Marius Vizer: "I don't give up"

SOCHI, Russia — If you thought Marius Vizer, the president of SportAccord, was going to go gently into the Russian good night as the convention wound down here Thursday, you might also believe that Vladimir Putin paid for the 2014 Winter Games with $24 worth of, like, beads and matryoshka, those Russian stacking dolls. “I don’t give up,” Vizer said after an incredible news conference Thursday in which he asserted repeatedly that the attack he launched Monday on the International Olympic Committee system, with IOC president Thomas Bach right up front, was assuredly designed to be “constructive.”

Vizer is like rock legend Tom Petty. He does not back down.

On Thursday, asked about his motto, Vizer said, “My life for sport,” adding, “But I have seen in here this week a lot of people and a lot of decisions of people which the sport is for their life,” leaving no doubt in his mind that for them sport is a vehicle to buffet lines, big cars and other perks with little or no consideration for athletes.

He said, “I wish to work and collaborate with everybody in harmony when somebody tells the truth and is the voice of sport. But when somebody brings his voice it does not mean it is war or [an] earthquake. It is just an opinion, an expression of sport life, activity, experience …

“Of course, some of us, most of us, agree with reality. But there are not many which have the courage [to speak out].”

The speech Monday triggered a contentious week of sports politics.

The end game is far from clear.

In something of an ironic twist, meanwhile, the IOC won for "governance and transparency" from the SportBusiness Ultimate Sports Federation Awards, it was announced Thursday by SportBusiness Intelligence at SportAccord. Judging was conducted an independent panel.

In Monday’s speech, Vizer described the IOC system as “expired, outdated, wrong, unfair and not at all transparent.” In more than 100 countries, he asserted, sport is “in misery,” with athletes “lacking the necessary basic elements — food, medication, equipment, preparation, facilities and possibility to participate to competitions.”

Almost straight thereafter, in a point that almost everyone has missed throughout the entire week of controversy that has followed, Vizer was re-elected SportAccord president for a full four-year term. SportAccord represents more than 100 Olympic and non-Olympic federations.

It wasn’t until later that day — after he had been re-elected, and intriguingly while the IOC leadership was still in town — that a letter signed by more than a dozen of the heavyweights of the Olympic sphere began circulating expressing their “disagreement” with Vizer’s remarks and their “strong support” for the IOC, for Bach and Bach’s Agenda 2020 reform plan.

On Tuesday, in an interview broadcast on SportAccord’s TV network partner, Euronews, Vizer said of the Olympic establishment, “We don’t need cardinals of sport. We don’t need popes.”

The 28-member Assn. of Summer Olympic international Federations, minus judo, of which Vizer is the president, voted Wednesday to suspend relations with SportAccord pending review.

Later in the day, ASOIF reviewed a formula under which the 28 entities would split up $550 million in revenues from the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Games.

The track and field and shooting federations, meanwhile, pulled straight out of SportAccord.

Lamine Diack, the longtime president of the IAAF, the international track and field federation, told Associated Press Tuesday that Vizer evoked “a chief or dictator coming from nowhere.”

On Thursday, Vizer, asked about Diack, said, “I want to make just one comment on this subject. I dedicate and I sacrifice my family for the sport,” adding, “In my eyes, he’s a person who sacrifices the sport for his family. No other comment.”

The reference was apparently to Diack’s son, Papa Massata Diack, who left his role as an IAAF marketing consultant in December pending an investigation into ethics allegations.

The winter Olympic sports association, which goes by the acronym AIOWF, called this week for “constructive dialogue.” A group called ARISF, which represents 35 non-Olympic sports, did the same -- “constructive dialogue.”

In private, there was considerable talk that Vizer’s comments might just merit some constructive dialogue.

In public, of course, there was consistent talk from the Summer Games sports federations that what Vizer had said was too much — way too much — for the diplomacy-heavy Olympic sphere.

Who, after all, invites a guest to their house — as Bach was such a guest at the SportAccord convention — and then scolds him so?

Vizer said he had repeatedly sent Bach letters asking for discussion but had been consistently been rebuffed. The IOC executive board opted not to come to SportAccord, meanwhile, which it had every year since 2003; the IOC told the two candidate cities for the 2022 Winter Games not to make presentations at SportAccord, even though bid-city presentations have been a SportAccord tradition.

Who, Vizer suggested, was snubbing who?

The IOC president, to his enormous credit, handled Vizer’s speech Monday with great grace, calling it when it was his turn at the lectern a “friendly welcome.”

Bach also drew an unmistakeable bright line:

“And when you say that the IOC and SportAccord have to cooperate in order to have a new model for the Olympic Games, for the organization and for the generation and distribution of the money, then I have to say very clearly, ‘No.’ “

Bach also said, “We have to avoid working in a parallel way that if somebody starts something and the next one is coming and saying, ‘Oh, I could do something in this respect.’ In this way, we are wasting time, we are wasting human resources, we are losing efficiency and in the end, and this is the worst of all, we are losing credibility.

‘And what we need for for our sports, if we want to promote our values, if we want to be a respected part of society, if we want to grow our sport, if we want to attract our young people, if we want to show to the world that sport has values and can do something for society, if we want to do all this, if we want then there to achieve our mission of organizing sport and to put at the same time sport at the service of society, then what we need altogether is credibility.

“And this credibility we can only achieve if we have some unity in all our diversity.”

At the ASOIF assembly Wednesday, the organization’s chief, International Tennis Federation president Francesco Ricci Bitti, had said that it was essential first to agree — only then could there be unity.

On Thursday, Vizer said, "I don’t think I have to restore something. The world of sport has to restore something, not me,” emphasizing that SportAccord would remain “the house and the partner of the international federations — those which want to stay, understand our vision, our activities, our hopes, they are welcome.

“We don’t oblige people, we don’t oblige organizations, we are open, we are welcome.”

It could be little surprise that the Summer Games federations rallied around the IOC and Bach.

“In the Summer Olympics, if there are 28 international federations from which more or less four or five are not dependent from the IOC, from the Olympic dividends, they could express their voice. That’s one thing,” Vizer said.

“But don’t forget that 24 or 25, I can not tell you exactly, international federations, Olympic Summer federations, depend totally on the IOC and IOC dividends. The area how to manipulate these federations I don’t have to explain to you.

“Everybody has to understand that sport can not exist only every four years. Sport has to exist daily, weekly, monthly, yearly. Sport — it’s a chance for millions, for hundreds of millions, of people. Sport — it’s a chance for discipline, for integration into society, for a better life.

“Don’t,” he said, offering up one final hit at the IOC as the news conference closed, ”take that for millions of people — this hope, this chance — for ego, for ambition. For billions that stay in the bank. And millions of athletes are suffering. For ego, power and control of the world of sport.

“Nobody has this right, ever.”

Game of Thrones, Olympic style

SOCHI, Russia — Lost for almost everyone in the provocative speech that SportAccord president Marius Vizer delivered here earlier this week was a Latin phrase at the very end, one that — now that the Assn. of Summer Olympic International Federations predictably rallied on Wednesday around the International Olympic Committee — sums up the contentious state of world sport politics. Fine primo tempo, Vizer said in closing his remarks Monday: “the end of the first season,” or, better, the end of the first chapter. If this were television drama, the second, or even the third, will surely make for even better stuff.

This was Vizer Wednesday morning, before the ASOIF meeting got underway: “I am ready to fight until the end. I have nothing to lose.”

The American television show “Game of Thrones,” which has resumed its on-air run, has nothing on what is going down this week in Sochi — and what promises to be forthcoming. Because Vizer believes in both words and, better, action. So, too, IOC president Thomas Bach.

What we have here are two strong personalities. Both are very, very smart and, as well, exceptionally strong-willed.

Bach’s background, remember, is in fencing.

Vizer is in judo. Moves and counter-moves.

The Putin factor

The first person to call Bach moments after he was elected IOC president in September, 2013, in Buenos Aires? Vladimir Putin. What country is now a strong supporter of SportAccord? Russia. Moreover, who came here at the start of SportAccord and exchanged toasts with Vizer? Putin.

The IOC put out a news release here from Sochi noting that Bach and Putin on Monday held an hour-long meeting celebrating the "legacy" of the 2014 Sochi Games.

For those skeptics who would focus only on the $51 billion figures associated with Sochi 2014, the IOC noted, apparently via Putin:

"This winter the local authorities say that all the hotels in the mountain cluster were fully booked from the beginning of November until mid-January. Traffic-calming measures even had to be put in place to cope with the numbers. Summer bookings for the hotels in the coastal cluster are said to be equally as successful."

The IOC release also said that Putin praised the “excellent relations” with the IOC president as “leader of the Olympic Movement.”

Back to you, Mr. Vizer, and this photo from SportAccord:

And, for good measure, these words from a SportAccord release:

"Congratulating Marius L. Vizer upon his re-election as SportAccord President, Mr. Putin said, 'Russia has worked very well with SportAccord and we are happy that the election has taken place in our sports capital. Sochi has given us the platform to organize big events and exhibitions. I hope that you will have a chance to enjoy all that is on offer.' "

And that's not all:

“Let me emphasize," Putin said, "that the support of SportAccord and IOC means a lot to us. We will continue to work together and promote peace and sport. I am convinced that the sports movement should be united and not divided by contradictions.”

ASOIF meeting

ASOIF represents the 28 sports on the Summer Games program. This is where things stood after Wednesday's meeting, and going forward:

Vizer is also president of the International Judo Federation. In front of all of his Olympic sport colleagues, he offered an apology for the speech Monday in which he, among other things, described the IOC system as “expired, outdated, wrong, unfair and not at all transparent.”

Vizer said Wednesday, “I regret to create inconvenience … regarding to my way and moment to choose this opportunity. But regarding the content, I expressed my voice and that is my opinion. For the rest, I am sorry. But I think everybody in the world of sport is free to express the opinion, to have vision, to have attitude. That is the world of sport.”

The ASOIF assembly on Wednesday, by a show of hands, ratified the statement adopted Tuesday by its council — suspending relations with SportAccord pending further review.

Twenty-seven of the 28 summer sports signed the petition. ASOIF chief Franceso Ricci Bitti, who is president of the International Tennis Federation, said it was super-easy to imagine which was the hold-out. Moves and counter-moves.

Despite the suspension, Ricci Bitti said, the door was still open for reconciliation.

This poses the question:

Really?

IOC system: how the millions go to sports

Putting a different spin than the one offered by Vizer on the IOC: it is for sure a traditional, indeed conservative, system. It works best when the president is firmly in control — a lesson the former president, Jacques Rogge, learned to his dismay after an exercise in “democracy” at the session in Mexico City in 2002.

That 2002 session was a watershed for Rogge — it marked the end of his honeymoon. He had been elected in Moscow the year before.

Perhaps this Sochi SportAccord convention will, in time, come to be seen as the end of Bach’s honeymoon as well.

It was altogether predictable that the summer sports would rally, and fiercely, around Bach and the IOC. They live in — if you will — a closed system, many hugely dependent on the IOC for financial and creative survival.

These distributions largely tell the story:

After the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the summer sports got $296 million to split up; after London 2012, $515 million, thanks to enhanced broadcast revenues; projected revenues to Rio 2016 are $550 million.

Track and field got $29 million in 2008; $45.2 million in 2012; and is projected to get $40 million in 2016. (The IAAF, incidentally, is working, and hard, for that $5 million back.)

It was the IAAF that bolted SportAccord first, with its president, Lamine Diack, on Tuesday declaring, “What was said by Mr. Vizer was unacceptable.”

Swimming got $14.3 million in 2008; $25 million in 2012; and is due to get $32 million in 2016.

FINA president Julio Cesar Maglione on Tuesday, to Associated Press: “The international federations are independent and they make their own job.”

Track and field and swimming (along with gymnastics) are what are called group A federations.

Even smaller federations can hardly say no to the IOC. Basketball is in B; it got $14.3 million in 2008, $25 million in 2012 and stands to get $25 million in 2016. Rowing is in C; it got $9.6 million in 2008, $17.7 million in 2012 and is due for the same, $17.7 million in 2016. Table tennis is in D; it got $8 million in 2008, $15.3 million in 2012 and stands to take in $17.3 million in 2016.

Ricci Bitti could hardly have been more clear in explaining, ostensibly for the benefit of all involved but really for Vizer, there in the audience, how things work.

“We believe the IOC is not a perfect organization but we can try to improve from the inside,” he said, and he hardly needed to add that for those in the bubble it has never been so financially secure.

And, a few moments later, specifically regarding “our relation with the IOC”:

“Our vision, the vision of the majority … is we can change if possible from inside our world in which we work, which we spend, because [we are] a major stakeholder of the IOC. ASOIF is a major stakeholder of the IOC, together with the [national Olympic committees]. We believe the IOC is a cornerstone machine with very important tools in the world of sport.

“It is a waste of time to make a war, in our opinion, from outside or to try to destabilize the system as your position unfortunately as expressed on Monday.”

A matter of perspectives?

Here is the thing about making "a war," though.

One man’s terrorist is, as the saying goes, another man’s freedom fighter.

There were many in the audience — and, indeed, around the world — who know in their hearts that there was more than just a little truth in what Vizer had to say Monday. As with many things, is it a matter less of what he said than when and how he said it?

“He has a lot of sympathy from a lot of people,” said the president of one Summer Games sport, referring to Vizer, asking not to be identified.

“This was not the right occasion,” the president of another Summer Games sport said, also asking to remain anonymous. “On the right occasion, Thomas will listen.”

There are 28 Summer Games sports and seven Winter. There are more than 100 international sports federations in SportAccord. What about the others not on the Olympic program? What about their financial considerations? Late Wednesday, ARISF, a group that represents 35 non-Olympic sports -- everything from baseball/softball to sport climbing to cricket -- issued a statement calling for "continued constructive dialogue between the IOC and SportAccord."

The fact that there was a break in high-level Olympic politics made news — fodder for sports-talk shows and the like — back home in the States. This is noteworthy. An Olympic story making general-news headlines in an off-year? For all the wrong reasons? Now the altogether foreseeable reaction of the federations rallying around Bach is for sure going to feed into the perception, right or wrong, that the federations (read: IOC members for those who make no distinction) are limousine-riding fat cats who care only perpetuating their own secretive, overblown caste.

You don’t think the opponents of the Boston 2024 campaign are going to seize on this sort of thing as evidence of how the IOC protects its own? Don’t be naive.

In his remarks Monday, Vizer said that in more than 100 countries, sport is “in misery,” with athletes “lacking the necessary basic elements — food, medication, equipment, preparation facilities and possibility to participate to competitions.”

This is, undeniably, true, everywhere in our world, from Laos — where this space has seen a would-be marathon runner running on shoes four years old — to the United States, where the struggle can prove ongoing to find a sponsor to fund the Olympic dream.

Financially speaking, the IOC is essentially a pass-through. For every dollar it takes in, roughly 90 cents go back out. Even so, it is nonetheless incredibly difficult to explain to ordinary folks how an organization that took in — according to tax filings — $5.37 billion for the years 2009-12 can not afford to find enough money to pay for a pair of decent running shoes.

Sometimes it takes someone to speak out to effect change.

Whether or not Vizer — and SportAccord — are appropriate vehicles for such change are, of course, matters for legitimate debate.

In the meantime, sometimes the IOC responds to calls for change. In March, it announced proposed tweaks to Rules 50 and 40, which would relax advertising rules during the Games — a victory for U.S. athletes who were campaigning for such reform.

It was in that same announcement that Bach disclosed the IOC executive board, which for a dozen years has held its spring meeting in line with SportAccord, would not be making the trip this year to Sochi.

Vizer said Wednesday he wrote a long letter to Bach last July. He got nowhere.

So now we are somewhere.

Where depends on your point of view.

The literalist would say, Sochi. Two more days of SportAccord 2015. What could possibly come next?!

The therapist would ask, have we made progress? “We have a conflict between all sport family,” ASOIF vice president Hassan Moustafa, the International Handball Federation chief, said Wednesday from the dais. “How we can solve this problem? We have to sit and we have to discuss.”

The script writer would say, and back to Latin of course: primo enim in capite duo — at the start of chapter two.

The start of an Olympic cold war?

SOCHI, Russia — There is a familiar saying in Olympic circles about SportAccord. It goes like this: SportAccord is the umbrella organization for the international sports federations. Now the key question: is it raining?

The query took on immediate and profound urgency Monday after Marius Vizer, the SportAccord president, launched a public attack on the International Olympic Committee the likes of which has not been seen within the so-called “Olympic family” in recent memory.

With IOC president Thomas Bach listening, Vizer said the “IOC system is expired, outdated, wrong, unfair and not at all transparent,” adding, “The Olympic Games belong to all of us and we need real reforms.”

Bach thereafter took to the lectern and delivered a wry smile that thanked Vizer for his “friendly” welcome. Referring to the 40-point reform plan dubbed Agenda 2020 that the full IOC membership passed last December in Monaco — after an extensive review that from around the world drew thousands of comments and suggestions — Bach said, “Nobody who wanted to listen, nobody who wanted to hear, nobody who wanted to understand, nobody who wanted to have some sort of goodwill … could miss the decisions we were taking.”

This was all Monday morning. In the afternoon session, Lamine Diack, the president of the influential international track and field federation, announced that the IAAF was withdrawing from SportAccord, absolutely a “protest” against Vizer’s position, IAAF spokesman Nick Davies confirmed afterward. The international shooting federation, another Olympic entity, quickly followed suit.

By mid-afternoon, those two were among 16 international sports federations that had signed a letter expressing “disagreement” with Vizer’s remarks and expressing “strong support” for Bach and for Agenda 2020. Some or all of the others, it was said, needed board review to contemplate further action.

Vizer, who was re-elected here Monday to a full four-year term atop SportAccord, said at a news conference, “Everybody is free to withdraw, to do whatever they want. There are two ways in sport — to follow the fairness, the transparency, the unity, the criteria and the principles. Or to choose another home.”

Back in the former USSR, was Monday the start of a cold war in Olympic sport?

Did it herald a split between the federations — those within the Olympic program and those on the outside?

Was it the beginning of the end for SportAccord? Or a distinct new beginning for the organization, which has branded itself as “the world sport & business summit 2015,” with perhaps the only leader in world sport who would dare to speak truth to the ultimate Olympic power?

Who else but Vizer, after all, would say this, as he did:

“In over 100 countries of the world, sport is in misery. Athletes are lacking the necessary basic elements — food, medication, equipment, preparation facilities and possibility to participate to competitions. One of the great questions of sport today is how much should we continue to invest in buildings and infrastructure and how much in people?!

“Furthermore: why invest hundreds of millions of dollars in opening and closing ceremonies, while millions of athletes live in hunger and they don’t stand a chance in sport due to the lack of proper conditions? If indeed the ‘IOC distributes 3.25 million dollars a day, every day of the year, for the development of sport worldwide,’ why do millions of athletes suffer and cannot enjoy or reach performances in sport?

“Together, SportAccord and [the] IOC must find a solution to compensate national federations and athletes [for] their events. Today, the money invested in sport never reaches the athletes and their families. Sport Accord and the international federations are already providing prize money to their athletes in competition, in an effort to compensate for this.”

Vizer, who is also president of the judo federation and who has throughout his career maintained — for anyone who truly would listen — an athlete-first priority, also said that Agenda 2020 “hardly brings any real benefit to sport, to [the international federations] or athletes.”

And he asserted that the key piece of Agenda 2020, the launch of an Olympic television channel, was approved without so much as a business plan.

“Any business project in the world needs a business plan, investors, professional partners, break-even points, strategy, consultation with stakeholders — international federations and to generate a benefit for all stakeholders,” adding, “Only after the decision appears that a plan is in process.”

In the protocol-heavy, diplomacy-filled, nuanced world of the Olympic movement, was such straight talk appropriate? Welcome? Or tantamount to sacrilege?

Immediately after Vizer and Bach made their remarks, Sheikh Ahmad al-Fahad Al-Sabah — the hugely influential head of the 205-member Assn. of National Olympic Committees — joined Bach in the hallway outside the ballroom to extend support. So did other leading Olympic figures.

The sheikh and ANOC would later issue a statement in which the organization sought to “stress its full commitment to Olympic Agenda 2020 and its implementation,” adding, “Under Under President Bach’s leadership we look forward to moving towards a more united and brighter future.”

Was the issue Monday not just what Vizer said but that he had not fully consulted his constituents before he spoke? Had he briefed them? Did they have ample warning what was coming?

One insider, asking not to be identified, said, “The headline is: this is the beginning of the end,” meaning for Vizer.

Another: “In a family, if you have a conflict, you don’t go out and express it in front of everybody.”

A third: “it’s a humiliation for the IOC president. He,” meaning Vizer, “certainly went too far. If you have a different opinion, find a private occasion to discuss it. Now we have to wait and see the consequences.”

These sorts of remarks raise perhaps the ultimate question. If you challenge the IOC president, who in the Olympic sphere is likely to win that fight?

Which brings up another question: is the Romanian-born Marius Vizer — and if you know his life story, how he escaped Communism — afraid of any challenge?

Vizer, in an interview, said of his his remarks, “I work for the sport voluntarily, free of charge, all my life, and somebody who is paid, working in the sport and for the sport, [has] to reply to me, no?”

The IOC recently announced that Bach will receive an annual 225,000 euro ($242,000) annual “indemnity policy” covering reimbursements.

“And,” Vizer said, “to reality, to my proposals and my questions.”

These include various multi-sport proposals such as beach, mind, combat and other games. A world championships that would include all 90-plus federations — a plank on which Vizer ran for SportAccord president two years ago — is one of those ideas that now, many agree, perhaps seems better suited to theory than the real world.

“Mr. President,” Vizer said, “please stop blocking the SportAccord strategy in its mission to identify and organize conventions and multi-sport games.”

It has been an IOC tradition in recent years to hold its executive board meetings in the spring at SportAccord. Not this year — the IOC saying it was a way to save money. Bach showed up in Sochi. But it was abundantly clear that the absence of the executive board was a play aimed at minimizing the import of the event, and by implication Vizer.

For that matter, in the appropriate years, SportAccord has also served as a site for IOC bid city presentations. This is a bid year, for the 2022 Winter Games. But, again, there are no bid-city presentations here. Same deal — no bid-city presentations mean, in theory, a lesser event.

For his part, Bach said from the lectern, the TV channel is “open to everybody,” a “worldwide presence” designed to grow sport and “promote the values we all share.”

The IOC has, he said, distributed more than $400 million over four years to “the national level,” emphasizing, “There in the end they and their athletes, they are benefitting.”

He also said, “We should always consider that sport at the end is about results. It’s in the sport competition but it’s also in the work we are doing.

“This is not about plans and projects. It’s about results and actions. When taking these actions, we have to be efficient. We have to avoid that we are working in a parallel way. If somebody starts something, we also start something in this respect. In this way we are wasting time, we are wasting human resources, we are losing efficiency and, in the end, and this is worst of all, we are losing credibility.

“What we all need for sport, if we want to promote our values, if we want to be a respected part of society, if we want to grow our sport, if we want to attract young people … if we want to do all this, if we want then to achieve our mission of organizing sport and at the same time put sport into the service of society, then what we need altogether is credibility. This credibility we can only achieve if we have unity in our diversity.”

He said, “I invite you to bring your diversity to the table … but then bring unity in our concerted effort,” adding to applause, “Thank you very much.”

There was one last little twist on the entire day’s events.

At the end of his news conference, Vizer had this to offer, unprompted: “Be happy.”

$50 million profit on $51 billion is 0.098 percent

With so many positive stories to tell, it can be so mystifying to read what the International Olympic Committee considers the most important bits of its news in its releases. The IOC likes to say that athletes are at the core of everything it does. On Thursday, at a meeting of its policy-making executive board, it modified provisions together known as Rules 40 and 50 so that athletes can sport “generic” or “non-Olympic advertising” during the Games. If ultimately approved by the full IOC, this will likely amount to a major step forward for athletes, especially in track and field, who had protested over prior restrictions that had stopped them from mentioning their sponsors.

Instead of trumpeting this news in its release, what did the IOC lead off with?

This:

The Sochi 2014 Games made an operating profit of $50 million.

In its release, the IOC for sure did not mention that the $50 million figure is way below the $261 million surplus reported last June by the Russian organizers.

That drop can at least in part be explained by the ruble’s drop in value against the dollar.

Just a little math: $50 million is about a fifth as much as $261 million.

Just a little bit more math, and it’s only because the IOC brings this on itself: $50 million equals what percentage of $51 billion, the reported cost of staging the 2014 Winter Games?

That would be 0.098 percent.

This is the news the IOC seeks to spotlight for the world?

When it genuinely has good news about the athletes, its purported raison d’être?

Of course, there’s more. The IOC gets 20 percent of the $50 million surplus. Math: $10 million. It said it would transfer that $10 million to the Russian Olympic Committee for sports development, the newly approved Olympic Channel and an Olympic Museum in Russia.

Yay for Russia!

Imagine if the IOC gave the U.S. Olympic Committee $10 million just like that. How would that go over around the world?

But I digress.

In all, the IOC said, it contributed $833 million to the Sochi 2014 operating budget, which ultimately roughed out at a total of about $2 billion. This contribution marked an increase of $83 million over previous estimates.

The IOC then spent two full paragraphs agreeing that there remains a “misconception” around the costs of the Games — that is, what it costs to run them and all the stuff that gets built around them or because they came to town.

All recent editions of the Games have made an operating profit, it pointed out.

It also — correctly — noted that the operating budget of an Olympic Games, Summer or Winter, is privately funded, with a significant contribution from the IOC. For the Rio 2016 Games, that contribution will be on the order of $1.5 billion.

But then:

The “other part of the budget” is the “investment the host city authorities decide to make,” the IOC said.

This is where the IOC gets it totally, fundamentally wrong.

It’s not the “other part of the budget,” and this is why the IOC is saddled with the perception that Sochi cost $51 billion.

This perception is the thing that has dragged at the 2022 Winter Games race and is more or less the first thing almost anyone anywhere thinks about when they think about Sochi. Or, pretty much, the Games in general -- whoa, the Olympics are cool but, holy smokes, they are really, really expensive!

Here is the thing:

The infrastructure cost is totally, fundamentally separate.

It’s why for decades cities and countries all over the world have sought the Olympic Games — as a catalyst to get public policy works done in the hard-deadline of seven years, the date from which the IOC awards a Games to opening ceremony, instead of 20 or 30, which is what it would otherwise take if roads, bridges, sewage pipes, metro lines, airports and whatever else could even get done in the first instance.

For years and years, however, the IOC has allowed the infrastructure budget misconception to hang around.

The IOC says it’s too difficult to explain otherwise.

It’s not.

There are two distinct budgets. One is the operating budget. The other relates to the infrastructure numbers.

Is that difficult?

No.

But even in Thursday's official IOC release, the IOC gets it wrong. Little wonder why when the IOC complains that Sochi didn’t really cost $51 billion, no one wants to hear it. Because it’s just “the other part of the budget.”

There’s so much more to chew on in this IOC release — for instance, the IOC executive board opting not to go in April to the SportAccord convention in Sochi, a clear slap at Marius Vizer, the key figure in that organization, and for what purpose?

The release ends, meanwhile, with a paragraph that aims to pay tribute to Mario Vazquez Raña, the longtime IOC member from Mexico who for more than 30 years also served as president of the Assn. of National Olympic Committees. He died earlier this month. The executive board, the release said, ended its meeting with a minute of silence in his memory.

Nowhere in that paragraph does it also mention that Vazquez Raña also served on that very same IOC executive board for a dozen years.

Back to the real lead — as we would say in journalism terms — of the day, and an observation.

The Olympic movement genuinely does good work all over this world. Much of it is not front-page stuff nor perhaps should it be. Much is one-to-one change. Plenty is the stuff of inspiration and dreams.

At the same time, the IOC itself has a huge image problem. Thursday's release from the executive board meeting in Rio de Janeiro is emblematic of this problem.

The IOC says it wants to be transparent and accountable. It wants to reach out to young people so they can understand what it is and what it does.

Really?

Here is a challenge. Read these paragraphs from the release and — no fair if you have had years of experience in the Olympic scene — decipher them.

“Proposed advertising changes

“The EB agreed to two proposals regarding changes to Rule 40 and Rule 50 of the Olympic Charter, both of which will be presented to the next IOC Session this July in Kuala Lumpur for final approval.

“In regard to the application of Rule 40, the IOC would, following Session approval, allow generic (non-Olympic) advertising during the period of the Games. The change to Rule 50 would increase the maximum size of a manufacturer’s identification while respecting the clean field of play to prevent conspicuous advertising.”

Seriously, there has to be a better way. It's athletes first. At least if the IOC genuinely means it: explain what Rules 40 and 50 say, in plain English, and what these changes — assuming a forthcoming OK in Kuala Lumpur — would mean for the athletes. It’s not difficult.

And put all of that first, ahead of stuff that translates to 0.098 percent. That should not be difficult to figure out, either.

See that Almaty ski jump: why no visits?

The International Olympic Committee evaluation commission visit to Almaty that just wrapped up underscores powerfully the problem with the one element that is sorrowfully missing from the new Agenda 2020 reforms. If all 100-plus IOC members could actually visit Almaty, or for that matter Beijing, this shambles of a 2022 race might be totally different.

Just outside the hotel where the evaluation commission members stayed these past few days — literally, steps — sits the ski jump that is the symbolic heart and soul of the Almaty presentation. The rest of the bid is similarly compact.

If the members could take this all in their very own eyes but more, feel what is about in Almaty, feel the emotion of the Kazakh people for the 2022 Games and for the movement, they would be impressed. Anyone would.

“Almaty has spectacular mountains, some very impressive venues and a real passion for winter sports,” the evaluation commission chairman, the IOC member Alexander Zhukov from Russia said in his closing news conference in Almaty. “I can say that our visit has confirmed that Almaty is capable of holding successful Games in 2022.

“We were impressed by what we have seen. Everything we have seen shows Almaty is a qualified candidate to host the Games. If Almaty wins the bid, the Games will help the city to reach its real potential.”

Plain talk: it is hugely unfortunate that the IOC has gone through a year-long review process and it is still stuck — without any meaningful public debate — in the same tired situation involving arguably the most important thing the members do, which is of course awarding the Games to a particular city.

Whichever city it turns out to be — the members cannot visit and see for themselves.

And why not?

Because of concerns they are going to be bribed?

That is on the cities, not the members.

Beyond which, the membership has changed considerably since the 1980s and 1990s. The IOC membership now is mostly full of technocrats who hardly need more air miles or more stays in nice hotels. These, now, are — mostly — women and men of the world.

It sends completely the wrong message to the entire world when the IOC can’t allow its members to visit bid cities. Indeed, it’s a loud statement that the members can’t be trusted.

A far better statement in an era of transparency and better governance — which the IOC in the Agenda 2020 reforms purportedly says it is striving for — is to show off its members as models of 21st-century global citizens.

Seriously.

Does that come with some risk? For sure.

Does everything in life come with some risk? For sure.

Does the system as it is now come with some risk? Absolutely. There is literally nothing in the way it is now that would prevent some ambitious city from doing something to bend the rules.

Be proactive. Show the members off. If the IOC wants to reverse its often-poor public image, in which the members are stereotypically depicted as nothing more than fat cats swilling champagne and caviar, better to get them out there and let the world see the stereotype is wrong.

What’s to hide?

It’s hardly a bother to arrange trips in groups of 15 or 20. Now that the IOC is awash in revenues, let the IOC pay.

The way the system works now simply cannot be said — in any way, shape or form — to be best practices.

Not when there are billions of dollars at issue.

See Sochi — where there was literally nothing on the ground when the IOC voted for it in 2007 — and the $51 billion hangover.

More — what is missing when the members can’t go is the real measure of a place.

The evaluation commission, now that it has visited Almaty, will visit Beijing in March. It will produce a report, which all the members will get, and odds are most will never read. Then the two cities will make a presentation for the full membership in June at IOC headquarters in Switzerland, and one more immediately before the vote July 31 in Kuala Lumpur.

It’s one thing to read in the report that it is two or three hours from Beijing to the mountains. It’s quite another to sit in the bus and feel that kind of time drag by.

It’s one thing to read in the report that there is no snow in the mountains outside Beijing. It’s another to go to those mountains and walk around them and see there is, really, no snow and wonder to yourself about the environmental implications — particularly in China — of having to make snow.

Or to tour Almaty — which had real snow in abundance the week of the evaluation commission and always has snow because it always snows there in the winter — and wonder whether the Agenda 2020 reforms, which say the movement is trying to leave a gentler footprint, are for real.

If the members, in this time of global uncertainty, ultimately opt that their friends in the Chinese government — whom they trusted in 2001 for the 2008 Summer Games — are going to get their votes just seven years later for the Winter project, that is of course the members’ choice.

There is zero question — literally, zero — that Beijing would organize the Games reliably.

At the same time, is that what the movement needs for 2022?

Because when you hear what the two sides are offering, it’s clear there is a difference, and this is what the members could have heard if only they had been in Almaty.

Beijing, at least right now, is a spreadsheet. Almaty is a poem.

Almaty has emerged as the first bid in a long time — a very, very long time — that actually needs the Games. Russia did not need the Games. London did not need the Games. Rio did not. Nor did Pyeongchang.

You hear it and feel it in this bid from a very young country, one that is just 24 years old: Almaty needs the Games. The people there are bidding for their very lives, and this is why the federal authorities there can seem at times so uncertain. It’s all new.

The people get it, though — an IOC commissioned survey finding at least 75 percent support.

You hear it, too, in the voice of the vice mayor, Zauresh Amanzholova, an executive board member of the bid, in a vision piece — with the theme “Keeping it Real” — that she wrote recently:

“In 1991, Kazakhstan woke up as an entirely new nation. Imagine the impact that reality had on our sporting infrastructure, from top to bottom, from grassroots to elite. We realized that we had to start from scratch to rebuild sport in Kazakhstan. Almaty 2022 is part of that plan,” a wide-ranging national  development strategy that stretches to 2050.

She also wrote:

“We also understand that sport improves lives at every level of society. That is why we hosted the Asian Winter Games in 2011, why we are hosting the Winter [University Games] in 2017, and it is why we are bidding again, for the Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games.

“Our bid’s vision also reinforces the true potential of an Olympic legacy – using it where it is needed most. As a new nation, Kazakhstan needs the power of the Winter Games to serve as a continuing catalyst for progress. Moreover, given our location sitting at the heart of Central Asia, the potential of an Almaty 2022 Olympic legacy becomes even more powerful and enduring for millions of people.

“The culture of Kazakhstan is a mosaic that not only reflects thousands of years of human interaction, but thousands of years of integrating different ideas and ways of life. This diversity is the source of our strength and a true example of Olympism at its core.

“This is the new face of Kazakhstan that we want to share with the world, for the first time as an Olympic host city.”

Explain, please, why the members can’t see, and experience, that up-close and in-person.

Mario Vazquez Raña dies: the passing of an era

Mario Vazquez Raña of Mexico died Sunday. He was 82. With him goes an era. Don Mario was indisputably the most important man in the Olympic movement in the entire western hemisphere. His ways may have been old-fashioned but his love for the movement and the so-called “Olympic family” were unquestioned. His counsel served International Olympic Committee presidents Juan Antonio Samaranch and Jacques Rogge. His jet, too.

Unclear now is who is positioned to take Vazquez Raña’s place in the Americas, if anyone. The 2016 Summer Games are of course in Brazil. The United States is bidding for the 2024 Summer Games, with that election in 2017. The 2015 Pan American Games are in Canada.

There are four primary languages at issue — Spanish, English, Portuguese and French.

The central issue is that there is no one — no one— quite like Don Mario.

International Olympic Committee president Thomas Bach told Associated Press “we will always remember him as a great Olympic leader,” declaring the Olympic flag at IOC headquarters at the lakeshore Chateau de Vidy would be flown at half-mast in his honor.

"The Olympic family in Mexico and indeed the world are mourning this loss,” the president of the Mexican Olympic Committee, Carlos Padilla Becerra, said in a statement.

U.S. Olympic Committee chairman Larry Probst said he was “deeply saddened” to hear of Vazquez Raña’s passing. “Mario,” he said, “served the Olympic movement for the majority of his adult life, and advanced Olympic sport in the western hemisphere like few before him.”

“Mario was a legendary leader, a dear friend and an esteemed colleague,” added Marcel Aubut, president of the Canadian Olympic Committee.

Vazquez Raña was much-misunderstood by many.

In part, that is because he preferred to operate almost exclusively in Spanish. In part, that is because he was an operator, in every sense of the word. In part, it is because — though he was a media magnate and himself interviewed hundreds if not thousands of world leaders, dignitaries and celebrities, enough to fill a nine-volume set of hardbound books and more — he permitted only a handful of English-speaking reporters, if that many, into his inner circle.

When he was in Mexico City, that circle invariably met for lunch every day in his offices. This was where the matters of the world, the state, the Olympic movement, the Olympic family and, perhaps most important, family were discussed.

To Don Mario, if you were in his circle of trust, you were in.

Criticism was OK — it was a part of life, as long as it was fair, reasoned and straightforward. He knew and accepted criticism.

Indeed, he sometimes sought criticism. Only fools, he would say, did not want criticism. Nobody got along with just yes people.

Trust — now trust was a commodity to be earned, over time.

Don Mario had the trust of Samaranch, the IOC president from 1980-2001, and then Rogge, president from 2001-13.

Samaranch used to say that the harmony of the Olympic movement used to depend on three “pillars” — the IOC itself , the international federations and the national Olympic committees. But when Vazquez Raña took over the Assn. of National Olympic Committees in 1979, that third pillar was comparatively weak.

Under his leadership, it became a force. Him, too.

For years he oversaw the IOC’s Olympic Solidarity commission, which oversaw the disbursement of hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to developing nations in a bid to get promising athletes to the Games.

He served as ANOC head for 33 years.

“An anecdote may illustrate his love for sports,” said Eduardo Palomo, president of the El Salvador Olympic Committee.

Just two years ago, on a tour of four South American countries in six days to evaluate sites for the 2019 Pan Am Games, Palomo said, Vazquez Raña “shared his middle school years.” He told how when “during recess he went to his family’s store to work, his classmates made fun of him.

“Later, he hired them to work for him.”

The intensity of the four-countries-in-six-days trip, Palomo said, “left no room for mistakes or leisure.” Vazquez Raña was “always punctual, always focused on demanding excellence for the Games in the same proportion he was giving of himself.”

Two and a half years ago, the winds of change finally caught up with Don Mario. He gave up control of ANOC; it is now headed by Sheikh Ahmad al-Fahad al-Sabah of Kuwait, who is arguably now the consummate IOC insider.

Vazquez Raña, meanwhile, stayed on in the Olympic world as head of the Pan American Sports Organization.

Recently, he missed a PASO meeting in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico — a sign he truly was ailing.

Jimena Saldaña worked with Don Mario for — to be precise — 30 years and two months. She is now first vice-president of the Mexican Olympic Committee, secretary-general of PASO, a member of the executive committee of PASO and a member, too, of the IOC Solidarity Commission.

When Vazquez Raña could not go to Puerto Vallarta, she said, he “called me and said, how is everybody, are they happy with their accommodations, that kind of thing — the Olympic family, is the transportation doing fine, the little details.

“I don’t think that in his mind anything gave him such satisfaction as the Olympic movement.”

She had last seen him, along with her husband, on Friday.

“He woke up and greeted me. We shook hands, he smiled. We said it was such a beautiful day, said we were happy he could look out on such a beautiful garden. We asked how he was doing. He said, ’So-so.’

“I kissed him and said, ‘See you tomorrow.’ He said, ‘Come back tomorrow.’ ”

“I was happy I could see him again.”

Don Mario died at 1 p.m. Sunday.

The legacy of China's He Zhenliang

The Olympic movement is all about changing the world. Very few people actually effect such change. Everything you see now that reflects China the important player on the world sports stage — all of that is, in some piece big or small, the work of He Zhenliang, a former International Olympic Committee vice president who died Sunday at age 85. Mr. He, as it seemed everyone in Olympic circles called him, was a remarkable man. He was not only the bridgehead, as David Miller pointed out Monday in the Olympic newsletter Sport Intern, but then the bridge between China and the world outside. There have been tributes, and appropriately, from around the world. Yet those tributes have missed, or glossed over, the tribulations and complexities that helped shape Mr. He.

And without those it is impossible to fully appreciate not only his story but China’s ongoing story in the Olympic movement and our world, which is entirely appropriate as the Beijing bid committee prepares Tuesday to lodge its 2022 Winter Games file with the IOC.

There are only two 2022 candidates: Beijing and Almaty, Kazakhstan. If Beijing wins, it would be the first city to stage both the Summer and Winter Games.

Mr. He would doubtlessly find that amazing.

To be honest, everyone ought to find that amazing.

The modern Olympic movement has been around since 1894. The People’s Republic of China, since 1949. The team that we call China — as a point of contrast to the team from “Chinese Taipei,” and by reference this is not intended to be a political discourse — has been back in the Summer Games only since 1984, the Winter Games since 1980.

The IOC president, Thomas Bach, said in a statement issued Monday, “Mr. He was a man of culture and art. He was a true advocate of the social values of sport and of our movement and I would like to pay tribute to the passion and energy he deployed over the years to fulfill his mission as an IOC member in China. He also helped our movement better understand his country, its people and outstanding culture. The Olympic movement has lost one of its most fervent ambassadors.

“For me personally, he showed me true friendship and gave me invaluable advice from very early days as an IOC member. I will always remember this with great gratitude.”

Wei Jizhong, a former secretary general of the Chinese Olympic Committee, told China Daily, “China’s current major-member status in the IOC is inseparable from He’s hard work for decades. His strong enthusiasm and responsibility to China’s sports development as well as improvement of its international image truly impressed me.”

Added Yang Yang, the short-track speed skating star who is now an IOC member, “His fruitful work in the IOC earned a positive impression from the world about Chinese sports, which inspired me and guided me to continue my work as a sports official.”

There will doubtlessly be smiles for the camera Tuesday at the Chateau de Vidy, the IOC headquarters in Lausanne, Switzerland.

That’s appropriate.

Mr. He knew great happiness on the Olympic stage. He played a key role in Beijing's win — at the IOC session in Moscow — for the 2008 Summer Games.

He knew disappointment as well. In 1993 — at the IOC session in Monaco — Sydney defeated Beijing for the 2000 Games, literally by a couple votes. Wei said Mr. He wept privately.

Just imagine, though, and it is difficult now, all these years later, having seen the bang of the 2,008 drums in the 2008 opening ceremony, to have seen Michael Phelps go 8-for-8 in the pool at the Water Cube, to have seen Usain Bolt set world records on the track at the Bird’s Nest — imagine what must have been going through Mr. He’s mind.

Mr. He had been exiled to the Chinese countryside during the Cultural Revolution. He literally did hard labor.

During those years, which saw ping-pong diplomacy, the authorities would sometimes call him in from the countryside. Why? Because he spoke French and English, and knew not just how to translate but, even more important, how to conduct himself with the people from overseas. When the foreigners would leave, Mr. He was sent back to the countryside, there to await a next round of ping-pong and artful finesse.

Mr. He had come from Shanghai, and the French Concession there. He earned a degree from Aurora University in Shanghai in electric mechanics in 1950, the year after the revolution. In 1952, he was part of the formal mainland Chinese delegation to the Helsinki Summer Games; to reiterate, there would not be another team from “China” at the Summer Olympics until Los Angeles in 1984.

In the mid-1950s, Mr. He was an international communications official in what was then the National Sports Commission. In the 1960s, he was a senior official for organizations such as the Chinese gymnastics and table tennis federations.

Then, though, came the Cultural Revolution.

“Along with his colleagues [at the sports commission], he was doing hard labor,” said Susan Brownell, a professor at the University of Missouri at St. Louis who is not only an authority on China and the Olympics but translated into English the story of Mr. He’s life, “He Zheliang and China’s Olympic Dream.”

The book is written by Mr. He’s wife, Liang Lijuan, and Brownell said of the years when Mr. He was in exile, “He would see his wife and children for a short time and then disappear again,” adding, “His partnership with his wife is inspiring, just a really great story of loyalty.”

In 1979, Mr. He was made deputy secretary general of the Chinese Olympic committee; in 1982, its secretary general.

That, though, was not his real break.

That came in 1981, when then-IOC president Juan Antonio Samaranch worked it so that Mr. He became an IOC member.

This had two results.

One, it helped to significantly advance China’s cause within the IOC. Three years later, in Los Angeles, there was China back at the Summer Games. The next few bid cycles would see it emerging as a serious contender, and then a winner, for the Summer Games — with the bang of those 2,008 drums, it has been said, perhaps signaling the onset of the Chinese century.

Two, Mr. He’s IOC membership gave him a standing within China that would help him navigate any number of shifting domestic political currents. In 1981, Mr. He was still in his early 50s; he would be an IOC member until 2010, which Samaranch and others in the IOC hierarchy knew full well.

Mr. He would serve 16 years on the IOC’s policy-making executive board, four as a vice president.

Even as China increasingly engages with the world, there remains — and sometimes at the highest levels of government — a lingering xenophobia, or as Brownell put it, “a distrust of people seen to be too internationalized, or not Chinese enough.”

She said, “It was really interesting to watch him move among IOC members. The first time I had dinner with him, in 2000, I was watching him converse in French with his IOC colleagues, managing conversation and pouring out wine, and I was thinking I had never seen a mainland Chinese do that.

"He could also manage western facial expressions. I had never met anybody like that — never met anybody who could move in both worlds.”

The last time she had dinner with Mr. He and Ms. Liang was in 2012. “After that time,” Brownell said, “I knew I would never see him again. Sure enough, that was the last time.”

She said, giving voice to an emotion felt by many within the Olympic movement, “I really admired him. He was a really inspiring and admirable person,” a man whose work and legacy will live on, in China and well beyond — perhaps to 2022, perhaps far, far longer.

Agenda 2020 change: for real, or not so much?

MONACO — From the department of the obvious: no one spends $601 million over seven years unless they’re serious. The International Olympic Committee is dead-bang serious about the digital television channel its members approved Monday as part of president Thomas Bach’s 40-part “Agenda 2020” plan. As for the other 39 components, which call for shifts in the bid process and the Olympic program? History and common sense teach that expectations ought to be tempered.

The IOC is now 120 years old. For all the talk — big talk among some here in Monaco — about how Agenda 2020 is revolutionary or radical, the blunt reality is that the IOC has talked this sort of talk many, many times before.

The issue now is whether it’s going to walk the walk.

To be clear:

Bach deserves significant credit for putting the IOC to and through a year of asking — with the help of considerable number of world-class advisers — what it is and what it wants to be in these early years of the 21st century.

The IOC absolutely, positively needs to innovate.

Just as an example of the kind of comparison that’s readily out there, one that gets almost no attention in the mainstream media but that draws intense focus within the Olympic sphere because the numbers show so plainly what’s what:

The 2014 Winter Games in Sochi: 88 nations (and one independent Olympic participant), about 2,850 athletes. Cost: widely believed to be $51 billion.

The 2014 Asian Beach Games, just a few weeks ago in Phuket, Thailand: 43 of the 45 national Olympic committees showed up (only North Korea and Saudi Arabia did not), about 2,300 athletes. The entire thing — test event, training, competition, demolition — proved a temporary put-up and take-down that required all of one month. Cost: not anywhere in a galaxy near $51 billion.

A consequence, perhaps intended, because sports politics is not a game for the naive, is that this year bought Bach buy-in from virtually every corner of the Olympic firmament — the dozens of international federations, all 205 national Olympic committees, the IOC athletes’ commission and more.

This stakeholder consensus enabled Bach to run the table Monday — to see Agenda 2020 go a perfect 40-for-40, with the IOC members voting “unanimously” for each and then at the end for the entirety of the resolutions, there being zero no votes even though perhaps not all hands were raised at all times.

The only time the members were not in unanimity was mid-afternoon Monday, when maybe five or six said they might like to take a coffee break but Bach opted to push through.

The last time the IOC went through such a far-reaching institutional exercise was under duress, amid the late 1990s Salt Lake City corruption scandal, which saw 10 members resign or be expelled. That prompted the IOC to enact a 50-point reform plan.

It was all this that Bach assuredly had in mind when, at the opening of the 127th IOC session here in Monaco, he made a play on Shakespeare and Hamlet, saying the IOC had to change or be changed.

The TV channel marks such a change. That’s $601 million talking, and that is big money.

Everything else is incremental change, at best, until proven otherwise.

Because the IOC has been there, done that, many times before.

Consider:

“It would be very unfortunate, if the often exaggerated expenses incurred for the most recent Olympiads, a sizable part of which represented the construction of permanent buildings, which were moreover unnecessary — temporary structures would fully suffice, and the only consequence is to then encourage use of these permanent buildings by increasing the number of occasions to draw in the crowds — it would be very unfortunate if these expenses were to deter (small) countries from putting themselves forward to host the Olympic Games in the future.”

That is from Pierre de Coubertin, the French baron widely credited as the founder of the modern Olympic movement, and those are words he penned that were published in the Olympic Review magazine in April 1911.

Fast-forward to 2002 and 2003.

Under the direction of Jacques Rogge of Belgium, who had just taken over as president from Juan Antonio Samaranch of Spain, the IOC dialed up an in-depth report, what came to be called the “Olympic Games Study Commission.”

Under the direction of longtime Canadian member Dick Pound, a former vice president who himself had run for the presidency, losing out to Rogge, the panel — just like Agenda 2020 — solicited public input, taking in thousands of suggestions. More than half related to the Olympic program; others were directed to the format of the Games, the bid process, TV coverage, the extravagance of the opening and closing ceremonies and more.

The IOC, according to the report, produced for the IOC’s session in Prague in July 2003, sought “to ensure that the host cities and their residents are left with the most positive legacy of venues, infrastructure, expertise and experience.”

In all, the document contains 117 specific recommendations, each aimed at managing the “inherent size, complexity and cost” of the Games. The IOC adopted all 117.

The upshot:

Beijing 2008 ($40 billion, at least). Sochi (that $51 billion).

And the 2022 Winter Games bid race (numerous cities drop out, only Beijing and Almaty, Kazakhstan, still in and not clear Almaty will stay in).

Monday’s action includes a provision in which the IOC created an “invitation” stage at which applicants will now be urged to discuss how their bids might be a more holistic fit with the Olympic universe.

OK, but look — this is going to take time, probably seven to 14 years, minimum, to figure out thoroughly.

Also, it’s one thing to say, all dreamy-like, you propose, you candidate city you, whether your butterflies and rainbows fit into your vision of the Games. What happens when that lovely little dream gets put to the acid test of a secret IOC vote?

This is the realpolitik of Agenda 2020.

Bach has, on numerous occasions, referred to Agenda 2020 as a “jigsaw puzzle” or “white paper.”

In a news conference here Saturday, before Monday’s discussion and votes, he called it a “strategy paper,” or “wishes for the future of the Olympic movement,” explaining, “We will not be discussing semicolons and bullet points.”

Now, though, the time has come to punctuate the conversation.

For all the headlines that rocketed Tuesday around the world about countries mounting dual-nation bids, those would be allowed only in “special circumstances.” Such circumstances would be few and far between and, again, the odds of any such bid winning a campaign for the Games — even more remote.

A real-life Agenda 2020 circumstance has already emerged, and it’s not pretty: the pushback in moving the bobsled run out of South Korea for the 2018 Winter Games?  Already intense. And so predictable, the governor of Gangwon province, Moon Soon Choi saying in a televised address Tuesday, “Sharing the competition with another city is not an option we can consider. The South Korean people would never accept it.”

When they were bidding, and they bid three times for the Winter Games, x million for a bobsled run and y million in annual maintenance expenses were legacy costs the Koreans knew they were confronting. The political and cultural costs of asking them to do something else — how much is that worth? Is that somewhere in Agenda 2020?

Just as challenging, albeit in a different context: the real-world hard work that lies ahead in re-shaping the Olympic program now that the IOC has shifted the focus from “sports” to “events.”

IOC policy, renewed Monday, calls for a cap of 10,500 athletes except in “special cases.” This begs the obvious question: which of the established sports now figures to give up spots to sports such as surfing, skateboarding, climbing or others seeking to gain entry into the Olympic program?

Consider track and field.

Seb Coe and Sergey Bubka — Coe has already declared — are going to be the two candidates for the IAAF presidency. Under what theory does it serve either to suggest, before the presidential election next Aug. 19 in Beijing, that track and field should give up even one slot from its Olympic quota?

Now, aquatics:

FINA launched high-diving at the 2013 world championships in Barcelona to great acclaim. It is experimenting with mixed-gender relays. It is promoting men in synchronized swimming, and has changed the name of that discipline — said to be at the urging of Bach himself — to “artistic swimming.” There’s urgency, in the name of gender equality, to put the women’s 1500 freestyle on the program.

So where does it seem likely that FINA wants to bend?

This can go on and on. Shooting. Rowing. And more.

Actually, there is an elegant solution — if, that is, the IOC wants to confront it.

The Olympic accreditation system gives athletes a placard with a capital letter “A” on it. Some of these “A” placards can feature a lower-case letter as well for others in the athlete camp; there are a variety of different letters. Altogether, the different “A” placards total roughly 10,500.

One of the secrets within the Olympic world is that perhaps 900 of those 10,500 “A” accreditations have not over the years belonged to, well, athletes. They have been assigned over the years to sponsors or, very quietly, to security personnel.

If the IOC wanted to take all of those 900 and move them to a new category, voilà! Problem solved.

Even a third, 300, would go far in addressing the practicalities.

Moving on, because the 2022 campaign remains a real challenge, and Agenda 2020 may well accentuate the matter.

One of the 40 resolutions affirms the IOC’s support for non-discrimination.

“It is not only with regard to sexual orientation,” Bach said at a Monday news conference, referring to the firestorm of controversy triggered by Russian legislation in advance of the Sochi Games. “We will be looking for the guarantee of the host country that the principles of the Olympic charter apply to all the participants during the Olympic Games.”

This ought to go over just swimmingly in either Beijing and Almaty.

Who remembers the lead-up to the 2008 Beijing Games? The protests over human rights that marred the 2008 torch relay in London, Paris and San Francisco?

Pound, as the session was drawing to a close Tuesday, dropped the bomb of suggesting the IOC re-open the 2022 race with the newly enacted Agenda 2020 procedures, declaring it would be “leveling the playing field” and “doing our best to promote the Olympic movement.”

No, Bach responded immediately, the IOC’s policy-making executive board had decided a couple months ago that the only cities that could be in the race were those that had applied earlier. “There will be no change in this procedure,” he said.

Thus: the first post-Agenda 2020 Games are now destined to go a non-democratic nation; western protests over human rights would seem an inevitability; and more.

Bring it on, all of you who believe the IOC signed on Monday for big change.

That change, again, is going to take time, and lots of it — if, indeed, it ever manifests itself at all.

The TV channel — that absolutely is for real. Anything else?

Time is the measure of all things.

At that Monday news conference, Bach was asked what he hoped 20 years from now how he would feel about the passage of Agenda 2020.

“When I look from above — this is difficult to say. I hope very much that this then will prove to be an important and positive day for the Olympic movement. I hope very much, I’m confident, I’m sure that today we took the right decisions with a vision for the future of the Olympic movement that we are getting the Games and the Olympic movement closer to the youth and to the people.

“We with this day today and with the Olympic Agenda 2020, we are also fostering our relationship with society at large. I hope in 20 years that I can still live it, first of all. I can look back to this day with satisfaction and happiness and maybe a little bit of relief.”

Agenda 2020 goes 40-for-40

MONACO — To much self-promotion and -congratulation, the International Olympic Committee on Monday “unanimously” enacted all 40 points of president Thomas Bach’s review and potential reform plan, dubbed “Agenda 2020.” The potential game-changer: approval of a digital TV channel. Other significant elements: shifts in the bid process as well as to the Olympic program.

The action Monday gave Bach what he craved, approval of what he has variously described as a "jigsaw puzzle" and a “white paper.” Now comes the hard work: implementation.

How to balance considerations such as finance and the essence of Olympic tradition? Should the bobsled track for the 2018 Winter Games in South Korea be moved to save money? Isn’t it ridiculous — or worse — to pressure the Koreans to give up building a track to move the event to, say, Japan, when, for instance, the matter of the 1936 Berlin marathon, won by Korean Kee Chong Sohn, who had to compete under the Japanese flag, is still very much alive in Seoul and precincts beyond?

To move it to, say, the United States? Canada? Europe? Wouldn’t that make the Olympics something of a united world championships, the very thing Sport Accord and international judo federation president Marius Vizer had proposed just last year?

The Koreans bid twice for the Games, for 2010 and 2014, before winning for 2018. It’s not as if they didn’t know the Winter Olympics included a bobsled run, right?

More of the struggles to come:

Yay for a move from “sports” to “events” if that means the possibility of fresh additions to the program, and particularly in the Summer Games — say, for instance, surfing.

But with a cap of 10,500 athletes except in “special cases,” the policy affirmed anew Monday, which of the established sports can be counted on to give up spots to newcomers? Track and field? Swimming? Shooting? Rowing?

In a word: ha.

To be sure, Monday ushered in evolution, not revolution.

In a style that can only be described as only in the IOC, the 40 measures were voted on one by one and by a show of hands, the 96 members in attendance passing each resolution in what was described from the head table as “unanimously,” even though it was sometimes plain not all hands went up.

To be abundantly clear: no hands went up to register a vote against.

Why did the IOC not register the votes on each measure through electronic ballots, which — in December 2014 — would be simple enough? Which the IOC actually does (though it does not attribute votes cast to individual members) for its bid-city ballots?

For those who might be befuddled, it must be understood that what transpired Monday is, in its way, progress.

In IOC terms, it amounted to something that might be termed transparency. The votes were shown on closed-circuit television that was beamed out to the internet. Thus some — if not all — the members could actually be seen raising their hands.

Moreover, the IOC is not, repeat not, a democracy.

Here is another fundamental principle:

The IOC works best when the president is firmly in control.

Bach, who is German, was elected in Buenos Aires in September 2013, replacing Jacques Rogge of Belgium.

Rogge served from 2001. He took over from Juan Antonio Samaranch of Spain, who served for 21 years.

Rogge sat Monday at the head table. Bach referred to him, among others, in the ceremonial introductions of the address that opened Sunday night’s 127th IOC session. That was, well, it. Not a word from the former president.

Since being elected in Buenos Aires, Bach has clearly sought to model himself after Samaranch, who operated with a direct yet deft touch.

For more than a year, Bach has worked energetically to secure buy-in across, within and without the Olympic movement for Agenda 2020. Though Rogge was not invited Monday to speak, Didier Burkhalter, president of the Swiss confederation, was — the IOC, of course, based in Lausanne. Agenda 2020, Burkhalter said, would enable the movement to “be proactive and change rather than be changed.”

The key item on the docket was always the creation of the digital TV channel.

To get there, though, the IOC had to work through hours of agenda items.

First up Monday morning: changes to the bid process, including a provision that in exceptional circumstances would allow events to be held outside host cities or countries.

Insiders noted that many of the bid changes, aimed at streamlining and reducing the cost of campaigning, evoked the Madrid 2020 bid that lost out to Tokyo, also in Buenos Aires.

It takes nothing away from the winning Tokyo bid to note that with as with many things in the Olympic universe, it can be a matter of timing: Madrid’s bids, particularly the 2020 campaign, its third in a row, may well have articulated an apt strategy but caught the IOC at a wrong time.

Around lunch time Monday in Monaco, the IOC moved to change the Olympic program from its traditional focus on “sports” to “events,” a potential boon for sports such as surfing, skateboarding, cricket, climbing and, as soon as the Tokyo 2020 Games, baseball and softball — again, if that is, spots can be found around that 10,500 cap.

“This is really a major step forward in the modernization of the Olympic Games,” Bach said as it passed, of course unanimously.

By mid-afternoon, the members affirmed their support for what’s called “Principle 6,” including non-discrimination on sexual orientation, a response to the firestorm over legislation in Russia before the 2014 Games.

“This is a very important step,” Bach said. “Congratulations.”

Approval of the TV channel came right after that.

Bach, speaking from the head table, called such a channel “crucial” for Olympic athletes and values between editions of the Games.

Yiannis Exarchos, head of Olympic Broadcasting Services, said it would be “the always-on, multimedia platform,” aimed at being the “ultimate” Olympic content source, initially digital only.

“This will be a truly collaborative effort [among] the Olympic family,” he said, also calling it “a challenge of Olympic proportions.”

“This will be a historic step in our existence and one we should embrace,” he urged the members.

Start-up costs were fixed at roughly $446 million euros, plus a 10 percent cushion, meaning $490 million euros all-in, or $601 million at current exchange rates.

Ser Miang Ng of Singapore, a former vice president who now chairs the IOC finance commission, said the channel represented a “substantial but necessary” investment. Break-even, he said: seven to 10 years.

“These figures are more than achievable,” said Bach, who chaired the TV channel working group.

“I think this is an excellent concept and the sooner we can launch this the better,” Larry Probst, the U.S. Olympic Committee chairman and new IOC member, said from the floor.

After the channel was approved, once more unanimously, Bach said, “This is a great, great step forward. I wish all the ones who will be involved in making this happen really good luck. This is really a historical step for the IOC an the Olympic movement. Thank you very much for your approval.”

Richard Peterkin, the witty IOC member from the Caribbean nation of St. Lucia, tweeted early in Monday’s session:

Looks like we will have an abundance of unanimous acceptance votes on the recommendations. Either a good sign or we are a bunch of sheep.

— Richard Peterkin (@rncpeterkin) December 8, 2014

A few minutes later, he posted another tweet:

Just to clarify. There's nothing wrong with sheep. They taste great, make lovely wool sweaters, and know a good thing when they see it.

— Richard Peterkin (@rncpeterkin) December 8, 2014

After lunch, yet again:

My arm hurts from voting yes so often. would it be different if the votes were by blind ballot? I doubt it. Other options in the future.

— Richard Peterkin (@rncpeterkin) December 8, 2014

From the floor in the afternoon, Peterkin said, speaking directly to Bach, “Like President Obama, you are a strong proponent of change. I hope you have more success than he has.”

Bach had predicted at a news conference Saturday that all would go smoothly here.

Of course he did. He had lined everything up in advance, Samaranch-style.

It was “very encouraging,” he said at that news conference, “to see that all the stakeholders of the Olympic movement are actually supporting this Olympic Agenda 2020,” including representatives of the international sports federations, summer and winter, the national Olympic committees and athletes committees.

Beyond which, as longtime IOC member and former vice president Dick Pound pointed out in an interview Monday, the topics themselves lent themselves to an easy show of hands in favor of yes votes.

“It’s pretty much motherhood and apple pie,” Pound said, adding, “These things are obvious. Friction will be in the events. What does athletics,” meaning track and field, “have to give to create some space for new sports? What does shooting have to give? What does swimming have to give? And there will be a lot of wailing about that,” down the line.

“You look at the team sports. Do you cut a 14-team draw down to 12? There are lots of ways to slice the pie.”

Pound served as IOC vice president under Samaranch. The comparisons between Bach and Samaranch seemed manifest.

Referring to Bach, Pound said, “He’s well prepared. You look at those committees, especially the outsiders. He has got good traction there. So you’re getting a lot of good thought having gone into it. Things have been circulated. You read them — there’s very little there that has a big hook out there that you want to grab onto and want to fight. I think it has been well-managed, well-directed, well-meaning."

Pound continued: “… I’m trying to think, somebody raised the visit issue, very tentatively,” meaning whether the members could visit cities bidding for the Games, a notion Bach had emphatically shot down before all arrived in Monaco.

“There may be people with hair my color who may object to having to retire before the age of 70 or something. We’ll see. I don’t think anyone will throw themselves in front of the train for that purpose.”

The image of whether to tinker in any significant respect with the age limit didn’t even begin to come up until 5:45 p.m. — too late in the day, really, for anybody to do anything about it, given that Bach had determined mid-afternoon that he was going to hustle the members through all 40 bullet points in one day.

As the clock ticked toward 6 p.m., Bach did call on Vitaly Smirnov, the Russian member who holds a special place in the IOC, what is called the doyen, the longest-serving member. Smirnov, carefully reading from a script, backed the measure on the table that would allow for a one-time extension of a member’s term beyond age 70, to 74, for a maximum of five cases at a given time.

So deft.

So Samaranch-like, really.

“Even in, as you say, my wildest dreams, I would not have expected this,” Bach said in a wrap-up news conference Monday night, referring to the 40-for-40 unanimous yes votes, going on to deflect credit away from himself and onto the members, just the way Samaranch used to:

“It showed the great determination of the members for these reforms to make this progress and to make this happen.”

Francesco Ricci Bitti, president of the international tennis federation and the association of summer Olympic international sports federations, said, “We did open today a big window but most of the work still needs to be done. That’s the most difficult part of our job. It’s a historical day.

“Now we have to proceed step by step. If someone has signed a contract like Tokyo, they cannot change everything. There must be a balance.”

Bach's Agenda 2020 revival meeting

MONACO — Proclaiming, “We are successful,” International Olympic Committee president Thomas Bach said on the eve of a potentially historic session convened to consider a review and potential reform plan he has dubbed “Agenda 2020” that “success is the best reason for change.” “If we do not address [upcoming] challenges here and now,” Bach told the more than 100 IOC members at the seaside Forum Grimaldi, “we will be hit by them very soon. If we do not drive these changes ourselves, others will drive us to them. We want to be the leaders of change and not the object of change."

Mindful that he was speaking Sunday evening not just to the IOC membership but via the internet to a worldwide audience, Bach sought to turn the opening of the 127th IOC session into something of a revival meeting before the committee gets down to the hard work Monday morning of considering the 40 bullet points that make up Agenda 2020.

In all, the plan amounts to the most wide-ranging action since the IOC enacted a series of moves in late 1999 after the Salt Lake City corruption scandal. The IOC will debate and vote, one by one, on each of the 40 recommendations; debate and voting are expected to carry through Monday and Tuesday.

This assembly comes as several countries, all European, have been scared off by the costs of hosting the Games, in particular by the $51 billion figure associated with the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics. A number withdrew from the 2022 Winter Games contest, leaving only Beijing and Almaty, Kazakhstan, and it is far from clear that Almaty will stay in the race through the finish line next summer.

The key Agenda 2020 item: creation of a digital Olympic television channel.

Also on the docket: shifts in the bid process, a transition in the Olympic program from its current focus on “sports” to “events,” a renewed commitment to non-discrimination and a number of elements dealing with financial transparency and governance.

Bach said in a news conference Saturday that he heads into the two-day workshop confident he has the support of key stakeholders for all 40 points.

Anything, though, is possible at an Olympic session. At the Sochi get-together last February, there were 211 “interventions,” as comments and questions from the floor are called in IOC-speak.

Behind the scenes, however, it was thought that the only one of the 40 that might draw real pushback is Recommendation 37, which calls for the full IOC session — upon the recommendation of the policy-making executive board — to allow for a one-time extension of an IOC member’s term beyond the current age limit of 70, to 74. The extension would be allowed for a maximum of five cases at any given time.

The issue? There might be some significant number of members, well beyond four, who are turning 70 who want to stay on beyond 74.

The other complication bubbling backstage Sunday night?

The second piece to air on German television alleging doping and other serious irregularities rooted in Russian sport, particularly track and field.

The airing of the production can hardly be seen as accidental. After all, it's on German television, in the days before and, now, during what should be the big moment for Bach, the German IOC president.

At issue, potentially: after a year pressing Agenda 2020, would potential misconduct somewhere in the reaches of the so-called "Olympic family" steal or dim the spotlight?

The first show aired last Wednesday; the next day, track's governing body, the IAAF, put out a news release saying it noted "grave allegations" and the federation's ethics commission had already launched an investigation. Late Sunday, the IAAF put out another release, this one saying an English-language transcript from Sunday's show would be forwarded to the ethics panel.

Bach made no mention from the lectern of such matters. Instead, he sought Sunday evening one final time to press his case for Agenda 2020.

“If I would deliver this speech in a theater,” he said, making like Hamlet, “I would say with an ironic smile, of course: to change or be changed, that is the question.”

Of course, in that scene, a despondent Hamlet is contemplating suicide.

On Sunday evening in Monaco, Bach — since he chose Hamlet, and now if we move just a few lines down in the scene, the president cheerfully bearing “the insolence of Office’’ — proved relentlessly upbeat.

“Whenever you initiate change,” he asked rhetorically, “you have to answer three questions: Why? What? How?”

To begin, he answered, “We need to change because sport today is too important in society to ignore the rest of society. We are not living on an island, we are living in the middle of a modern, diverse, digital society.”

And more, here speaking in French, with this fascinating, never-before-spelled out explication: “If we want our values of Olympism — the values of excellence, respect, friendship, dialogue, diversity, non-discrimination, tolerance, fair play, solidarity, development and peace — if we want these values to remain relevant in society, the time for change is now.”

This, too, back in English: “For us, change has to be more than a cosmetic effort or a procedure. Change has to have a goal. This goal is progress. Progress for us means strengthening sport in society by virtue of our values.”

That was the why.

He turned to the what.

“We are living in a world more fragile than ever,” Bach said, one beset by “political crisis, financial crisis, health crisis, terrorism, war and civil war,” one in which the “Olympic message is perhaps more relevant than ever.”

But: people not only have to “hear our message, they have to believe in our message, they have to ‘get the message.’ “

Thus the dozens of action points in Agenda 2020, he said, adding what has become over the past year one of his favorite taglines: “We have an interest and a responsibility to get the couch potatoes off the couch. Only children playing sport can be future athletes. Only children playing sport can enjoy the educational and health values of sport.”

The digital channel, he said, is intended — in part — to give Olympic athletes and sports the “worldwide media exposure they deserve” between editions of the Games.

“This modern world,” he said, “demands more transparency, more participation, higher standards of integrity. This modern world takes less for granted, has no place for complacency, questions even those with the highest reputation. This world takes much less on faith.”

Agenda 2020, he declared, takes on these matters under the broad themes of sustainability, credibility and youth.

In another of his favorite lines, Bach said, Agenda 2020 is “like a jigsaw puzzle,” adding, “Every piece, every recommendation has the same importance. Only when you put all these 40 pieces together [do] you see the whole picture. You see progress in ensuring the success of the Olympic Games, progress in safeguarding the Olympic values and progress in strengthening sport in society.”

Which led him to this third, and final, question — how to achieve such progress?

It needs, he said, cooperation.

Since being elected IOC president in September 2013, he said, he had met with 95 heads of state or government, declaring, “In most of these meetings the Olympic Agenda 2020 and our relations with the world of politics played a major role.”

Unsaid: he has not met with President Obama, and seems unlikely to take such a meeting before Obama’s term expires in January 2017, the White House still frosty over Chicago’s first-round 2009 exit in the 2016 Summer Games vote won by Rio de Janeiro — though the U.S. Olympic Committee has, to its credit, made great strides in repairing many “Olympic family” relationships since.

Bach, as expected, touted what he called a “new sense of cooperation and partnership” with the United Nations.

As he neared the end of his remarks, Bach said:

“Dear friends and colleagues, now this Olympic Agenda 2020 is in your hands. Now it is up to you to show that this is our vision for the future of the Olympic movement.

Referring to the French baron widely credited with founding the modern movement some 120 years ago, Bach said, “Our founder Pierre de Coubertin, I am sure, is following us closely these days and with great sympathy, because he was always a man of reforms.

“He said, ‘Courage … and hope! … charge boldly through the clouds and do not be afraid. The future belongs to you.’ “

Bach added a moment later, turning to his catchphrase from last year’s presidential election, “Let us demonstrate the true meaning of unity in diversity. Let us together shape an even brighter future for this magnificent, truly global Olympic movement.”