IOC

The pandemic brings IOC to a moment consequential if not existential

The pandemic brings IOC to a moment consequential if not existential

Greetings anew from Manhattan Beach, California. And how are things? Thanks for asking! People are sick and dying because of the coronavirus. Also, a chunk of the state — bigger than Rhode Island — is ablaze after a siege of spectacular lightning strikes, some 12,000 over the past week, 100 on Friday; on the ground, the destruction is already savage; the air smoky and unhealthy; beyond, it’s only August and fire season has weeks to go. Meanwhile, the utilities are ordering rolling electricity blackouts. School started again but, you know, not in person so no one is happy about that.

Then there’s the political angst, President Obama finally going off on his successor. Here’s a fact: the selection of California Senator Kamala Harris to be Joe Biden’s running mate makes her the first person in the history of the Democratic Party to be nominated — as president or vice-president — as a representative of a state west of the Rocky Mountains.

We are living in weird times. In all of this, there seems to be an element of the apocalyptic. Even the setting sun is not yellow but an iridescent red. Thus the mind quite naturally goes, especially as the red sun sinks into the Pacific, to matters existential or, at the least, consequential.

Being, staying relevant in an 'ever more fragile world in deep crisis'

Being, staying relevant in an 'ever more fragile world in deep crisis'

Welcome to Day 3,042 in Coronaville. It’s back to Lockdown 2.0 here in Manhattan Beach, California, where nobody can even get a haircut and as of Saturday you are liable to get a fine of up to $350 if seen in public without a mask and, to quote Alice Cooper, school’s out not for just summer but for a long time to come.

Looking out across the top of that mask, the United States on Thursday reported 75,600 new coronavirus cases, a single-day record. The situation is so bad across the 50 states — Thursday was the 11th time that the past month the single-day record had been broken — that, for now, Americans are not welcome in the European Union.

India, the New York Times also reported, hit a million cases in a surge that has forced a return to lockdowns there. India ranks third in the world in both total cases and new ones, the Times further said, adding that its rate of new infections is on track to overtake Brazil’s.

And what’s this?

The International Olympic Committee, capping a series of meetings with its first-ever virtual assembly on Friday, remained resolute in its determination to stage the Summer Olympics next summer in Tokyo.

Getting to Plan B — and with kinder, gentler messaging for a world that needs it

Getting to Plan B — and with kinder, gentler messaging for a world that needs it

When I was a boy growing up in the cornfields of Ohio, my younger brother and I thought one of the greatest days imaginable was riding our bikes the several miles to the Ben Franklin five-and-dime store, there to peruse the comic books, to see what might have come in since our last check-in.

The summer before I turned 11, drama! DC Comics created Earth-Two, a parallel world. This allowed them to publish Superman stories without regard for the line of Superman tales that had developed over decades.

A fresh start, if you will.

Imagine if in our Earth-Two the International Olympic Committee had 1/ a more nimble communications department and 2/ could thus tell the story it should be telling in a world in crisis because of the coronavirus.

After Dayton and El Paso: guns must get out of the Games

After Dayton and El Paso: guns must get out of the Games

I was born and grew up in Dayton, Ohio, where nine people were killed and more than two dozen hurt  when a gunman with a military-style weapon opened fire over the weekend at a bar.

That attack came just hours after a gunman with an assault weapon killed 22 people at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas.

That’s 31 people killed in a space of 13 hours — 31 innocent lives, their hopes and dreams gone forever — because of gun violence.

This has to stop. 

Shooting needs to be off the Olympic program. The guns need to go.

No more 'losers': IOC vows new way to pick Games hosts

No more 'losers': IOC vows new way to pick Games hosts

LAUSANNE, Switzerland — Thomas Bach is a winner.

From some, that sentence is likely to draw howls. What? Is this, like, sucking up, or what? 

Please — chill. Any objective, reasonable analysis of the International Olympic Committee president’s record would lead to that conclusion. The man is an Olympic gold medalist. A brainy lawyer. An adept businessman. Now in his sixth year as IOC president, he is all but a shoo-in for re-election to a second four-year term in 2021.

Perhaps twice in Bach’s career has he been a “loser.” Once, when as a champion fencer representing West Germany — he, like the outstanding middle-distance runner Seb Coe in Great Britain — campaigned to go to the 1980 Moscow Games amid the U.S.-led boycott. Britain went. West Germany did not.

The next time came in 2011. On that occasion, Bach was leading the Munich campaign for the 2018 Winter Games. PyeongChang won. And Bach was — not happy.

Of course, Bach rebounded two years later to become IOC president. But as the IOC session on Wednesday approved a plan to re-do the process by which it selects cities for the Summer and Winter Games — driven by Bach’s avowed concern that the current system produces too many “losers” — it’s perhaps worth wondering, why? And what of his own experience?

In memory of Patrick Baumann

In memory of Patrick Baumann

We all know what awaits us at the end. What we don’t know, can never know, is when the end comes for each and every one of us. This is why, despite the considerable rancor and conflict in our world, the better path forward is to listen a little bit more, to be just a little more gentle in your words and your manner, a little more kind, to always work toward solution.

This was Patrick Baumann’s way.

It is why his sudden passing at the Youth Olympics in Buenos Aires has not just stunned but shaken the Olympic landscape. Baumann died from a heart attack, according to FIBA, the international basketball federation. He was just 51.

Baumann served as FIBA’s top administrator for 15 years. He was the key figure behind, among other things, the introduction of its so-called urban discipline, 3x3 ball, into the Summer Games. It will debut in Tokyo in 2020.

And so much more. 

The story the IOC should be selling

The story the IOC should be selling

From the time we crawled out of the muck and mire, we human beings have told each other stories. It’s the way we make sense of our world. It’s also the way we give voice to our hopes and dreams.

The International Olympic Committee, for reasons that mystify, does not know how to tell a story.

This is why, yet again, it is getting its ass kicked in the candidature process, now for the 2026 Winter Games. Two cities are already out. Five remain in but none definitively. 

Pardon the bluntness but, really. This does not need to be this way. 

Signs, signs, everywhere signs: the esports revolution is coming to the Olympics

Signs, signs, everywhere signs: the esports revolution is coming to the Olympics

LAUSANNE, Switzerland — Thomas Bach has been president of the International Olympic Committee for nearly five years now, and one of his pet phrases is thus: “We have to get the couch potatoes off the couch.”

Prediction, and cue the screams of the traditionalists: the couch potatoes are very likely going to shape, perhaps significantly, the 2028 Los Angeles Games. 

The esports revolution is coming, and fast, for it cannot and will not be stopped, and indeed the gamers are almost surely going to help propel a thorough and long-overdue review — if not, indeed, the start of a re-do — of the Olympic program. That next-generation program is coming, in 2028 and LA.

“It’s the passion that really gets us together,” Bach told 21-year-old Jake Lyon, a professional gamer for the Houston Outlaws in the Overwatch League, as part of a Friday and Saturday forum dedicated to esports.  

A gold medalist in fencing at the 1976 Montreal Olympics, Bach told Lyon in a remarkable one-on-one, nearly hour-long breakout session Saturday morning at the Olympic Museum, both having shared on stage the emotion that comes with championship and victory, “We feel the same passion for your activity as you feel the passion for our activity.”

Meet the 'new norm': same as the old norm

Meet the 'new norm': same as the old norm

PYEONGCHANG, South Korea — Like a bad itch, the International Olympic Committee has a way of scratching on a recurring basis the in-house fiction that it can conjure up new ways to save astonishing sums of money in the staging of its franchise, the Games.

Here at its annual assembly, its 132nd session, the IOC unveiled its latest, a strategy it immediately dubbed the "new norm,” calling it a "Games changer."

This “new norm” outlines an “ambitious set of 118 reforms that reimagines how the Olympic Games are delivered.”

Buzzkill: this new norm is the same old-same old, at least where it counts: in winning public opinion.

The altogether cleverness of 'Olympic Athlete from Russia'

In taking action Tuesday on the Russian doping matter, the International Olympic Committee was faced with the delicate task of trying to thread a needle while wearing a pair of those red mittens that were all the rage at the Vancouver Olympics way back when in 2010, which, you know, is more or less when — because the Russian team performed so poorly there — this sordid tale began, right?

The task at hand was to make it seem like the IOC was coming down hard on the Russians — to appease the baying jackals of the western press, in particular the Americans and the Brits — while simultaneously crafting a diplomatic compromise that would serve the IOC’s long-term purposes.

The IOC, seeking to balance a multitude of interests, got what it wanted.

The initial reports screamed out over the news and social media in our 24/7 gotta-have-it tell-me-what-it-means-this-instant world: Ban! Ban! Ban! 

Reality: the IOC made a play for what it always plays for, stability.

And the more sophisticated argument, because as always the real work is in the details, is that the Russians are getting off way easier than would seem at first blush.