whatever from whoever. Vizer, who has never had anything to hide and has consistently been a forceful voice for accountability and change (to the IOC's chagrin), made it plain: bring it on.

Indeed, Vizer ended by saying more such Q&A's would be forthcoming.

https://twitter.com/MariusVizer/status/736291453161246722

7. Switching to 2024 bid news:

If you might be tempted to look past those potentially significant developments related to the allegations of Russian doping — first, a potential U.S. Justice Department inquiry and, second, U.S. Anti-Doping Agency chief Travis Tygart’s bombshell of an op-ed in the New York Times — it was otherwise a good week for the LA24 bid committee, at least for those things it could and can control.

Los Angeles, behind a bid headed by Casey Wasserman, who is also in charge of LA24, won the right to stage the 2021 Super Bowl.

Plus, a rail line from downtown to Santa Monica opened, to real excitement and big crowds. Roll that around in your head: LA. Rail. It’s real. Really.

8. Still a long way to go in the 2024 race, which the IOC will decide by secret ballot in September 2017 at a meeting in Lima, Peru. Three others are in the race: Paris, Rome, Budapest.

It’s a proven that what wins Olympic elections are, first, relationships, and two, telling a story that will move IOC members emotionally.

Right now, only two of the four are telling a real story: Los Angeles. And Budapest.

9. Turning to the 2020 Summer Games campaign, won by Tokyo:

The Japanese Olympic Committee announces a three-person investigation of allegations of bribery. This from the same place that brought you the burning of the Nagano 1998 books so as to avoid embarrassing the IOC.

Let’s all wish for really good luck in getting a genuine answer.

Why in the world would you need to send $2 million to Ian Tan Hong Han, a consultant based in Singapore, who is close friends with Papa Massata Diack, son of Lamine Diack, the then-president of the IAAF, when virtually no one in the Singapore international sports community knew of Han or his firm, Black Tidings?

Black Tidings had precisely what know-how to provide such high-level consultancy services?

More: those who were there for the Singapore 2010 Youth Games know there had to be external help when Singapore was bidding for YOG. Curious.

10. Russia uses sports as an instrument of what’s called “soft power,” meaning president Vladimir Putin has sought to use sports to project a Russian image of strength, not only abroad but, crucially, within Russia itself.

The United States, which under President Obama has clashed with the Kremlin over issues ranging from the disclosures of the activist Edward Snowden to the composition of the formal U.S. delegation to the Sochi 2014 Winter Games, has if not unparalleled then at least significant resource available to its spy agencies.

How is it that Sochi 2014 lab director Gregoriy Rodchenkov could flee Russia and end up so quickly in the United States? No one in the American spy apparatus would want to embarrass the Russians, would they?

Again: just curious.

11. What a surprise! The London 2012 doping re-test positives became public on a Friday!

The numbers: 23 athletes from five sports and six countries, based on 265 re-tests

More numbers, 32 doping cases from London 2012, 57 for Beijing 2008. Previous high, according to IOC figures: 26, Athens 2004.

To reiterate a central point: you have to be frighteningly stupid to get caught doping at the Olympic Games themselves.

It’s one thing to be caught in no-notice, out-of-competition testing. But at the Games?

You know there are going to be drug tests. You know the samples are going to be kept in the freezer for (at least) 10 years to allow for advances in testing.

It has been said many times but is still worth repeating: failing a drug test at the Olympics is like failing an IQ test.

Stupid.

12. If you’re thinking of going to Rio, don’t. Sorry to say so but — don’t. Watch on TV.

The pictures will be beautiful and the only danger in overloading on TV is breathing in that funky orange-red Doritos powder.

In Brazil, meanwhile:

The case of the Spanish sailors getting held-up at gunpoint, lucky to escape with their lives, underscores the No. 1 challenge ahead of these Games. More than dirty water, or maybe even Zika, or presidential politics, or corruption scandals. More than anything. To compete, or to be at, the Games in Rio, you have to deal with life in Rio as it is. Maybe — maybe even probably — it will be fine. But one wrong misstep, even with no fault, and you might well find yourselves in a scene evoking Tom Wolfe’s 1987 masterpiece, “Bonfire of the Vanities.”

Who wants that? Be a master of your TV universe.