Pyeongchang 2018's conductor: Yang Ho Cho

PYEONGCHANG, South Korea -- Nine years ago, Yang Ho Cho, who is the chairman and chief executive officer of Korean Air but who is really a regular guy, got five of his buddies together and they did one of those bucket-list things. They drove across the United States, Los Angeles to New York. Yang Ho Cho is not, after an extraordinary career in business, lacking for means. He could have arranged the trip so that he and the crew stayed at the most upscale of hotels and ate only the finest meals. Not the point. They wanted to feel the United States, to have a genuine experience, to talk along the way with real Americans.

They did have two big cars, a Lincoln and a Lexus, for all six guys and their bags. But for most of the trip they stayed at $30 per night Best Western motels. They ate with near-religious fervor at McDonald's for breakfast; at Kentucky Fried Chicken, Subway or (again) McDonald's for lunch; and, always, at a Chinese joint for dinner.

"No matter how small the town was," he said, laughing, remembering the adventure, "there was always a Chinese restaurant."

This third straight Korean bid for the Winter Olympic Games brings with it an almost-entirely new set of characters. Perhaps no one embodies that fact more than Yang Ho Cho, and that holds significant consequence should the International Olympic Committee chose Pyeongchang in its July 6 vote for 2018. Munich and Annecy, France, are also in the race.

The IOC's 2018 Evaluation Commission, after visiting Annecy last week, turned this week to Pyeongchang. It travels March 1-4 to Munich.

With the exception of a very few notable personalities, among them the former provincial governor here, Kim Jun Sun, the prior two Korean bids -- both unsuccessful, for the 2010 and 2014 Winter Games -- left a remarkably unremarkable impression. The image that lingers: packs of men, almost all men, dressed alike in dark suits, smoking a lot of cigarettes, speaking the Korean language almost exclusively, obviously giving off the impression of competence in their spheres but just as obviously not resolving to the IOC's satisfaction one of the most elemental questions any bid campaign presents:

Do I want to do business with these people?

In any enterprise, the wanting-to-do-business factor depends on the getting-to-know-you factor -- and all the more so in the Olympic sphere, where bids cost tens of millions of dollars and Games run to billions. The IOC has a franchise not only to extend but to protect.

The IOC thus moves with prudence and common sense.

So does Yang Ho Cho.

This is a man who oversaw nothing less than a thorough transformation of his airline's corporate culture. He took over after a series of accidents in the 1990s; he instituted changes that turned Korean Air into one of the world's safest carriers.

This is a man who moves easily now at the highest levels of Korean and western business, government and politics.

At the same time, this is a man who moves comfortably in any environment -- having seen pretty much everything along the way, including the Vietnam War, the Korean DMZ, gritty downtown Los Angeles and a lot of McDonald's menu boards.

He is a genuine human being. He is accessible and real. "I want not just to shake the hands of the IOC members," he said here Thursday night, one of a series of conversations in various locales around the world over the past several months. "Instead, I want them to say, 'This is a guy I can work with for the next eight years.' This is what we want to show."

Real people, even important businessmen, sometimes make mistakes -- that's life. Yang Ho Cho accepts responsibility and asks to move on. Last year, Korean Air signed a sponsorship deal with the International Skating Union. The ISU's president, Ottavio Cinquanta, is a ranking IOC personality. The IOC thereupon issued a warning to the Pyeongchang bid committee, and the airline agreed to postpone its sponsorship of the skating federation until after the July 6 vote.

"We had good intentions," Yang Ho Cho said. "There wasn't any hanky-panky. I had to learn.

"... If you're talking about transport -- I'm an expert. Sports -- I'm learning."

This Korean 2018 crew is -- like Yang Ho Cho -- entirely, indeed profoundly, different. They move, many of them, effortlessly in English -- like communications director Theresa Rah.

They invite you to sit with them in the hotel bars. If that doesn't sound like such a big deal -- it's a huge change from the prior two bid cycles.

Early on, it was decided that the 2018 strategy would be to reach out, early, to non-Koreans who could help -- among them, the English communications and strategy advisor Mike Lee, who played a key role in Rio de Janeiro's winning 2016 Games bid, as well as the American counterpart Terrence Burns, who helped Sochi win for 2014.

Most intriguingly, Yang Ho Cho is not the emotional center of the campaign. Nor is he aiming to be. In that regard, the German and Korean campaigns make for a vivid contrast. Munich puts forward a star: Katarina Witt, a two-time Olympic figure skating champion. Yang Ho Cho is more orchestra conductor than star.

It is perhaps illuminating that though Yang Ho Cho of course speaks English -- he went to high school in the United States -- he had no trouble a few months back acknowledging a succession of 2018 advisers who suggested that with a little bit of practice he could sound just that much better.

How many chief executives are truly willing to accept such coaching?

"Why not?" he said Thursday. "I can learn from anyone who can teach me."

If you know Yang Ho Cho's back story, though, that's hardly surprising.

Korean Air is the family business. So he didn't exactly grow up in poverty.

But he didn't exactly wallow in privilege.

Yang Ho Cho's passions have always been travel and photography. After high school, he went to go see the sights in Europe. His father sent him to the continent with $3,000.

"I spent only $2,000. I gave him back $1,000. After that," he said, "my father never questioned my spending."

Next:  boot camp in the Korean Army. When that was finished, he was sent to the DMZ:  "We had no electricity. We had to use kerosene lamps just to see. For me, it was just too much of a shock."

Anything, he reasoned, had to be better.

So he volunteered to go to Vietnam.

Again -- he volunteered to go to a war zone. "At least in Vietnam," he said, "they had electricity."

He spent 11 months there. "After that -- it was back to the DMZ." And after that, he had learned something about himself: "If I can live at the DMZ, I can do anything."

When his military service ended, he went to college in Korea, then moved to Los Angeles, to learn the family business in earnest.

He and his wife lived downtown. He was getting paid $800 per month. Their rent was $300. It was a big treat to take the kids out for French fries.

While in Los Angeles, he earned a master's degree at USC -- where he now serves on the board of trustees.

He still has the California driver's license he got all those years ago. It came in handy on that road trip to New York.

He and his crew saw the national parks in Utah; then took in Santa Fe, New Mexico; went back up to Oklahoma; headed down to New Orleans; east to Savannah, Georgia; then made their way up through Washington, D.C., to New York.

Oh, they did make one other important stop along the way. They went to Memphis, and for one very important reason.

That's where you can find Graceland and, as Yang Ho Cho said with a laugh, "I like Elvis."

Lindsey Vonn's epic silver

GARMISCH-PARTENKIRCHEN, Germany -- Second place? That's just the first loser, right? You don't win silver; you lose gold. So went the tag line from that insufferable shoe commercial.

It's all how you define winning. And how you measure a champion.

Lindsey Vonn threw down an epic run here Sunday, a courageous performance on the Kandahar course to win silver at alpine skiing's 2011 world championships.

"Today," she said afterward, "feels like a gold medal."

It should, and it goes down as one more chapter in the growing legend of one of the great American athletes of our time, because just 11 days ago Lindsey Vonn smacked her head on an icy mountain in a fall on a training run and suffered a concussion.

Austria's Elisabeth Goergl won Sunday's downhill; German's Maria Riesch, skiing before her hometown fans, took third.

Goergl's victory marked the first time that someone other than Vonn or Reisch had won a World Cup level downhill in nearly two years -- 15 races dating back to Feb. 28, 2009.

The American team finished with three skiers in the top 10 -- something not seen in a downhill in 15 years. Julia Mancuso took sixth and Laurenne Ross tenth, a career-best.

One day, meanwhile, when Lindsey Vonn's career is over and done, they will look back and surely some of what she has accomplished will seem almost unreal.

Like somebody had to make this stuff up.

Except it has all been real, and she deserves enormous credit for just how competitive and mentally strong she has proven herself to be, time and again.

"She," Markus Wasmeier, the 1994 Lillehammer Games gold medalist in both super-G and giant slalom, said Sunday, "is a racer made for pressure."

Five years ago, at the 2006 Torino Games, there was the horrifying crash she suffered in training before the downhill. She was hospitalized overnight. She finished eighth.

Two years ago, there was the slashed-up thumb on the champagne bottle at the world championships. She nonetheless went on to win the World Cup overall title.

Last year, there was the badly bruised arm and then the banged-up shin, and saying the shin was banged up really doesn't even begin to describe how badly it was hurt. She nonetheless won the Olympic downhill, took bronze in the Olympic super-G and won the World Cup overall title.

Last week, she suffered the concussion in a training run. She pulled out of Friday's slalom portion of the super-combined. She had made the one training run she had needed to compete in Sunday's downhill but had done so in a puffy sort of warmup jacket, to keep her speed under control.

The Kandahar downhill runs for about 1.8 miles. Alpine skiing is conducted on  "snow" that runs to "ice." You wear a skin-tight suit to reduce aerodynamic drag as well as a helmet. Lindsey Vonn's top speed Sunday ran to about 72 miles per hour.

There's nothing, really, to compare what being an elite ski racer is like. The best anyone can come up with is this:

Imagine what it's like driving at night, down a country road. You're depending on your headlights to see where you're going. You feel incredibly alive, keenly aware of everything around you. At the same time, you need every bit of everything you've got -- all of your senses -- just to keep the car on the road.

Now imagine you're driving just a little bit faster than the range of your headlights. That's the description offered of trying to do the downhill still suffering the effects of a concussion.

To be blunt, and obvious, about it: people can, and do, get seriously hurt in ski racing.

Antoine Deneriaz, the Torino 2006 Winter Games downhill champion, stressing that he was not expressing any opinion about whether Lindsey should or should not race Sunday, said about the downhill, "It's not something  you just do. You have to be 100 percent, and beyond."

Sweden's Pernilla Wiberg, winner of three medals at four Olympics, including a silver at the 1998 Nagano downhill, also emphasizing that she was not offering an opinion about whether Lindsey ought to be racing, said of the downhill itself, "The most important thing is to have 100 percent concentration at the start.

"If you have any doubt when you put your poles outside that start gate, you should not start. You should have respect for the mountain. You should not be afraid. But if you have doubt -- you should not start."

Dr. William Sterett, the U.S. team doctor, tested Lindsey every day to see if she was ready to compete. He said she could. She decided she would.

Somehow, she managed to pick up speed when nearly everyone else tired, at the bottom of the course. That's how she slipped into second, ahead of Riesch, who had run three spots ahead.

No one was going to catch Goergl this day. Goergl skied beautifully, to the sounds of "Eye of the Tiger" blaring over the mountain loudspeakers. It should have been "Rocking the Free World," or the official song of these championships, "You Are the Hero," which Goergl herself sang last week in front of 11,000 fans, including German chancellor Angela Merkl at the opening ceremony.

Again, you can't make some of this stuff up. You couldn't if you tried.

"I could feel the speed today," Lindsey Vonn said afterward. "I think I made some really good turns today and I was happy with my skiing. There were great conditions out there.

"It was a fun downhill and I enjoyed racing it today."

Fun. She said it was fun.

Annecy -- it's a French thing

ANNECY, France -- The International Olympic Committee's 2018 evaluation commission headed out of town Saturday after declaring that this alpine town was indeed very pretty. "The International Olympic Committee's 2018 evaluation commission has been very pleased to spend time in this beautiful lakeside city, situated in a region where winter sports are so popular," the commission chairwoman, Sweden's Gunilla Lindberg, said at a news conference early Saturday evening as streaks of pink from a lovely sunset lit the western sky.

That is really what happened. And that is really what Lindberg said. It was masterful.

Anyone expecting substance in this context has never been to one of these evaluation commission news conferences, where it is spelled out early and repeatedly that the IOC discussion from the dais will revolve around matters technical, not political. Platitudes are both perfunctory and expected.

Beyond which -- in this case, it's fully in the IOC's interest to be as bland as possible to ensure that Annecy is depicted as a legitimate contender.

The IOC has had no trouble in recent years attracting Summer Games bids from all over the world. But Winter Games bids have been fewer. So a 2018 two-horse contest -- with only Munich and Pyeongchang, South Korea, remaining -- would ill serve the IOC.

Even so, the reality of Annecy's legitimacy is both far more complex and far more subtle, as France's sports minister, Chantal Jouanno, made clear in a wide-ranging roundtable conversation earlier Saturday with reporters.

To be plain:

The minister asserted emphatically that Annecy is in the race to win.

"What I think is we are now on the same line as the other candidatures," she said after a series of make-overs in recent months that have seen Charles Beigbeder take over for Edgar Grospiron as bid leader, a thorough revamping of the technical plan and other significant moves.

At the same time, she acknowledged the obvious: the Annecy bid has been grappling with any number of structural, cultural, political, financial, story-telling and other challenges.

In other words -- it's French.

There are obviously so many lovely things about France. Too, it is so easy to like being in the French Alps, and especially in Chamonix, one of the main hubs of the Annecy bid. And of course Chamonix is the site of the first Winter Games, in 1924.

At the same time, the whole France thing wasn't so great for the unsuccessful Paris Summer Games bid for 2008, or the unsuccessful Paris Summer Games bid for 2012. And now the Annecy 2018 bid has spotlighted again some of the very same problematic issues.

The Olympic movement, for instance, moves increasingly in English, in some ways almost exclusively in English. You can understand why the French would want to speak French. But if you have a message you want to communicate, wouldn't it make more sense to do so in a way that people hear you in the way you want -- indeed, need -- to be heard?

The Olympic bid process now runs to more than $50 million per campaign. If you're going to throw yourself into the game, why get in for $25 million? That's roughly the announced Annecy budget. Bluntly, that's just not enough, and that's what caused Grospiron to get out in December,  and Jean-Claude Killy to note here Friday -- unprompted -- that Grospiron had done a great job under the circumstances.

The bid process now relies heavily on international consultants. Admittedly, they are expensive. Are they worth it? Just to name two: Mike Lee helped Rio win the 2016 Summer Games. Jon Tibbs helped Sochi win the 2014 Winter Games.  Lee is working now for Pyeongchang, Tibbs for Munich. But Annecy went for long months without any international consultant, either to save money or on the belief that the French could surely figure out a French way to run a French campaign, or both.

"To a certain extent, what you're seeing with Annecy is these [French] institutions that are intelligent and well-meaning but there's so little space for some pushing out of the old and incorporating of the new," said Laurent Dubois, a Duke University professor and author of the recent book, Soccer Empire: The World Cup and the Future of France.

"The solution is going to have to be some French solution," Dubois said. "There's no reason to think they can't think of one. That's not to think they are going to have to accept what the U.S. or the British are doing. But the only way is for the younger generation to have a way in shaping what's going on."

Jouanno, who is among other things a 12-time French karate champion, took over as sports minister just last November. She is 41 years old.

Asked if she believed institutional issues were at the root of the ups and downs of Annecy's bid, she said, "This is just French character. We just like to have drama in what we are doing."

Even so, last month, she announced the formation of an "Assemblee du Sport" to review and develop French policy going forward, saying it would include representatives of the state, municipalities, business and sport. "One must admit that while society has changed, the organization of sport has changed very little," she was quoted as saying in the newspaper Le Monde.

Granted, the minister is new to her job -- but perhaps that marks the sort of smart thinking that should have been done well in advance of an Olympic campaign, not smack-dab in the middle of one.

Jouanno acknowledged serious thought was given late last year to withdrawing Annecy from the 2018 campaign. But millions of euros had already been spent. And, she said, "We would have been the only country resigning just six months before the end. This is not the sport spirit."

So now several changes have been made.

Beigbeder is on board. The technical plan has been re-worked. A number of Olympic athletes now play leadership roles on the Annecy 2018 team. Several key Annecy leaders move easily in English; Jouanno spoke mostly Saturday in English. A veteran international consultant, Andrew Craig, has been retained.

The budget, Jouanno said, still needs more cash.

Craig said, "Although there has been much talk about the Annecy bid being under-budgeted and so forth, the reality is it's human capital that wins bids and the human capital in the Annecy bid is now very, very strong."

As the IOC commission moves on -- next week to Pyeongchang, to Munich the first week in March -- the task in Annecy would now seem to be to figure out what story to tell, and how to tell it.

"We are not trying to put flash in your eyes, put stars in your eyes. We just want to show you our mountains," the minister said.

So simple, right?

As ever, though, this is France, so it gets made more complex and subtle. Perhaps the task is also to convince the voters that in fact the Annecy 2018 bid is not -- as some have suspected all along -- merely a stalking horse for the big prize, another Summer Games bid from Paris, or another French city.

Paris played host to the 1924 Summer Games. A bid to commemorate the 100th anniversary of those Games would be so very French, wouldn't it?

The minister was asked Saturday whether France would bid for the Summer Games if Annecy doesn't win out. Such an easy question to answer with a simple, "I don't know," or a, "We'll see." But this is France. Commend the minister at least her honesty:

"If we win the Winter Games of 2018 we won't be a candidate," she said. "If we don't win, probably.

"Because it has been too many times France didn't organize the Olympic Games."

Jean-Claude Killy meets the press

ANNECY, France -- Jean-Claude Killy met the press here Friday night, about 10 writers, most international reporters, a few locals. "We have come a long way," Killy said, referring to the Annecy bid for the 2018 Winter Games. To be emphatic: There is still a long way to go.

Indeed, perhaps a long, long way to go for Annecy, which by virtually all accounts started the International Olympic Committee's visit here this week in third place in a three-city race and almost surely ends the visit still looking up.

There are still five months to go before the IOC picks the 2018 site; Pyeongchang, South Korea, and Munich are the other two cities in the contest.

"I would say Annecy is back in the race," Killy asserted, and it's true: in five months anything can happen.

Now the question for the next five months: can Annecy 2018 make something happen?

Killy's comments late Friday capped a day of enormous symbolism that highlighted both the opportunity here and the real-world challenges the Annecy campaign must confront.

The opportunity:

The countryside is, in a word, magnificent. To see Mont Blanc and Chamonix on a day like Friday, when the sun was shining and there wasn't a cloud in the brilliant blue sky, is to be reminded of a simple truth: it can be spectacular here.

The skiing is great. The food is great. The wine is great. The cheese -- it may well have been made by the gentleman standing behind the counter himself and he can tell you which cow you ought to thank.

Where else in the world do you find that combination?

Killy, at ease, penciled in for 20 minutes with the press, stayed for 30, the last couple devoted to the reading of a quote he attributed to the artist Paul Cézanne, the great 19th-century French post-impressionist, about the beauty of Lake Annecy, Killy saying he intends to read the words Saturday to the IOC committee as they prepare to depart:

"It is a temperate area. The surrounding hills are of a reasonable height, the lake, narrowed at this spot by two gorges, seems to lend itself to the linear exercises of young ladies."

"See," Killy said, letting the words settle, laughing, "everything in France ends with the love."

If only the Annecy 2018 bid committee could count on the IOC to be so tender.

To paraphrase the more modern American artist Bruce Springsteen -- the French had better start working harder for the IOC's love.

Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, flew down to this part of the country Friday to meet with the IOC commission. Sarkozy did not meet with reporters covering the IOC's visit.

But, according to an Associated Press account of a tourism and economics conference in La Clusaz, the proposed venue for the cross-country and Nordic combined events, Sarkozy said it would be tough to overcome Annecy's "extremely powerful" rivals.

Sarkozy said, "You have got a very good bid book. Your region is absolutely beautiful. You want to host those games. We are going to fight together to have them."

On the one hand, it's imperative for the bid that Sarkozy make his manners with the IOC over lunch and stump for Annecy 2018 at such conferences.

The IOC demands unqualified support from national governments. It wants to know, reasonably enough, if something goes wrong that the government -- of whatever country it is -- stands ready to guarantee the Olympic project's finances.

"Whether it's a plus or not it's a disaster if it doesn't happen," Killy observed later in the day, referring to such guarantees, which France has emphatically offered, adding, "It's going to happen in Korea, heavily, and in Germany, I am sure."

The challenge with Sarkozy may well be -- Sarkozy.

It is hardly forgotten within the IOC that in late March 2008 Sarkozy became the first world leader to suggest he might boycott the Beijing Olympics as a means of ratcheting up pressure on China over Tibet.

Ultimately, Sarkozy relented. He attended the epic ceremony.

Also not forgotten within the IOC: the tortured path the Beijing torch relay took through Paris in April, 2008, when the flame was extinguished several times, Chinese organizers canceling the last leg through the French capital as well as a stop at City Hall where a banner read, "Paris Defends Human Rights Everywhere in the World."

If it seems unfair to conflate free speech in Paris in 2008 with a bid in Annecy in 2011 for the Winter Games in the mountains in 2018 -- well, c'est la vie, right?

Which had to have been -- or surely should have been -- evident to anyone and everyone in France when the subject of an Annecy bid was undertaken in the first instance.

Compounding the challenge was the way the bid was initially drawn up, with way too many venues.

This past June, the IOC said, no, that's way too many venues. Come back with a different plan. A "black eye," Killy said, adding a moment later, "The bid started very poorly."

The new plan, centered on Annecy and Chamonix with the sliding sports at La Plagne, is better, he said. Credit for that, he said, is due Edgar Grospiron, the then-bid leader who resigned in December amid concerns the project was under-funded.

Killy said of Grospiron: "He did a wonderful job."

Such comments from Killy are powerful, indeed. Killy is not only a French ski legend but arguably the single most important winter-sports figure within Olympic circles, co-chair of the 1992 Albertville Games, the IOC's link to the 2006 Torino and 2014 Sochi Games. He knows sports, politics, business. He knows real when he sees it, and when he doesn't.

So his distance from the Annecy 2018 bid over the past months had been thoroughly obvious.

What, then, to read into his meeting Friday with the press? A rapprochement of sorts, certainly, with the 2018 effort.

But read into this what you will, Killy saying of Charles Beigbeder, the new bid leader, "I don't know him very well, I have seen him two days -- that's all."

Or this, Killy asked how much he expects to pitch in from here on in and answering, "I have my own business. I have Sochi for fun," laughing and adding, "I'm choosing my words properly. And I will help Annecy as much as I can, as much as I can, because I am from this region."

It will be spring soon, and the linear exercises of young ladies will commence in earnest along lovely Lake Annecy. And then summer, and an IOC vote July 6.

"There is no perfect bid," Killy said. "I have been in this business for 30 years.

"There is no perfect bid," he repeated. "The outcome is not known to no one."

Trading cover-two schemes for a five-point try

Sometimes you see something and it's such a no-brainer. Maybe that's why, you know, the smart ones really do go to those Ivy League schools.

Miles Craigwell, who will turn 25 in March, played football for Brown. He was a solid football player, a linebacker, good enough after graduation to legitimately chase the NFL dream. It didn't work out. No shame. A lot of big, fast guys don't make it.

Miles Craigwell, though, is big, fast and smart. Back home, he happened to be watching a rugby sevens match on television. Talk about -- and here's where it pays to know the kind of words they like you to know at schools like Brown -- serendipity.

This weekend, the HSBC Sevens World Series rugby tour lands in Las Vegas, its sole American stop on a global tour that already has been to Dubai, South Africa and New Zealand and will go on to Hong Kong, Australia, England and Scotland.  The U.S. team includes one Miles Craigwell.

He said, "Rugby -- it's 14 minutes straight at 100 percent. It's like doing the two-minute drill in football, no-huddle, for 14 minutes straight."

Craigwell saw that rugby broadcast last June. He picked up a rugby ball for the first time last July. Now he's on the U.S. national sevens team. It's too much to expect he'd be the featured act this weekend in Vegas, and odds are he won't be.

Even so, he may well be the most interesting guy on the American side, whether he plays big minutes or not.

Why?

Because he's a smart guy, and he's on to something that a lot of other football players doubtlessly are going to be checking out in the coming months and years.

How many football players, really, are going to make it in the NFL?

What career opportunities await those who wash out?

For all of them, which of these sounds more appealing:

Playing for the likes of the Spokane Shock, San Jose SaberCats or Iowa Barnstormers of the Arena Football League, or traveling the world and maybe playing for your country in the Olympics? Or at least giving that second option a try?

Hmm. Rugby sevens is going to be in the Olympics come the Rio Games of 2016. That's Rio de Janeiro. The "Iowa Barnstormers" play in Des Moines.

In the United States, football is huge. But rugby could be the next big thing. And rugby is fun. The rugby scene deliberately includes party time. (Check out the background in the photo above from last weekend: "NZ Beer Pong Assoc.")

In part, that's why the tour's American stop was moved to Vegas. It's said, you know, that Vegas can be a fun place to party.

This is the weekend after the Super Bowl, of course: "Our message to Americans," said Mike Miller, secretary general of the International Rugby Board, "is if you like football you probably will like rugby. Give it a try."

Like Miles Craigwell.

"When I saw the sevens, I was like, wow, the athleticism -- that is definitely something I could do."

By the way, there's an incredibly deep pool of rugby-type talent out there that's now playing football in the United States. How is the U.S. sevens team doing this year?

A look at the Series standings heading into the Vegas weekend shows England and New Zealand tied for first; Samoa in third, Fiji in fourth, South Africa fifth, Australia sixth, Argentina and Wales tied for seventh, the United States ninth and Kenya and Scotland tied for tenth.

The standings further show England and New Zealand with 64 points. The Americans have six. Just checking: When was the last time the Americans stood behind Samoa, Fiji and Wales in anything?

Could an infusion of some bad-ass linebacking and Cover Two-type talent maybe go far in addressing that kind of thing?

Is Al Caravelli, the U.S. sevens coach, a forward-thinker?

On the official USA Rugby website, Caravelli gives his description of his ideal sevens player: "physical, big and yappy." Does that description match, say, any football players?

When the sevens tour landed in Dubai as the tour got underway in December, Caravelli told a newspaper there, referring to Craigwell, "When we talked about the future and rugby being in the Olympics, that attracted [him] immensely. He thought to himself, 'I could stay in the United States and play on a domestic stage, or maybe go and play on the world stage. That is more appealing to me right now.'

"We have thrown him into the deep end. He is very powerful and his defensive ability is scary.

"He hits so hard, he is very explosive."

One final thought: If it turns out there really is an NFL labor action in the coming months, aren't there going to be a lot of football players looking for something to do?

"I was eating at a diner, the sevens were on TV," Miles Craigwell said. " I dropped the fork and I said, 'What is this sport?' "

A whole bunch of football players may well be asking that very same question. And soon.

'Donner du sens' from a guy talking sense

ANNECY, France -- If the Olympic Games come to Annecy in 2018, the famous chef Marc Veyrat was asked here Wednesday, what will you prepare on the day of the opening ceremony? "The Olympic Games," he said, "are full of flavor and authenticity and truth. And, you know what we're going to do? We're going to have an Olympic Games with a capital A for 'amour' -- amour for love.

"Love in all its depth and all its aspects. Love for the region. Love for being able to hand down the legacy. We are proud we want the Games. We know," he said, "that this is an incredible, extraordinary region."

For two years, this Annecy bid has struggled mightily with what in idiomatic French might be called donner du sens -- what in English we would call the narrative.

In just a few seconds at a news conference here, while the International Olympic Committee's evaluation commission was elsewhere in town, studying the Annecy file, Veyrat may very well have sketched out the contours of that narrative.

Now: Does the Annecy bid team want to hear it?

And do they want to hear it from a big guy who wears a big black hat, just like his grandfather wore a big black hat, and who is unapologetically progressive and environmentally oriented?

Far be it from me, an American, to offer the French perspective about anything.

But does this sound like a guy who might have some sense:  "Just like a hamburger, the Olympic Games can become a healthy meal if you put it together properly."

Veyrat grew up in this part of France, the Haute-Savoie, around food, family and nature. They had cows and pigs. They made their own butter and cheese. They picked blueberries. "At every step," he said, "I was told, 'Look, this is nature.' "

In the mid-1930s, meanwhile, the family had opened an inn at the base of a chairlift. "People liked going to the restaurant because it smelled good there," he said.

For the young Marc Veyrat, meanwhile, "These 'strangers' [at the inn] were for my parents a wonder. They brought this openness. They fed our souls."

The grown-up Marc Veyrat became one of France's, indeed the world's, great chefs, emphasizing the use of the herbs and plants he could harvest in the French Alps. He won, for instance, six Michelin stars, three for his first two restaurants. He earned a perfect grade of 20/20 in the Gault-Millau guide.

When he talks, he talks a little bit like Jimi Hendrix used to riff on the guitar. The words just sort of rush right out.

Does it all hold together?

That depends.

Is what he has to offer a tightly coherent message? Could the Annecy 2018 committee take his comments, wrap them in a bow and present them to the IOC? Of course not.

Are the threads all there?

After the news conference, Veyrat and I talked, one on one, for 45 minutes. He has a lot  -- and I mean a lot -- to say.

For instance: "The paradox is that people say the notion of identity -- provincial life, rural life, the Alps, the Olympic Games, these can't all go together. But that's our goal. That's what we are striving for, to use these Games to reinforce this notion of identity, to better define our identity within the Alps."

And: "There's an underlying problem. I'm going to repeat myself. It's about the heart. It's about not just can we -- but do we want -- these Olympic Games? It's about do we want these Olympic Games to be about sports or about something else?

"I think the Olympic Games can be about so much more than just sport. I think they're about a way of communicating. I think they're about a way of having exchanges with others and a way of opening ourselves up with knowledge. That's why we should have the Games. That's why we should want the Games. It's about love. It's about being in love, with a capital L. It's love for your region. Do you love your region enough to defend it enough to make it into an Olympic region? And why the Olympics? Why the Haute-Savoie? This region is already a universal draw for tourists, from Lake Annecy to Mont Blanc. Skiing is what we know. Skiing is who we are. Everybody skis.

"… The reason I think we deserve these Olympic Games is because these would be  the Games that would be ruled by reason, by sanity. It's about respect for others, respect for the planet.

"… The whole point of the Olympic Games is for each [edition] to be able to tell their story, the story of where they live. The thing is, in this region we have very deep roots. The whole point is to have this trace-ability, to know where they come from. These Games are going to be devilish in a way. Because it's really important. We are going to get the youth in. We are going to put a sparkle in their eyes. As they get older, they are going to remember they once had this opportunity to see this incredible region that is near Switzerland called Haute-Savoie, where life is so good, where life was made so good by the people who live there."

If this man offered to cook for you, wouldn't you accept? If he had some advice for you along the way, might you listen?

Let's put it a different way: If you're the Annecy bid team, what do you have to lose?

140 minutes on the bus to La Plagne

ANNECY, France -- No matter how many times one travels through the Alps, it never fails. To be here is breathtaking, indeed awe-inspiring. You wind through canyons marked by vineyards and quaint villages, through mountains that seem to rise right up from rushing rivers, these huge massive blocks of rock standing sentinel against the sky.

This is ski country, indeed the world's leading destination for winter sports. Seven million people come to this region each winter, according to the French ministry that counts such things, and from all over the world.

So there's zero question the French could organize Winter Games. After all, the very first Winter Games were organized in France, and in this part of France -- in Chamonix, in 1924.

There's also zero question that the French know how to organize Winter Games: Chamonix in 1924 was followed by Grenoble in 1968, and that was followed by Albertville in 1992.

So the pertinent question now, as an International Olympic Committee commission on Wednesday undertook a three-day evaluation of the latest bid here for the Winter Games: France, again?

In Annecy, in 2018?

The IOC will pick the 2018 Winter Games site in July. Annecy is in a three-way race. The other two candidates: Pyeongchang, South Korea, and Munich.

This IOC evaluation visit is the first of three site visits. Annecy gets looked over first; Pyeongchang gets visited next week; Munich gets looked over in early March.

The preliminary question the IOC wants to know here is: what kind of Games would they be if they went to Annecy in 2018?

The focus here -- at this point -- is purportedly on what's called the "technical" merits of the bid, on matters such as transport, hotels and other such things. The politics purportedly comes later. Not really -- but there are technical issues to be reviewed.

Fair or not, everyone knows the Albertville Games in 1992 were spread-out over what seemed like far-flung swatches of French mountainside.

Fair or not, too, everyone knows as well that the IOC had to step in last June and ask the Annecy 2018 bid committee to re-think the technical merits of its plan.

So they did. They centered the plan on two main hubs, Annecy and Chamonix.

So, they were asked at a news conference here Wednesday, why do you talk about two main hubs when there are really three?  The third would be the sliding center at La Plagne, where the bobsled, luge and skeleton competitions would be held -- the assembled journalists having had the advantage of having been taken by Annecy 2018 organizers to La Plagne earlier in the day.

The answer: Because we haven't planned an athletes' village nor a medals plaza at La Plagne so that doesn't get called a hub. It's just, like, the place where they'd actually do, you know, the sports.

Another question: The Annecy bid book says everyone who comes would be housed in roughly 530 hotels (or pensions or the like). That would make for a lot of people spread out in a lot of places. But the Olympics are all about getting groups of people together. What's the solution?

Answer: We're working on it, and we anticipate a "much stronger transport infrastructure."

Maybe.

Ninety minutes is what they said it would take from Annecy to La Plagne.

Perhaps.

It took two hours and twenty minutes Wednesday on the press bus, and that was on a day with perfect weather. No snow, no ice, temperatures in the 40s, maybe even 50s. Incidentally, the road to La Plagne features a barf-inducing series of 21 hairpin turns. Thoughtfully, they passed out hard candy on the press bus with assurances that it would quell any unease.

With a few kilometers yet to go to get to La Plagne, the last of the 21 turns behind us, there were eight cars strung out in a line behind the press bus.

These are precisely the sorts of real-world things the IOC ought to know about when evaluating the "technical" criteria. It's the kind of thing that isn't in the bid books.

Does this mean Annecy has no chance?

Not a chance.

These may, in the end, be glitches.

It is undeniably the case that the Annecy team is running on undeniable energy under new bid boss Charles Beigbeder.

The leadership team includes several former Olympic athletes. Many bids, of course, include former Olympic stars. In Annecy's case, they're not there to serve as mere props. They have real leadership roles and responsibilities, and word out of the first day of meetings with the evaluation commission was that the panel was duly impressed with that leadership.

Meanwhile, this 2018 campaign is the seventh IOC bid contest I have covered, dating back to 1999, and the press tour Wednesday easily ranks among the smoothest and most well-intentioned of such events (that is, it was genuine without being gratuitous). That's remarkable in any instance, all the more so because virtually all the organizers are new to the Olympic scene, some brought on literally just two or three weeks ago.

Imagine what they could do if they had seven years to pour themselves into it for real.

Shawn Johnson's comeback

Shawn Johnson, the sweet, gosh-don't-you-just-love-her gymnast from West Des Moines, Iowa, had won the world all-around title the year before the Beijing Games. She was thus widely favored to win the Olympic all-around in 2008. That didn't happen.

Shawn's American teammate, Nastia Liukin, lithe and fluid and evocative, particularly on the uneven bars, won the Olympic all-around.

Women's gymnastics has a funny way of lending itself to storybook endings, even when they come with a twist or two along the way. Nastia's fairy tale came true in 2008. Maybe Nastia comes back for 2012; maybe not. maybe not. Shawn, meantime, is emphatically back at it -- since Beijing having both enjoyed and endured celebrity stuff, normal teen stuff and a bad, really bad, knee injury.

"I love being able to consider myself an athlete again," Shawn said the other day on the phone. "I really missed that."

If Shawn's knee holds up, talk about storybook. She is both champion athlete and popular culture fixture, winner of "Dancing With the Stars." She is cute, personable, well-spoken, at ease on camera and off -- a great spokeswoman for gymnastics, pretty much everything the sport could ask for over the next 18 months as the London Games draw near.

Again, if the knee holds up -- she'll be chasing the one thing that eluded her in Beijing, the all-around title.

To properly set the scene for this year and next, it's necessary to re-visit Beijing and 2008, and to understand why Shawn is so much more than cute. She is mentally as tough as they come. Never, ever forget that. Shawn is as tough as forged steel.

The U.S. women, gold medalists at the 2007 world championship in the team competition, took silver at the Olympics, behind the Chinese.

Shawn and Nastia were -- they still are -- friends. Even so, only one girl gets the all-around gold. Shawn won silver.

Shawn was favored by many to win the floor exercise. She got silver.

So, finally, it came down to the last individual event, the balance beam.

Shawn might well have packed it in. Who would have blamed her, really?

But no.

Shawn may be sweet. But Shawn is so mentally strong that she won gold on the beam. If you don't think that's remarkable, keep in mind that the beam is all of four inches wide.

Keep in mind, too, that as a practical matter the beam gold meant Shawn wouldn't have to do another day of gymnastics in her life. Corporate America would forever see her as "gold medalist Shawn Johnson."

After Beijing, Shawn -- understandably -- took time off. She went to L.A. for a while, where she went on, and won "Dancing." She won multiple awards and did lots of cool stuff.  Eventually, she went back home to Iowa, and did normal teen-age girl stuff, and that -- in its way -- was excellent, too.

About a year ago, Shawn went skiing. Normal enough. Until she tore up her left knee, big time.

"I had freedom, the chance to try new things, to discover who I was outside the gym," Shawn said.

"I found out I love dancing. I love going to football games. And being a normal girl. School was a lot of fun for me. Getting ready for college."

At the same time, she said, "I'm a gymnast. I miss gymnastics. Gymnastics is who I am."

So many gymnasts have to deal with major injuries. Nastia, for instance, battled a succession of injuries and then peaked, healthy, in Beijing.

This is Shawn's first major injury. The plan is to bring her along cautiously yet aggressively.

Already there are signs of significant progress. Last week, the U.S. national team for 2011 was named. Shawn is on it.

"She would not be the first gymnast in the country or in the world who has a great return after an injury," the U.S. women's team national coordinator, Martha Karolyi, said.

"With her discipline and her dedication and her desire to be the best [that] she can be, she could return and deal with the nagging little things coming from the injury. Also, we can't forget that she always has a great guidance from her coach, [Liang] Chow."

Chow and Shawn have worked together since she was a little girl. She is not, however, a little girl anymore. Each, in separate interviews, emphasized that.

Each also stressed that it's okay -- it's to be expected.

"I am up to the challenge," Chow said. "But I have to be realistic. And I have to be smart, to give her the best possibilities."

He added, "She is working hard every day."

Shawn said, "I'm not the same person. I'm older. I'm more mature. I have a different mindset. I'm basically starting from scratch. Getting back in shape at 19 years old is much harder than 16 years old."

She said a moment later, "When I was 16, if there was a birthday party, let's say I would go eat a giant cheeseburger and a sundae; Chow would see me the next day and maybe I would gain a pound or two and he would make it so I would work it off. Now it's up to me. I'm the one who decides how hard I work. Everything inside and outside the gym is up to me.

"The relationship is definitely different. He respects the fact that I am older and have my own opinions. He can't treat me as a little girl anymore. We have to work together."

On the one hand, she said, it's terrifying. On the other, it's profoundly liberating. What a story -- a teen-age girl grows into a young woman, and chases her dream, and it's her own dream, not someone else's.

It's her very own, and she's doing it for one reason, and one reason only. She wants it.

"I'm terrified because I have no idea where I'm going or where this is going to end up," Shawn said. "But it's liberating because I'm enjoying it and learning so much."

Norm Bellingham on his USOC big push

If you know the story of the 1500 meters at the 1936 Berlin Games, you know how it was one of those races that carried with it great expectations. If most such events never live up to such expectations, this was one for all time. Among the starters were six of the top seven finishers from the 1932 Olympics in Los Angeles, including the defending champion, Luigi Beccali of Italy. Also in the field: the American Glenn Cunningham, whose leg had been badly burned when he was a boy, and Jack Lovelock of New Zealand, a former Rhodes Scholar who was now a medical student.

Lovelock had meticulously trained for a killer final sprint and that, ultimately, is what won him the race, in world-record time, after a race marked by fantastic strategy and tactics, one that pushed the standards of human excellence of all who were in it to a higher level, four minutes in time to celebrate then and forever after.

Hanging now outside the fifth-floor executive offices of the U.S. Olympic Committee's new headquarters building is an oversize black-and-white photo from that race.

That's Norm's doing.

Around the USOC offices in Colorado Springs, Colo, in fact, there are hundreds of photos from the last 100 years of the modern Olympic Games. There's a fascinating quality to the pictures. They show winning, of course. But not in any of those moments of triumph can you find anyone else's despair.

Not even in the photo depicting the 1980 U.S. men's hockey team famous semifinal-round victory. Here, instead, the shot is of the Americans shaking hands with the Soviets.

That's Norm's doing, too.

"To have a chance to have been part of something that has a big impact and that brings the world together -- it has been great," Norm Bellingham was saying the other day on the phone.

Norm's last day as the USOC's chief operating officer is this coming Friday. They announced his resignation last Friday -- the USOC playing it smart, announcing it essentially right before Super Bowl Sunday, knowing it would essentially get little play in the mainstream media.

And that's pretty much what happened.

The USOC played it that way for three reasons:

One, Norm made a lot of money. It's all public information, right there in the Form 990s the USOC puts out every summer.

Two, Norm was at the center of the aborted launch in the summer of 2009 of the USOC television network.

Three, Norm was a candidate to be the USOC boss and didn't get the job.

As for the money, Norm never negotiated his salary. Former USOC chairman Peter Ueberroth told him, here's your package.

The aborted network launch remains, in many regards, a mystery. But this much is certain: There will, at some point, be an Olympic channel. It's inevitable.

And though Norm didn't get the CEO job -- the fact that he stayed on for more than a year, and helped Scott Blackmun, who did get the job, speaks to Norm's character.

Norm came to the USOC in the first instance because he wanted to give back to a movement that has made a difference in his own life.

Norm is an Olympic gold medalist, in kayaking in 1988. "Chariots of Fire" is without a doubt his favorite movie; he has an original poster from the movie in his office.

Norm has a remarkable background. He grew up in India and Nepal. His personal hero is Sir Edmund Hillary, who climbed Mt. Everest. Norm has an MBA from Harvard. And on and on.

A big part of Norm's job over the past four-plus years was to make business decisions. Some of those decisions didn't sit well with certain constituents within the so-called U.S. Olympic "family" (these decisions came in the ordinary course of USOC business and for purposes of this point stand apart from the 2009 drama  over the TV network).

So what? None of that has anything to do with the big picture: Doesn't any entity want its senior officers to get it? To understand the mission?

In Norm's case, it can be said that he not only understood the mission -- he has a genuine soulfulness for it.

That's why that picture of the 1936 1500 hangs outside the executive offices.

It's why Norm was rapt when Lou Zamperini came through Colorado Springs recently, the World War II hero telling Norm what it was like to compete at those 1936 Games. Norm, meanwhile, played Zamperini an audio tape of the race and when the call to the line went out over the loudspeaker went out -- in German, of course -- Zamperini, all these years later, froze for a brief moment.

Like being there all over again, he whispered to Norm. (Among Zamperini's incredible accomplishments: eighth place in the 1936 5000 meters.)

"You can look in their eyes," Norm said, referring to that black-and-white photo of those great runners from that classic 1500 from Berlin, "and it transports you back to a different time. And yet the striving for excellence in 1936 is the same as now; the young people pursuing excellence now is the same; we're all the same.

"That, I think is one of the ultimate lessons of the Olympic Games. They reveal the fact that were all the same, and they celebrate our humanity."

He said a moment or two later, "I"m really grateful I had this opportunity," meaning at the USOC." As for what's next: "There are only so many big pushes in life. You have to select them wisely. This one was worth it."

Biathlon: a Maine event

The World Cup biathlon tour that makes the first of its two American stops Friday in northern Maine shines the spotlight on the sport that -- with its combination of skiing and shooting -- is huge in Europe.  They'll be way more interested in Germany in biathlon in Presque Isle and Fort Kent, Maine, than in that Super Bowl thing in Dallas. Meanwhile, for those of us here in the States, if you can tear yourselves away long enough from the Packers and Steelers to think about life beyond football -- biathlon and Maine make for an amazing story.

Well, to be precise -- winter sports, in this instance meaning biathlon and cross-country skiing, and Maine.

Did you know, for instance, that northern Maine and southern Maine might as well be separate states -- in something of the way that northern and southern California are the same state but different states of mind?

Portland is a real city. It's in southern Maine.

Northern Maine is rural. Very. All of 73,000 people live in Maine's northernmost county, Aroostook, spread out over 6,672 square miles. That's 11 people per square mile. They grow broccoli, potatoes and hay there.

If that sounds charming, there's this: The shoe factories and the woolen mills are almost all gone now, and the paper mills have fallen on hard times. That has meant high unemployment. At the same time, Maine ranks near the top of the charts nationally in the incidence of childhood smoking, obesity, type II diabetes and asthma.

What to do?

"I remember," Russell Currier was saying the other day on the telephone, "in fifth or sixth grade, when one of the coaches showed up at our school and handed out skis to us. At the time, I thought they were the best skis available. They practically were compared to what we were using."

This was the Stockholm Elementary School in Stockholm, Maine. There were 32 kids in the school, kindergarten through eighth grade, he said.

"To be able to rent a decent pair of skis for $20 a season was what we needed," Russell, who is now 23, said. "Basically, it was the cool thing to go ski during recess and gym class, and even before school. That was where I started to realize I enjoyed cross-country skiing."

In a nutshell, that is the vision of the Maine Winter Sports Center.

The center's mission is to develop a sustainable model for Maine's rural communities -- through skiing. That means economic development in places like Aroostook County. That means the development, physical and academic, of the young people there.

"It's about trying to create a new identity -- getting to see themselves as healthy risk-takers," Andy Shepard, president and chief executive officer of the Maine Winter Sports Center, said.

"What we want to do is get to these kids before they challenge their parents on the clothes they wear," Shepard, who used to work at L.L. Bean and who knows about these things, said. "As soon as a child starts asserting his or her own sartorial view of things, we've lost them. They stop listening.

"But if we get them when they're younger -- when they're 8, 9, 10 years old -- we can help them. We can create this healthy, active, outdoor lifestyle."

The center was founded in 1999, backed from the start by what's called the LIbra Foundation, a Portland-based organization that aims to promote projects in and for Maine.

"We're not going to get a Ford Motor Co. plant in [northern] Maine," Owen Wells, the foundation's president and CEO said. "We ought to forget about that.

"But we think we can do something about health and obesity and our children."

The attributes central to success as an élite athlete -- commitment, discipline, responsibility -- are at the core of the center's mission as well. Thus the center has built two world-class venues -- one in Presque Isle, the other in Fort Kent.

Several members of the U.S. national team in recent years have trained in Maine.

Among them: Russell Currier.

Russell's mom, Deborah, works in the office of a local oil company. His dad, Christopher, does lawn care in the summers and snow removal in the winters. His older sister, Lauren, is a nurse.

Russell won't be competing at the Maine World Cup stops before the locals. He has made World Cup starts before and while his skiing is solid, his shooting -- as he admits -- still needs work.

"A setback," he said. But it's okay. And here's why.

"Sometimes you make the team and sometimes you don't," he said. "Those are the rules," and that's uncommon maturity for 23.

Then again, that's precisely the kind of thing Andy Shepard was hoping for when this whole thing got started.

"We see sports as a means to an end," Shepard said. "Responsibility, accountability, discipline, the pursuit of excellence -- all these attributes of success in sports are also critical to success in life.

"When [Russell] first saw himself excelling as a biathlete, as a cross-country skier, he also started seeing himself as someone who could excel in anything. For me that is what it is all about," Shepard said.

That began to happen, he said, when Currier was a teen-ager: "In Russell's freshman year of high school," at Caribou High, 15 or so minutes north of Presque Isle, "he made the honor roll. He underlined his name and cut it out of the newspaper," the Aroostook Republican," and mailed it to me.

"That," he said, "is powerful stuff."