Qatar: soccer in 2022, Olympics an inevitability

The 2022 World Cup selection Thursday marks less a rejection of the United States than an affirmation of Qatar even as it underscores just what a challenge it's going to be to convince the International Olympic Committee in the coming years to send the Games back to the United States. There are other places in the world. They deserve their chances, too.

And there's almost no place that's as deserving of its chance as Qatar.

I have been to Doha twice, the first time in 2006 for the Asian Games and then again this past March for track and field's indoor world championships.

The sports facilities already on the ground in Doha are, in every regard, world-class, including the Aspire Dome, where they ran the world indoors. As Seb Coe, the 2012 Summer Games chief, made plain to me when he and I were walking around the facility, you'd be hard-pressed to find anything anywhere better.

With Doha and Qatar, the trick is always just getting people to see for themselves what it's all about -- moving past perceptions and stereotypes and confronting reality, a nation that not only wants to be but eminently deserves to be part of a vibrant 21st century world order.

To me, it was always a foregone conclusion that FIFA would go to Russia in 2018 and Qatar in 2022. Russia is on the move. Qatar, too.

To its credit -- and sometimes it's hard to assign the byzantine FIFA much credit -- soccer's worldwide governing body has consistently been willing in recent years to make the sorts of leaps of faith that inexorably lead to Thursday's results.

Here's to the hope that the FIFA balloting was actually done fairly and in good faith, and the suspicion that reigns in so many quarters about the 2018 and 2022 process, amplified by the corruption scandal that dogged FIFA in the weeks before the vote, will not in years to come explode into even-grander scandal.

Assuming a credible vote -- and, granted, given everything involving FIFA, that might well be a big assumption -- Russia and Qatar always seemed the choices.

Britain? Um, why?

The United States? Been there, done that. Sure, 1994 was great. But that was then.

China, South Africa, Brazil, Russia, Qatar -- those places are now.

The Olympics have already been to China, in 2008. They're going to be in Russia, in Sochi in 2014. They're going to Rio de Janeiro in 2016. South Africa? Someday, and the IOC members are going to see Durban for themselves when they gather there this July for the committee's annual all-delegates assembly.

The World Cup is not the Olympic Games; the scale and scope of the Games is far bigger than one soccer tournament. Even so, it's inevitable that one day the Games will go to Qatar. And Doha will be eminently deserving.

The good news for the Qataris is that they now have 12 years to showcase what they're all about.

They have a great story to tell, and now an audience that's going to be way more inclined to listen. And that's their biggest challenge -- telling their story to almost everyone else in the world, because very few travelers traditionally have been there. Doha is not Florence or Paris or Madrid.

Not yet, anyway.

Once you've been to Doha, you get it, and you get it immediately.

It's not just that the pace of construction there is fantastic. The buildings that are going up -- they're fantastic-looking, too.

The architecture is, in a word, stunning. To stand on the deck of the I.M. Pei-designed Museum of Islamic Art and gaze across the bay at the Doha skyline -- it's breathtaking.

And the museum itself -- it's incredible.

Some of the leading universities in the United States have quietly been setting up branch operations in recent years in Doha. Northwestern, where I went to journalism school, now runs full-fledged journalism and communications programs in Doha. Anyone who knows how inherently conservative American universities can be knows how remarkable it is that Northwestern, and others, including Carnegie Mellon, have adopted such forward-looking strategies.

They wouldn't be there unless there was sound reason.

Okay, it's hot in Doha, and more so in the summer. So what? It's hot in Chicago at a Cubs' game in mid-summer, too. Sit in the bleachers at Wrigley Field for four-plus hours on a hot and humid August afternoon and then tell me Chicago doesn't deserve to have a baseball team -- or, for that matter, two -- because it's hot? That's just dumb.

This past March, I was among the first group of international sports journalists to see the cooling technology that's going to be featured prominently at the soccer stadiums in and around Doha in 2022. It cools the stadiums and the seats down to about 78 degrees Fahrenheit.

It works, and it's incredibly cool, literally and figuratively.

The Qataris have money -- they're sitting on an immense deposit of natural gas that might well sustain their economy for this century and beyond -- and, more importantly, the will.

Don't ever doubt that. They have the will.

Are the Russians truly committed to doping-free sport?

The Russian Ski Assn. -- and, by extension, all of Russian Olympic sports -- is under significant scrutiny because numerous Russian athletes have been caught doping. With the next Winter Games in 2014 in Sochi, the Russians have been making a big show of being committed to competing doping-free.  Yet this report from fasterskier.com raises significant questions about whether, in fact, it's just a show -- whether the Russians truly are committed to clean sport or they have now found an end-around the rules.

Why didn't Westerners hear much about the Asian Games?

The just-concluded Asian Games in China were a big deal, arguably bigger than the Commonwealth Games a few weeks back in India. The Western press played up the Commonwealth Games but paid hardly any attention to the Asian Games. Why? Here's a pretty good take from the Christian Science Monitor.

Sportsmanship the way it's supposed to be

If your competitors, your rivals, showed up for a big canoe and kayak meet, and the boats that she and her team thought they had waiting for them suddenly weren't ready as billed, and if you had boats you could lend, would you? If you said no, you would surely deny those rivals, the American racers, a key qualifying opportunity on the way to the London Olympics in 2012.

If you said yes, sure, you might complicate your own Olympic qualification.

Well?

A few weeks ago, when this exact situation presented itself at an event called the Sprint PanAms, held in Mexico City, officials from the Canadian canoe and kayak federation didn't even hesitate.

Click here to read the rest at TeamUSA.org.

Fighting to make her mark in a man's world

When they were little girls, Hazzauna Underwood was, she says, "a girlie-girl." She was the sort who went on to be a high-school cheerleader Little sister Queen - not quite.

"She was the one who ran around with dogs, who played basketball, who did weightlifting," Hazzauna recalled with a laugh. "If she could have played football, she would have done that, too."

The first women's boxing tournament in Olympic history is set for the London 2012 Games. Queen Underwood, 26, has emerged this year as one of the United States' prime contenders.

And among many great stories in the Olympic scene, Queen Underwood has one of the most compelling. She is a woman fighting to make it in a man's world, in and out of the ring.

Click here to read the rest at TeamUSA.org.

Number 50 in your game-day program, Steven Contreras

The thing about Steven Contreras being back on the football field, which of course is extraordinary, is that it's really not. Eight months to the day after doctors amputated the lower part of his left leg, Steven, who is a 16-year-old high school junior, got back in for about a dozen plays in the game that clinched the league championship. Last week, even though that knee was sore, he played again as his school, Rolling Hills Prep, moved to 8-1.

Five or six or 10 years from now, when Steven is bigger and stronger, maybe he competes for the United States in the Paralympic Games. Or maybe not.

It doesn't matter.

What matters is the change the Paralympic movement has wrought. That change has come incrementally and surely has yet to be fully realized -- there being some 21 million people in the United States with a physical disability.

The years have nevertheless ushered in that change. And it is powerful and undeniable. It is emphatic and it is real. It does nothing less than give young people like Steven hope.

"That," he said of the Paralympics, "is something I would definitely love to do."

Yes, Steven has lost part of a leg. No, he won't ever again be the same. But he can -- he will -- still be "normal," able to live his life to the fullest, just like the able-bodied kids around him -- who, and this is a key part of the change, too, treat him "normally."

That is the power of the Paralympics. It makes it all -- whatever it is, even something as definitively American as football, a sport that isn't even part of the Paralympic scene -- so much more "normal."

"It has been really inspiring," sophomore Kevin Kole, Rolling Hills Prep's punter and place-kicker, said of Steven's determination to get back into uniform, a testament to Steven's own mental fortitude, Steven's faith and the love and support of his parents, coaches, teammates and others.

The way that inspiration manifested itself, and the way Kevin describes it, is the telling part: "He was always trying, always at practice every day. But his leg wasn't ready," by which Kevin meant both Steven's left leg and one or another of the prostheses Steven would be trying.

"He kept getting new legs," Kevin said. "They kept breaking because he kept jumping and running. This one now, it works -- but we had to wrap it in all this foam."

Just a matter-of-fact recitation about how to solve what is, well, an equipment issue.

Because once that was solved, of course Steven would be playing -- right?

Rolling Hills Prep is an independent co-educational secular school for grades six through 12 in San Pedro, Calif., about a half-hour south of downtown Los Angeles on the eastern slope of the Palos Verdes peninsula.

It was during football season last year, Steven's sophomore year, that his left ankle started bothering him.

He couldn't figure it out. He would just fall, for seemingly no reason. One time, he recalled, he fell after he thought he'd gotten hit. No, someone said -- you just fell. "I said, you've got to have this looked at," the football coach, Frank Frisina, recalled.

Steven's mom, Valerie, 46, is a longshoreman. His dad, Steve, 47, is a Los Angeles County welding foreman. They took him to one of those urgent-care facilities to check out the ankle. It's not broken, they were told there, but you really have to see an orthopedic specialist, and right away.

The day before Thanksgiving, the specialists told Steve and Val that their son had a bone tumor, a kind of cancer called Ewing's sarcoma, in his left ankle.

Last Dec. 5, Steven started chemotherapy.

Over the next four months, he became very good friends with a little boy, Nathaniel Robert Arteaga, not yet even in kindergarten, who was also undergoing chemo. "If this little boy is doing it, we can do it -- we can beat it," Steven would tell his mom.

For those months, Steven and his little buddy carried each other through the routine of chemo. For all that time, Steven wasn't in significant pain. He could get up and around. He could dance.

But the cancer wouldn't go away. The fear was it would spread.

On March 5, doctors amputated Steven's left leg, about where the calf muscle ends.

"The only time he was down was right after the surgery," Val said. "They didn't have his meds quite right. He looked down and said, 'Oh, it's really gone.' "

Steven remembers that. But he also describes it like this: "That was the turning point for me. Okay, it's gone. They need to do this to save my life and I'm okay with it."

How quickly, he wanted to know, could he play ball again? "That was my main goal," he said. "To get back on the football field with my brothers."

Understand that Rolling Hills Prep is not one of those mammoth California public high schools that produce reams of Division I scholarship athletes. In all, about 235 kids attend all seven grades. The school plays eight-man football. About two dozen boys are on the team.

This is Frisina's sixth year as head coach. When he started, he brought with him a saying: "Hold the rope." He meant to teach the boys that they were in it, football and life itself, together: "If you're falling off a cliff, you're dangling off a cliff, who's going to hold that rope for you? Your teammates."

After Steven's diagnosis, with the okay of teammates and alumni, they took the original rope and put it in a frame and gave it to him. The team also held a car wash and some other events to start a fund for the upgraded and expensive prosthetic Steven wants, made by the same company that makes the device sprinter Oscar Pistorius runs on.

"He didn't want to let anyone down," his mother said. ""His coaches, his friends, his parents -- he knew everybody was watching. I think he just wanted to prove to himself, too -- he saw other amputees do it, and he felt that if they could do it he could do it.

"I don't know," she said, marveling at her son's willpower. "He's so young. The thought of losing his life at such a young age -- he had so many hopes and dreams yet to accomplish. The thought of not reaching those goals -- he wasn't going to stand for that."

Hardly.

"He said, 'Coach, as soon as I get the stent out of my chest, I can play -- they're going to clear me,' " Frisina recalled. "I said, 'Steven, as long as you get cleared by the doctor and the parents, we'll get you back in shape and make sure you put in the time and if it's okay for you to play -- you've got it.' "

Learning to walk again with a prosthetic device can take weeks. "I only used crutches that first day," Steven said. "I was determined I was going to be playing football this season. Within three weeks to a month, I was walking without a limp."

Frisina said, "You talk about there being heroes -- this kid has faced everything head-on. But this kid doesn't see that. He says there are other people out there who are stronger. I tell you, if there are, I haven't met them."

A couple weeks ago, Steven brought Frisina a doctor's note. It said he was cleared to play.

In eight-man ball, there's a 45-point mercy rule. In its final regular-season game, against an L.A. school called Ribet Academy, Rolling Hills Prep roared out to a big first-quarter lead. After that, in came Steven, the prosthetic wrapped up in all that foam.

"You could tell the buzz along the bleachers," Frisina said. "He was fired up."

Steven played a few plays, then came out. He came right over to Frisina.

"He said, 'Can I go back in?'

"I said, 'You can go back in but let's do this right.' "

After the game, a 47-0 Rolling Hills Prep Huskies victory, Steven was sporting a big bruise on his right arm. Pretty normal.

This past weekend, in the Huskies' first-round playoff game, Steven got in for about a half-dozen plays in the Huskies' 47-14 defeat of Nuview Bridge, from Nuevo, Calif., near Riverside.

Maybe Rolling Hills Prep gets by Windward, another L.A. school, this week. Maybe not.

Does it really matter?

Val didn't even get to see her son play last weekend. She was manning the snack shack, cooking burgers and hot dogs. "It felt like things were normal," she said.

She also said, "It's happening so fast. I can't believe he's pushing himself to not just get back to normal but pushing himself to help other people. I'm, like, maybe you shouldn't be doing all this. Let's breathe a little. Let's make sure your health is good."

"He has a lot of people praying for him. He has a lot of support. I just told him," and here she laughed because she knew that what she would say next was exactly what you'd expect, so very normal, "make sure your grades stay good."

London 2012: construction progress

As the International Olympic Committee's inspection team comes to town for a routine visit, London authorities on Tuesday released a series of photos that underscore the undeniable progress made at Olympic Park. Here's one showing the central stadium. The Olympic Delivery Authority, as the construction oversight entity there is called, recently announced that work is 75 percent complete, with the main venues on track to be completed next summer, a year before the Games. The opening ceremony is set for July 27, 2012.

Gymnastics: yeah, that's cool

Football players -- yeah, it can be cool to play ball. Basketball players -- yeah, that's cool, too.

Gymnasts -- um, all you football and basketball players: did you notice who it was doing handsprings on the runway and cuddling up later for snapshots with lingerie-wearing super-models at the Victoria's Secret 2010 fashion show Wednesday night in New York?

Did all you football and basketball players notice those ripped, buff guys with six-pack abs?

Those were, for the most part, U.S. Olympic and national-team gymnasts, past and present, and that -- at the intersection of sports and American pop culture -- makes for one of the best advertisements the sport could ever ask for, a reminder that men's gymnastics is for guys who are as tough as steel and that, too, men's gymnastics deserves way, way, way more attention than it usually gets.

Which is, to over-simplify, once every four years.

And, even then -- the men are often overshadowed by the girls.

Formally, that would be the "women's events,"  but as everyone understands those are -- with exceptions -- teen-age girls out there, not women.

The men -- they're men.

David Durante -- the 2007 U.S. all-around champion, he's a Stanford grad who just spent the last year burnishing his renaissance-man chops in Italy.

Morgan Hamm -- a two-time Olympian, now married, now in pharmacy school in Wisconsin.

John Macready -- the youngest member of the 1996 Olympic team, he has gone on to make a career out of hosting gymnastics and other events.  "I never dreamed gymnastics would take me to the places I've seen or the things I've done," he said.

The full list of the nine who now go down in Victoria's Secret, and gymnastics, lore: Durante, Hamm, Macready, Stephen McCain, Sasha Artemev, Alexei Bilozertchev, Chris Brooks, Wes Haagensen and Derek Shepard.

"This was definitely an opportunity that when I saw it, I thought, you're not going to get many of these types in your experiences in your life. I'm like, all right, I'm doing it," Hamm said.

And talk about an understanding wife -- asked how his bride of 18 months, Megan, reacted when she first heard about what was up, he said she responded, "Wow, cool."

"I heard that Blaine turned it down," Durante said, meaning Blaine Wilson, the 1996, 2000 and 2004 Olympic-team mainstay, "and it will probably be the biggest regret of his life."

Because this is just a partial list of who else was at the show Wednesday night, which airs Nov. 30 on CBS:

Katy Perry, who arrived flaunting considerable cleavage and "looking eye-popping in pink," as one celebrity website put it. Akon, the R&B star. Tennis star Serena Williams. "Entourage" actor Adrian Grenier. "Blondie" singer Debbie Harry.

Oh, and did we mention there were scantily clad models?

"Obviously," said Shane Geraghty, the link between the show and the top U.S. gymnasts, "Victoria's Secret has the hottest models in the world. To have them interacting with these top gymnasts, and making the gymnasts sexy on the same level the girls are -- that was great.

"The girls would come down the runway and give the guys props, a wink or a high-five. They were very excited about it -- the girls, that is. All that makes gymnastics look cool."

Geraghty is now 37. In college, he was twice captain of the Syracuse gymnastics team. He and Jonathan Nosan, who has a theater and circus-training background, run a production and event-management company in New York City called Acroback.

Originally, Geraghty said, the thought was to recruit some local gymnastics-type talent for the Victoria's Secret show.

Quickly enough, though, it became apparent that they needed more. They needed guys who could handle the intensity of a demanding rehearsal schedule and still be able to go at show time.

They needed national- and Olympic-caliber gymnasts.

"The rehearsing was intense," Durante said. "We got there," to New York, "on Saturday night. We rehearsed all day Sunday, Monday and Tuesday," from 10 in the morning until 9 at night. "We went through two dry-runs Wednesday morning with the models. Then we had two shows Wednesday night."

Macready said, "We're coming back into the building for the second show, two or three of us, and I heard out of the side of my ear someone say, 'Those guys are the gymnasts who are so absolutely amazing.' To have someone in that environment make a comment like that -- it was like, wow, this is cool."

Macready also said, "When we first got there," for the first rehearsals, "one of the ladies who was a stage coordinator said, 'I bet everyone made fun of you in high school for being a gymnast. Now they're going to see you and say, I want to be a gymnast.'

"It funny," he went on. "When you're growing up in that environment," meaning high school, "it's all about what is cool and not cool, what is tough and not tough. When you get older, and I'm now 35, you have people who in football and other tough sports show you respect and show you how amazing they think your sport is."

All along, it was critical to Geraghty that stylistically the gymnasts be perceived on the runway as -- well, gymnasts. That is, not as dancers or Cirque du Soleil-style characters.

"It was such a great thing for the gymnasts to be able to do something on this scale," he said. "It was great to involve the male gymnastics, who can be overlooked outside of the Olympics. And I hope it gets boys excited to be involved in gymnastics."

You think?

As the Huffington Post reported: "Longtime model Isabeli Fontana did enjoy a fully engaging moment during this show when she strutted in a silver bra and sequin swim bottoms carrying an oversized barbell and tossed it to a group of bare-chested male gymnasts."

"Just being around such amazingly beautiful women and being able to perform on stage with them -- that was pretty exciting," Hamm said.

"The only way I can put it," Durante said as the sun came up on another morning and it was no longer a day in which he was hanging around a bunch of hot models, "is that it's depressing today."

The star of America's fencing renaissance

If fencing was football, Mariel Zagunis would be a star on the order of Peyton Manning. There would be gauzy slo-mo half-hour TV features on her and everyone would know all about her Olympian parents (both on the 1976 U.S. rowing team), the Notre Dame connection, the two Olympic individual gold medals. That is, two so far. If fencing was basketball, Mariel Zagunis would be like MJ, Kobe and LeBron. MJ? MZ! A couple days ago, MZ took her talents to France and won yet another world championship in the sabre.

If fencing was boxing -- well, maybe there can only be one who is eternally The Greatest. But Zagunis, with this latest world championship, won Saturday at the famed Grand Palais in Paris, has made it abundantly plain that she holds a singular place in the annals of American Olympic sports.

She's great, and she has led an American renaissance in the sport. Click here to read the rest at TeamUSA.org.

New face in U.S. Olympic Training Center cafeteria line: Paul Hamm

It was just a couple days before the start of last month's gymnastics world championships that Paul Hamm, the 2004 Athens Games all-around gold medalist,  moved into the U.S. Olympic Training Center. His sky-blue Acura TSX, the one with Wisconsin plates, pulled up to the center, in Colorado Springs, Colo., and thus launched the most anticipated comeback in U.S. men's gymnastics history.

Bring on London and 2012, because with a healthy Paul Hamm on board, the U.S. men -- who finished fourth in the team competition at the 2010 worlds -- immediately become contenders, and not just to place but to win.

Paul turned 28 in September. He will be closing in on 30 in the summer of 2012. If he can stay healthy, he will -- appropriately -- be seen as a medal favorite in the all-around and in a number of individual events as well.

Understand: If he were to never make another appearance in red, white and blue, Paul Hamm has already secured his place in gymnastics history. He is the first American male to win the Olympic all-around (2004); he is also the first American male to win the all-around at the world championships (2003).

This comeback, though, could secure his legacy as not just one of the greatest American gymnasts ever; he could be the greatest. Indisputably, unequivocally -- the greatest.

Click here to read the rest at TeamUSA.org.