Michael Phelps: 'Everything is clicking'

Michael Phelps just put in a three-week block of altitude training up in Colorado Springs, Colo. Coming down from altitude, he raced last weekend in Indianapolis. He decided beforehand that he would write down in a journal the times he wanted to hit at the races in Indy.

For those who have followed Phelps' incredible career, the 16 Olympic medals, 14 of them gold, you know that he can have an almost super-natural quality to predict his times. It's like he is a metronome.

More, it's a signal that he's motivated and on his game -- he's tuned in, he's dangerous and he's getting ready to really rock.

In an interview this week, this is what Phelps said he had written before the Indianapolis races in his journal:

"I wanted to go 1:46 in the 200 free."  He went 1:46.27.

"I said 1:57 in the 200 IM but I was a little faster," 1:56.88.

"I said 1:55, 1:54 in the 200 fly." He touched in 1:55.34.

"48 in the 100 free." He came home in 48.89.

"And I wanted to hit 50-point in the 100 fly but I was a little off" -- 51.75.

Each of those five times is fastest in the world this year.

One race in particular, the 100 free, is worth dissecting in further detail.

Phelps has always been what's called a "back half" swimmer. That is, he goes out slower in the first 50 meters of a 100-meter race and comes on strong in the second 50.

So it was no surprise Phelps was behind at the turn, this time behind Jason Lezak, the very same Jason Lezak who saved the 400-meter freestyle relay gold for Phelps and the U.S. team in 2008 in Beijing.

Off the turn, though, Phelps turned it on. He swam the back half in 25.10. Nobody else in the field got under 26 seconds for the final 50 meters. Indeed, no one else in the field broke 50 seconds for the race. Again, Phelps finished in 48.89.

That kind of back half tells you that Phelps is once again feeling far more comfortable with his freestyle technique. He had since Beijing famously dithered with it, trying this, trying that, admitting to frustrations -- but now all again seems, well, Phelps-like.

Which means it's excellent but there's still plenty of tinkering to be done to go faster still -- just the way he and longtime coach Bob Bowman like it with four months to go until the 2011 world swimming championships in Shanghai and the countdown to the 2012 London Olympics nearing 500 days.

"Being able to go to Colorado and really work on some specifics really helped a lot," Phelps said of his freestyle technique.

"I am getting a feel for the water again. I am able to ride off my kick. Everything feels connected. I think it showed in the 200 and in the 100. But, I mean, there's still a lot of work to be done. Those times, at the end of the year, aren't going to stand up."

Phelps also said, "As a whole, I think for right now -- I'm on the right track." adding of the weekend in Indy, "I think after the weekend there I have started realizing I was enjoying myself, I was having fun, I was laughing, I was swimming how I wanted to.

"It's kind of --  I'm enjoying it more than I was before. I'm happy again and everything is clicking. It feels kind of good to be back and it feels good to be moving in the right direction."

Jordyn Wieber: gymnastics' new It Girl?

On Fridays during football season at Dewitt High School in Dewitt, Mich., just north of Lansing, the boys on the football season wear their blue-and-gold Panther football jerseys to school on game days. That's cool. One of the standout players on last season's Panther team was a junior defensive back, Ryan Wieber. As a senior, his younger sister, Jordyn says, he's going to switch sides and play quarterback. The local newspaper, the Lansing State Journal, calls him "one of the best from from a junior class that must step in for some significant seniors." Cool.

You know, though, what's really cool? "He thinks it's so cool," Ryan's kid sister said, "to see me on TV."

Jordyn Wieber, who is just 15 years old, a high school sophomore, may well be the next It Girl in U.S. gymnastics. Assuming she stays healthy and she keeps performing the way she did last weekend, she's going to be on television a lot, on camera in particular at the 2012 London Games.

It's not just that Jordyn won the AT&T American Cup, an International Gymnatics Federation World Cup event held last Saturday in Jacksonville, Fla.

It's not just that the American Cup marked Jordyn's senior-level event debut.

To win the American Cup Jordyn had to beat the 2010 world all-around champion, Aliya Mustafina of Russia.

Which she did.

Jordyn locked up the top score of the day on three of the four events -- vault, balance beam and floor exercise.

She scored a 15.833 on the vault, a 15.266 on the beam and a 14.9 on floor.

She missed a Tkatchev on bars and scored a 13.9. "My hands slipped off the bar a little bit. But it's something i'm able to go back in the gym and work on the consistency of," she said.

Her total score: 59.899.

Mustafina ended up with 59.831.

Alexandra Raisman of Needham, Mass., took third, with 58.565. Alexandra, by the way, is 16 going on 17 -- another young American talent.

That Jordyn won does not come as a total surprise. Hardly. She won the American Cup in 2009, when she was merely 13.

Of course, in 2011 the reigning world champ was at the meet. Jordyn said, "I knew the competition was going to be more stiff. So I didn't expect to win. But it definitely was a goal of mine."

Jordyn tends to be matter-of-fact about these kinds of things. It's her approach. It's why, at 15, she is so demonstrably mentally tough.

Okay, it's why she was that way at 13.

"For me," she said, "gymnastics -- we go into the gym and practice every day. We do the same routines. When we go to competitions, I think of them as another practice. You don't freak out and get too excited. Even though there's a crowd, I try to think of it as just another practice routine in the gym."

And that is why Jordyn might well be the next Big Deal.

She's calm and collected way beyond 15. The pressure on the next anointed gymnastics princess can be intense. Jordyn -- she seems unfazed.

"Today was my first day back at school," she was saying on the phone after getting back from Florida. "So many people were congratulating me. They think it's awesome."

You know what's really awesome -- her older brother, the quarterback, and how his sister might be the It Girl way, way, way beyond DeWitt High School.

She said, "He's really cool with it."'

The Lindsey Vonn concussion conundrum

Lindsey Vonn nailed down three World Cup season titles in what was, by any measure, a great weekend of skiing -- another chapter in her formidable career. Vonn, racing in Tarvisio, Italy, locked up the downhill, super-G and super-combined titles. She cut the lead her good friend Maria Riesch of Germany holds in the overall points race to 96 -- making it at least possible, if not probable, that Vonn could yet win that, too. Six races remain; the tour resumes Friday in the Czech Republic.

The Tarvisio weekend was capped by a 1-2-4 U.S. finish in the super-G -- Vonn, Julia Mancuso, Laurenne Ross -- and what makes it all the more compelling is that Vonn is back skiing, and obviously skiing well, after a Feb. 2 training crash in Austria that produced a nasty concussion.

Which raises this fascinating conundrum:

Is Lindsey Vonn one more hard fall on the head away from disaster?

Or is what Lindsey Vonn is doing now, with her brilliant skiing, the essence of championship performance?

Her will to compete, well documented after other crashes and spills, is ferocious. Isn't that what separates a champion -- a true champion -- from the rest of us? And isn't that, in large measure, why we watch sports -- to be inspired by the likes of Lindsey Vonn?

In simple terms: by seeing greatness? The rest of us, to reduce this to its basics, can only dream of flying down a mountain at 70 miles an hour.

But should she?

Where does the line get drawn -- and who gets to draw it?

Doctors? The U.S. Ski Team? The New York Times? Lindsey Vonn herself?

The concussion prompted Vonn to withdraw Feb. 14 from the back half of the two week-long world championships in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany.

She finished seventh in super-G, pulled out after the downhill portion of the super-combined and then, on Feb. 13, took silver in the downhill. At one point, she said she felt like she was "skiing in a fog."  After the downhill silver, the said she thought it best to rest.

That downhill came with considerable controversy. Some thought she shouldn't have skied at all.

The New York Times' Alan Schwarz may very well win a Pulitzer Prize -- if so, deservedly -- for all he has done to change the national conversation about the effects of concussions on football players and other athletes.

In an "analysis" headlined "Concussion Protocols Fail Vonn," a story that ran the day after the Garmisch downhill, Schwarz made it abundantly plain that one slip and Vonn could have become "her sport's Dale Earnhardt."

He said she and the U.S. Ski Team "appeared to hit the trifecta of concussion no-no's: they called the injury mild, blindly followed so-called concussion tests, then discounted clear signs that her injury remained."

At her first races back on the World Cup circuit, in late February in Sweden, Vonn told the Associated Press that what she called the "tabloid gossip" had gotten to her in Garmisch.

"No one was really listening to what I was saying, either. It was definitely a really hard time for me," she said. "Some people were saying that I shouldn't race because it's too dangerous, and some people were saying that I'm just making it up, that it's not even true. You know, it's like tabloid gossip."

The Times, meanwhile, hardly seems about to let the matter go. The U.S. Ski Team organized a conference call Monday with Vonn. Another first-rate Times reporter, Bill Pennington, who knows both skiing and Vonn, asked three questions -- two of which related to her mental health.

"Hindsight is 20/20," she said. "But I still think we made good decisions. I think we made decisions that were right at the time and I trust the decisions that we made. I got a lot of support from obviously my husband," Thomas, a former ski racer, "and the doctors and I think that is what has gotten me through it.

"But I really think the decisions we made were right. I am happy right now that's over and I can finally put that behind me and I'm looking forward to trying to compete in the next races."

"Not to harp on this," Pennington said, "but there were a lot of people, especially here in the States, that were concerned for you, that were worried you were taking unnecessary risk. What would your answer be to that?"

"I mean, well, I think we made the right decisions, like I said. I think it's really easy for someone to be an armchair quarterback. But I was there. My doctors were there. And we made decisions based on the facts that we had. And, like I said, I think they were the right decisions. So obviously people were concerned but, you know, I had great doctors, great people looking out for me -- we were always, always very careful."

Is "careful" enough?

To be obvious about it, there's nothing "careful" about alpine racing in the first instance. It involves managed risk.

All of life, for that matter, involves managed risk.

As a practical matter, perhaps the U.S. Ski Team ought to re-visit its protocols to ensure they are state-of-the-art.  Too, it ought to seek to join in what the NFL is learning about concussion research and helmet safety.

As for Lindsey Vonn: If the protocols are medically appropriate, and she passes them, and she wants to ski, she should ski. Flat-out. Life is for living.

And if, by the way, Lindsey Vonn somehow manages over the final six races of the 2011 World Cup circuit to overtake Riesch, it would make for an astonishing comeback.

"If I were to win the overall title, it would be the most rewarding, I think, of my career," she said Monday on that same conference call.

It would, indeed, be incredible. Then again, she is an incredible athlete -- the best alpine racer  the United States has ever produced.

Billy Demong: back at it

Seventh in the normal hill, sixth in the large hill at the just-concluded Nordic combined world championships -- is there something wrong with world and Olympic gold medalist Billy Demong? Just the opposite.

To know Demong is to understand what an incredible accomplishment he just turned in at the 2011 worlds in Oslo, Norway.

It is also to understand why he and the U.S. Nordic combined team, the breakthrough stars of the 2010 Vancouver Games, would seem poised for yet more success in Sochi and the 2014 Winter Games.

That's what sixth place in Oslo will do for you. Or fifth, which is where teammate Todd Lodwick finished in the large hill event. Or fourth, where the Americans finished in the team event.

"When we have people disappointed with fourth, sixth, fifth," Demong said Monday with a laugh, "we have come a long way."

Indeed.

Until Vancouver, the U.S. Nordic combined program had registered a historic oh-fer. In 86 years of Winter Games history, the U.S. team had won no medals.

Fourteen years of consistent funding, improved coaching and training, and planning -- it all paid off in Vancouver, with the U.S. team winning four medals in three events.

Demong and Johnny Spillane went one-two in the large hill event; Spillane won silver in the normal hill; the U.S. team won a relay silver.

Then came the obvious question: what next?

For Demong, it was time to take time off -- take most of 2010 to, as he put it, "live life, so that the motivation comes strong in the next three years."

The life living started with a bang.

Within 24 hours all this happened: He became a gold medalist. He learned he had been chosen to carry the U.S. flag in the closing ceremony. He proposed to his girlfriend, Katie Koczynski.

As soon as the Games ended, he did the whole media blitz thing. He went ski flying. He attended celebratory parades.

Originally from Vermontville, N.Y., he threw out the first pitch at a New York Mets' game: "I have watched too many people come up short," he said. "I freaking launched it over the catcher's head. He had to jump for it."

He spoke on the National Mall on Earth Day.

He visited U.S. Army bases in the Middle East.

He went back home to Park City, Utah, and re-did his house, among other things adding 400 square feet and moving the kitchen to the other side of the structure.

He and Katie got married. A son, Liam, was born in January.

It wasn't until September that Demong became a Nordic combined skier again. As he put it, "That's a little late."

So sixth place at the 2011 worlds -- that gets the job done, and in two ways:

"I would be going through that media corral and the reporters would be saying, 'You must be disappointed after sixth place,' " Demong was saying.

Hardly: "I'm in a different place right now. That's my best result of the season. It not only gives me confidence I can be really good it also lets me know I can be training well and can be better than ever."

All it takes, he said, is getting back to the gym.

No one has ever accused Billy Demong of lacking the hard-work gene.

"When you are at the top of your game," he said, thinking back to the 2009 and 2010 seasons in particular, "you're like, 'I can ski backward,' or, 'I can skip days training,' or, 'I feel so in control.' That is an important part of getting good.

"What's also important is realizing you have to stay good all the time. Taking time off and struggling through the season is a really good way -- a really good way of getting back in touch with desire and hunger."

He also said,  "As neat a goal as it is to win a gold, it might be even harder to defend it. It kind of freaks me out but it gets me excited.

"And that's the fun part."'

Alfred Lord Tennyson at the 2012 Olympic Village

The last line of Alfred Lord Tennyson's poem Ulysses -- "To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield" -- will be engraved on a wall in the 2012 Olympic Village, London authorities announced Monday. How classically British, right?

As Tennyson also wrote, "Knowledge comes but wisdom lingers." So perhaps there is wisdom in the choice. Just for the sake of argument here, however: why a 19th-century British poet laureate when the 21st-century Britain on display now and next summer is surely a far-more multicultural place than when the master himself was exercising his pen and Queen Victoria oversaw an empire on which the sun never set.

Like, couldn't you make the argument that someone or some saying a little more, you know, nowadays would perhaps be more suitable?

But what should I know -- a mere scribbler and, at that, an American? Mine, as Tennyson also wrote, albeit in a very different context, is not to reason why.

Olympic authorities said the lines from Ulysses were chosen "to not only inspire athletes competing in 2012, but also future generations of residents and schoolchildren." The choice was made by a panel that include the current poet laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, and author Sebastian Faulks. The village will be converted after the Games into housing with a school, health-care facilities and parks; the plan is for the inscribed wall to stay as is as "part of the lasting legacy," officials said.

U.S. Ski Team's depth -- wow

The stars of the U.S. Ski Team delivered this weekend. So, too, did some up-and-comers, and that's why the U.S. Ski Team is now, truly, one of the best in the world. It's not some advertising slogan anymore or some pumped-up corporate motto or even some "let's get the troops fired up so everyone who works here might one day believe it" kind of deal.

It's fact.

It's one thing to see Lindsey Vonn, Julia Mancuso and Ted Ligety on the podium. Each is a proven talent, a star at the top of the game.

But Nolan Kasper in second place? And -- in the slalom? Only one word will do to describe that: wow.

The good news didn't stop there: Laurenne Ross came in fourth in the super-G, behind Vonn, Mancuso and Germany's Maria Riesch.

Over the course of the past three Olympic Games, Vonn, Mancuso, Ligety and, of course, Bode Miller have firmly established the U.S. team as a genuine force in alpine skiing.

Here, then, is the top line from this weekend, the men racing in Kranjska Gora, Slovenia, the women in Tarvisio, Italy:

Vonn secured three World Cup season titles -- downhill, super-G and super-combined. She also cut the lead that Riesch holds in the overall to 96 points; six races remain.

And this:

Ligety took third in Friday's giant slalom, his speciality. He is now the clear favorite to win the season GS championship.

Mancuso's second in the super-G,  meanwhile, continued her first-rate season.

Of course, the challenge for any program is to move beyond individual excellence -- to develop a pipeline of ongoing talent. The emergence of Andrew Weibrecht, who earned a bronze medal at the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver, suggested the U.S. team was indeed on the way.

Weibrecht, injured, has missed this season. Now come, among others, Kasper and Ross.

"My god, how cool -- we were all, all the girls were in the hotel lobby watching his run and we were so fired up," Vonn said, referring to Kasper's slalom silver. "I mean -- the whole restaurant was staring at us; we were screaming pretty loud."

Mancuso, referring to Ross, said, "It was awesome .. special … so super-cool."

Ross is 22. She writes a super-interesting and -thoughtful blog.

She said of being fourth: "I'm not disappointed. it would have been nice to have been third but …  this is my first top five, this is my first top 10, this is my first top 15 in a World Cup,."

Noting her 10th-place finish in the downhill at last month's world championships in Germany, she went on to say, "This is my first time being in there, really, at a World Cup. I'm psyched with fourth. At least now I know I can be in there. I'm OK with Lindsey and Julia and Maria beating me. They're really good skiers. I'm psyched to be in there with them."

As for the 21-year-old Kasper -- if you have been following the season closely, you could see this coming.

He has, as he said afterward, been going fast in training. He notched a couple top-15 slalom finishes, then came in 10th last week. A close dissection of the stats shows that the 13th he earned on Jan. 25 in Schladming, Austria, included the second-fastest time on the second run.

Nearly 40 other racers went out Sunday. Kasper, though, turned it on, U.S. men's head coach Sasha Rearick afterward calling Kasper's performance "some of the most impressive skiing of the season by any athlete of the World Cup -- he took some chances, put pressure on the right spots and went really fast."

Austria's Mario Matt won the race, Kasper nine-hundredths back.

Miller was the last American male to finish in the top three in a World Cup slalom race, in 2008.

The last time before that, per the authority, Ski Racing magazine's online edition:

Felix McGrath, in 1988.

Again, from Ski Racing: "Kasper's name now joins those of American legends from the early days of the World Cup, when slalom podiums where more routine:  From '67 to '72 Tyler Palmer, Bob Cochran, Rich Chaffee, Bill Kidd, Spider Sabich and Jimmy Huega all picked up podiums. And, of course, Phil and Steve Mahre got a full share in the late '70s and early '80s, retiring in 1984."

Wow.

Munich's would-be 2018 fairy tale

MUNICH -- Five years ago, Germany played host to a great soccer World Cup. Everything worked; after all, this is Germany. Beyond that, for a month, this nation, capable of such melancholy, came alive with optimism and hope. Just a couple months later, a movie debuted that captured that summer's spirit. The movie, from director and producer Sönke Wortmann, is called Deutschland, Ein Sommermärchen -- "Germany, A Summer's Dream."

The movie instantly became a huge hit. It remains a knowing cultural reference, one that the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, used here in briefing the press moments before greeting the members of the International Olympic Committee's 2018 Winter Games evaluation commission.

Referring specifically to the "summer fairy tale," the chancellor -- speaking through a translator -- said she believed Munich's bid for the 2018 Games had a "great chance to plan a winter fairy tale," adding, " I believe that since Germany is such a fantastic host, the world can look forward to the Games here in 2018."

Perhaps.

The challenge now for Munich, as the IOC commission on Friday wrapped up its month-long tour to the three cities in the 2018 derby, is quite simple. As everyone knows, fairy tales rarely come true.

Just ask that 2006 German soccer team. It finished third.

The IOC is due to pick the 2018 site in a vote on July 6; Annecy, France, and Pyeongchang, South Korea, are now in the race.

There is, to be sure, much for supporters to tout in this Munich bid.

For starters, it's Germany. Things do work here, and work incredibly well.

They proved that with the logistics that made the soccer tournament move in 2006. And again with the track and field world championships in Berlin in 2009. And again just last month with the alpine skiing world championships in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, an hour south of here in the Bavarian Alps, where the skiing events would be held if Munich wins in 2018.

Next:

Merkel and the German government at all levels are wholeheartedly behind the bid. For all the blather about landowner and farmer opposition -- there were three lonely protestors standing roadside at one would-be venue here this week. Three protestors isn't even a card game.

Next:

German financial support underpins winter sports -- that is, worldwide. Moreover, German fans have proven time and again they are crazy for winter sports. But Germany hasn't had the privilege of staging the Winter Games since 1936, in Garmisch-Partenkirchen.

If Munich were to win, it would be the first city to stage both the Summer and Winter Games.

Next:

The IOC -- at least until it went for Sochi in 2014 -- has had an affinity in recent years for Winter Games in big cities. See, for instance, Salt Lake (2002), Torino (2006), Vancouver (2010).

Munich not only fits that pattern -- it arguably might be the best of that pattern. It's an easy hour from Gapa, as the ski area is colloquially known, back down to the city.

This week, the IOC could have checked out the poetry slam at the BMW museum; the Bayern Munich soccer game; or, immediately outside their hotel, a funky shrine to pop star Michael Jackson. Or dozens and dozens of world-class restaurants and interesting cultural events.

Gunilla Lindberg, the evaluation commission chairwoman, said at a news conference here Friday night that the group "absolutely felt the atmosphere and the passion for the Games."

"To put it in a nutshell," Thomas Bach, the German IOC vice president and senior bid leader said at a follow-up press briefing, "this is a bid with no risk but fun."

So why is the Munich bid, which has to date raised 29 million euros, about $40 million, said to be the largest amount ever for a non-American bid, widely perceived to be trailing Pyeongchang, with Annecy a distant third?

While $40 million is indeed a lot of money, this was the news in early January: Samsung Group announced plans to boost investment to a record $38 billion in 2011.

That's not fairy-tale money. That's the real deal, nearly 20 percent of South Korea's gross domestic product.

Samsung is, of course, a leading Olympic sponsor.

If that may yet prove the ultimate factor complicating Munich's drive, there may be others.

The Munich bid is premised on the re-use of many of the iconic venues from the 1972 Summer Games -- re-packaging them, if you will, for Winter Games use.

The gymnastics hall where Olga Korbut tumbled her way to four medals, three of them gold, in 1972? Figure skating and short-track speed skating.

The swim hall where Mark Spitz won a then-record seven gold medals? Curling.

That seems cool, right?

Except that the while the IOC tends to talk a good game about "sustainability," it also in recent years has favored bids with huge construction projects.

Witness the construction booms in Athens (2004), Beijing (2008) and, especially now, the forthcoming sequence of Games -- London (2012), Sochi (2014) and Rio (2016).

All these Games will leave concrete evidence, from the IOC's perspective, of the transformative power of sport on society. And in this race, the Koreans are the ones who have built a brand-new winter resort from scratch, just as they promised the IOC they would do -- and they still have more building to do, including a high-speed rail line from Seoul to Pyeongchang.

Indeed, the Munich 2018 bid bears striking similarities to the campaigns that Great Britain and the United States ran for soccer's 2018 and 2022 World Cups -- in essence, come here, use the venues we already have and make a lot of money.

Didn't work. Russia (major infrastructure boom) and Qatar (immense construction project) won going away.

To be sure, the IOC is not FIFA. At the same time, the IOC has itself shown in the votes for Sochi and Rio its own expansionist tendencies. That's why the Korean tagline is "new horizons."

Will the Munich 2018 bid prove the turning point? Or is it, simply put, up against a relentless geopolitical reality in the international sport bidding scene?

Must it contend as well with distinct IOC politics -- in particular the clear intent of other interests to bring the 2020 Summer and 2022 Winter Games back to Europe? And, as well, another complexity -- Bach's presumed run for the IOC presidency in 2013, and how, if at all, that factors into a 2011 campaign for 2018?

Another potential complication: Munich is promoting a "festival of friendship," and in that regard it's unclear how the use of one more iconic venue, Olympic Stadium, will resonate with the IOC members come July 6.

Everyone knows what happened here in 1972. The stadium is where Avery Brundage, the then-IOC president, declared after the Palestinian terror attack and the deaths of 11 Israelis that the Games "must go on."

Speaking Thursday at the stadium to the evaluation commission, Uli Hoeness, the president of Bayern Munich, noted the "echo of history," and said that coming back in 2018 would offer an "extra dimension" that would be "connecting the past to the future."

If Munich wins, Olympic Stadium is where the 2018 opening and closing ceremonies would take place.

Lindberg, speaking Friday, noted that she and two others on the evaluation commission -- New Zealand's Barry Maister and Japan's Tsunekazu Takeda -- were here in 1972, and came back here this week with "mixed feelings," with "sadness at what happened" but fondness for the "good organization of the Games," adding, "The IOC took a decision to go on with the Games and I think that was the right decision."

As her remarks underscore -- it remains, 40 years later, no simple matter.

In large measure, Munich and Germany have undeniably moved on since 1972, confronting challenges such as the end of the Cold War and reunification. The stadium, meanwhile, has been used for countless numbers of events.

Moreover, the World Cup proved unequivocally that Germany could safely play host to a mega-event and show the world a good time. It doesn't need the 2018 Olympics for that purpose, according to Chris Young, co-author of the 2010 book, "The 1972 Munich Olympics and The Making of Modern Germany," who said it follows that the "vibe of the [2018] bid" is thus not "we have a past we have to deal with" but "we can put on a world-class, great show."

At the same time, the last time much of the world last connected the words "Munich" and "Olympic" was 1972. To think that the 2018 bid will not provoke look-back pieces in the international press, particularly as July 6 approaches, would be naïve.

Charlotte Knobloch, the head of the Munich Jewish community, observed, "The Olympic Games of 1972 are, let there be no doubt, especially for Jews, inextricably linked to the attacks of the time. Both from the point of view of drama and of far-reaching impressions, the events were similar to those of 9/11. If now, 36 years later, Olympia were to return to Munich this would certainly not mean that the past has been cut out. Should the Games of 2018 be awarded to Munich, we would, in my mind, connect them also with the Games of 1972 reflecting them. At the same time it is also a matter of showing the world the Munch of today."

Between now and July, the Munich strategy would seem straightforward -- try to seize momentum at the IOC bid-city meeting in mid-May in Lausanne, Switzerland, with Bach leading the way, then build toward the vote.

Asked at the news conference to assess where Munich is now in the race, Bach demurred: "Where we are is difficult to say. We don't want to lead the race all the way. We want to win at the end."

The back story of the 1936 Winter Games

GARMISCH-PARTENKIRCHEN, Germany -- Most everyone knows how Jesse Owens went to Berlin and won four gold medals at the Summer Olympics in 1936. As the legend goes, Owens showed Adolf Hitler a thing or two about the Nazi myth about superiority. Birger Ruud of Norway is also one of the greatest Olympic athletes of all time, a great ski jumper who could also beat you at alpine racing. Moreover, his story is one of incredible personal courage. After his time in the Olympic spotlight, he spent 18 months in a Nazi prison camp and then, upon release, joined the Resistance, where he used his unmatched ski skills to find and hide ammunition dropped from British aircraft.

It is no accident that the photo of Ruud's moment of triumph in the ski jumping event at the 1936 Winter Olympics, here in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, high in the Bavarian Alps, makes for perhaps the emotional centerpiece of an unprecedented exhibition that brings to light not just the story of those Games – but, more importantly, the back story.

Here in the photo are the three Olympic champions: Ruud, the winner, just as he had been four years before, flanked by the bronze medalist, Reidar Andersen, another Norwegian, and the silver medalist, Sven Eriksson of Sweden. Here, too, is the then-president of the International Olympic Committee, the Belgian Count Henri de Baillet-Latour. And over on the right side of the photo -- here is the jarring note that underscores the great lie of the 1936 Winter Games, the notion that sports and politics don't mix: Karl Ritter von Halt, the organizing committee president, snapping a sharp stiff-armed Nazi salute.

It's not a pretty picture. Indeed, it's jarring. But it is an honest photo. It happened. And that is precisely why it's on display, now, after 75 years, along with dozens of other photographs and other materials that confront the ugly history of the 1936 Winter Games, the town's mayor, Thomas Schmid, said.

"We really said that for this 75th anniversary we need to talk about this openly -- the 'dark side of the medal,' he said, referring to the title of the exhibit, which opened here Feb. 15 and which the Museum of Tolerance has already expressed interest in bringing to Los Angeles.

"We can't make it go away," Schmid said. "But we can show how Garmisch-Partenkirchen has changed."

The 1936 Berlin Summer Games have, over the years, been the subject of extensive study. Not so the Garmisch-Partenkirchen Winter Games just months before.

Building upon the success of the 1932 Los Angeles Games, the 1936 Berlin Games announced the emergence of the modern Olympics as a worldwide phenomenon.

A confluence of factors explains why -- the expanding reach of communication technologies, the attempt by the Third Reich to use the Berlin Games as a massive propaganda exercise, the power of the film "Olympia" by Leni Riefenstahl, Jesse Owens' four medals and more.

To this day, of course, the 1936 Berlin Games remain a source of enduring controversy.

Again, the reasons are complex. The Riefenstahl film, for one. Just to pick another, many of the stories from Berlin have remained alive: Marty Glickman and Sam Stoller, the only Jews on the U.S. track team, were denied sure gold medals when they didn't run in the 400-meter relay; they were told the day of the race they would not run, for reasons never made clear.

In comparison, the 1936 Winter Games in Garmisch-Partenkirchen -- it's as if they hardly happened.

And yet, as Charlotte Knobloch, the leader of the Jewish community in Munich and Bavaria, put it, those Winter Games hold significance that deserves to be fully, deeply understood:

"People have, of course, gladly glossed over the fact that this was a most revolting show of propaganda, a nasty deception of public opinion worldwide, under whose guise the very first signs of the Shoah," the Hebrew word for the Holocaust, "could already be detected."

Why look back now at 1936?

Munich is bidding for the 2018 Winter Olympics. An IOC inspection team is in Germany this week; the full IOC will pick the 2018 site in a vote on July 6. Annecy, France, and Pyeongchang, South Korea, are also in the 2018 race.

The Munich candidacy proposes to hold ice events -- skating and curling -- in the city. The snow events -- skiing and so on -- would be in Garmisch-Partenkirchen.

Thus the impetus to re-visit 1936, the mayor and others stressing that the 2018 process affords the opportunity for reflection, perhaps even healing.

In February, meanwhile, the 2011 world alpine ski racing championships were held here in "Gapa," as Garmisch-Partenkirchen is colloquially known on the ski circuit. Some 100,000 euros, roughly $138,000, from the championships' cultural budget -- supported by the German federal ministry of the interior -- was allocated to fund the exhibition.

That took care of the logistics.

As for the will to get it done:

This exhibition is the first of its kind in Garmisch-Partenkirchen. Not once in 75 years has there been anything like it, according to Alois Schwarzmuller, a retired local high-school teacher, long-time community activist and one of the exhibit's primary curators.

For decades, he said, most of the archives were locked away in communist East Germany. It was only after the fall of the Berlin Wall that one could even get at the files, he said.

Then more time had to pass. It just did, he said.

"The first generation -- they were the Nazis ... They did not allow us to go behind the wall.

"The second generation -- in community politics, they told me it was only a sports event," Schwarzmuller said, meaning the 1936 Winter Games. "There was nothing else.

"Now I think it's time. We have a generation that wants to be informed."

The way the story has been largely understood for the past 75 years, Schwarzmuller said, is that the 1936 Winter Games offered near-perfect organization, an array of new buildings and impressive competition venues.

Reality check:

The Games served as cover for a brutal dictatorship that oppressed political opponents and that harassed, humiliated and disenfranchised Germany's Jews. That is "the dark side of the medal":

-- A photo depicts Gapa-area road signs above another announcing, "Jews not welcome."  Such "not welcome" signs disappeared by the Feb. 6, 1936, opening ceremony. They came right back after the Games.

Baillet-Latour, the IOC president, had encountered numerous such signs on a visit to the area just four months before the Games. He was "especially horrified," historian David Clay Large writes in the sole chapter devoted to the 1936 Winter Olympics in his first-rate book "Nazi Games," to see too that "the speed-limit markers on dangerous turns included explicit exemptions for Jews, thereby encouraging them to kill themselves."

-- A photo shows Hitler at the 1936 Winter Games opening ceremony. Some number of the Austrian team "unmistakably" shouted out, "Heil Hitler!"  as they left the stadium at the end of the ceremony, Large writes, causing Hitler to "gaze wistfully" across the border. Innsbruck is just a few kilometers away.

-- A photo of von Halt, the Winter Games organizing committee chief, is accompanied by a striking caption. It says, in part, that von Halt took part in 1936 and 1939 in visiting concentration camps in Dachau and Sachsenhausen. "As a convinced national socialist," it says, "he approved suppression of political opponents and the destructive anti-Semitism that was done by the brown dictatorship since 1941. At the collapse of Berlin he sent in the last hours very young soldiers and old men to fight hopelessly against the Red Army."

"We need to tell people what happened," said Christian Neureuther, who having grown up in Gapa is something of local ski royalty and whose voice thus carries locally, nationally and even abroad. He raced at three Winter Games. So did his wife, Rosi Mittermaier, and she won three medals, two  of them gold, skiing in 1976 in Innsbruck. Their son, Felix, skied at the 2006 and 2010 Winter Games.

"Everyone thinks the 1936 [Winter] Games were fantastic and beautiful," Christian Neureuther said. "The truth comes out here -- the two sides of the medal."

Thomas Bach: it's not all about Thomas Bach

Thomas Bach is, by any account, one of the most accomplished and experienced senior figures now moving on the Olympic stage. The 57-year-old International Olympic Committee vice-president is also head of the German Olympic sports confederation and plays a leading role in the Munich 2018 Winter Games bid. It is a measure of Bach's range of experience that, as the IOC Evaluation Commission on Tuesday began its inspection this week of the Munich bid, Bach's resume says he has twice before -- in the 1990s -- led such IOC inspection teams. Will Bach run for the IOC presidency in 2013? Would the IOC award the Games to Germany and then two years later grant the presidency as well to a German? Or is that two-fer just too much? These sorts of questions frame the backdrop against which most close IOC observers believe the 2018 race is taking shape. The IOC will pick the 2018 winner on July 6; Annecy, France, and Pyeongchang, South Korea, are also in the race.

Bach sat for a Q&A with 3 Wire Sports during the recent world alpine ski championships in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany -- where, if Munich wins the 2018 derby, the ski events would be staged. He had to hold the tape-recorder microphone close to ensure that he could be heard over the enthusiastic, standing room-only crowd.

3 Wire: Munich is now running for the 2018 Winter Games. The first, and most obvious, questions: Why Munich, and why now?

Bach: Because with Munich we could show that winter sports can be organized in a modern way in a sustainable and environmentally friendly way, and it could be organized with great passion and by a really excited public, which is very much appealing to the athletes -- who like to do winter sports in Germany, in Munich and in Garmisch. Even the last skier coming in has been greeted with standing ovations, celebrated in a unique way in full stadia. This is one part of the reason.

The other one, [why] we think now it's the right time for Olympic Games in Munich and in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, [is] because it is important that the Games from time to time are re-loading the batteries, that they are coming back to their roots, enjoying Olympic atmosphere and Olympic tradition, and then from there on you can take it again to new shores. It may be a little bit like the situation with the [soccer] World Cup, where we had this great atmosphere in the 2006 World Cup here in Germany and then handed it over to the new territory, South Africa -- [a] kind of cycle which makes it the right time for Munich now.

3 Wire: On the way down here, on the drive down the autobahn from Munich to Garmisch, it's so obvious -- the first thing that comes to mind, the BMWs and the Audis moving at 180 kilometers per hour, the way those cars move, is their reliability and dependability. That's a stereotype and a cliche, I know. But there's good reason that's a stereotype and a cliche. It's true - that's why. Maybe those words fit the 2018 German bid as well -- "reliability" and "dependability." Would you agree?

Bach: Yes. I definitely agree. And again this is not something we can just promise. This is something we can guarantee, we can show. We have been organizing in the first three months of this year three world championships in Olympic winter sports plus 12 World Cups. Plus, we have always been a very reliable partner of the respective international federations. This of course would even apply more for our partnership with the IOC. And given, you know, the environment we are enjoying here in Germany, I think the IOC could really trust us and would have a very smooth preparation time for an Olympic Winter Games.

3 Wire: To me, the Number One variable in this race is you. How do you feel about that?

Bach: To me, this I can not see. Of course, I am supporting this bid. And the DOSB, the German Olympic sports confederation, with its 28 million members, has voted twice, unanimously, in favor of the bid, at the beginning, to start it, and now to approve the bid book. And I support this bid wholeheartedly because I think it would be good for Germany and it would be good for winter sports and the Olympic movement. But the difference at the end will be the concept, will be the guarantees, will be the unity we can show here in Germany with the world of politics, with the world of business -- and so there are many, always many factors which have to come together to make a bid successful.

3 Wire: So it's not all about Thomas Bach?

Bach: For sure not. If it would be, we could not succeed.

3 Wire: This is surely not the time, this is not the place, to say, yes, Thomas Bach is going to run for the IOC presidency in 2013 or, no, Thomas Bach is not going to run for the presidency in 2013. What can you say, now, in 2011, about your interests, ambitions, aspirations for the IOC presidency in 2013?

Bach: What I can say is that I was a candidate for re-election as vice president in 2010 with the intention to support the IOC president in his term. This is what I'm doing. I think it would be unfair to the IOC and it would be unfair to the president to start now a discussion about candidatures yes or no. There is so much to do in the Olympic movement that we should concentrate on issues rather than on persons.

3 Wire: One of the interesting things, especially as an American, to be in Europe, and to be in places such as Garmisch, is to feel history, and in this context Olympic history. The Winter Games were here in 1936. To come back here in 2018 would be an interesting return. What would it mean to come back here so many, many years later?

Bach: It's very difficult to compare. It's a different Germany you see here and now. You see here [now] an Olympic bid which is driven by sports and by athletes. At the time, it was a political issue. The Nazis used it -- tried to use it -- for their purposes. It's completely different. There is one thing, however, which has not changed, and that is the enthusiasm of the people for winter sports. They just love winter sports. They practice winter sports themselves. This is why they really can value the athletes' performances and the performances of all the athletes. In one way or the other, the message may be how much the world has changed since then, how much Germany has changed since then and how much winter sport has changed -- but the passion is still there.

3 Wire: You mentioned the [2006] World Cup a few moments ago. There is an argument to be made, and a good one, that in many ways Germany has moved on since 1972, and since the Summer Games. The fact is, though, that the last time the words "Munich" and "Olympic" were in the same sentence was in 1972. There's an enormous symbolism to see those words in the same sentence again. What would it mean symbolically to turn the page, to turn the corner, were Munich to be awarded the [2018] Games -- not only because you'd have Winter Games in a place where the Summer Games were but of course because of what happened here?

Bach: I think it could be a great symbol of conciliation, to see Munich organize peaceful and friendly and open Games after the tragedy of '72. This is I think how many people feel it. They realize that Munich has been struck at the time by the rise of international terrorism -- that this has hurt the Games at the time and the Olympic ideal very much, and they still are upset at how the Olympic ideal could be misused in such a way. The symbol, really, could be that some wounds are healing. You will not forget but you can show to the world that it can be done in a very different, peaceful Olympic way.

Woo: 'Yes, Pyeongchang!'

PYEONGCHANG, South Korea --  Precisely 2,018 people rose as one here amid the International Olympic Committee's visit to what would be the curling rink should this be the winning entry for the 2018 Winter Games and, on cue, started belting out a song called, "I Believe in Angels." The lyrics veered from, "I'll cross the stream/I have a dream," to, "I believe in angels/something good in everything I see/when I know the time is right for me/woo/I have a dream/a song to sing/to help me cope with anything."

Anywhere else in the world you might not say woo but -- what? This, though, is South Korea, and they really, really, really want the Winter Olympic Games here. So, woo.

Woo here isn't cheesy. Woo here is genuine and heartfelt. Woo is the sound of a bid roaring toward the election for 2018, and woo frames the question of the moment: can this third straight Pyeongchang bid for the Winter Games, after unsuccessful campaigns for 2010 and 2014, be the one that fulfills the earnest longing of the Korean people?

"We have seen great progress in the bid from the previous two bids. We have also seen very strong governmental support for this bid," the chairwoman of the evaluation commission, Sweden's Gunilla Lindberg, said at the first of two news conferences Saturday, adding a moment later, "We have seen also progress for Korean winter sport for these last years."

The evaluation commission, which spent last week in Annecy, France, takes a break now for a week. It goes to Munich, the third and final candidate in the 2018 derby, from March 1-4.

The commission will produce a report to be published May 10. The IOC will gather a week later in Lausanne, Switzerland, for a conference that will likely attract most of the roughly 115 members; only then will the 2018 race begin to take real shape.

The IOC will pick the 2018 city on July 6 in a vote in Durban, South Africa.

At this preliminary stage, most everyone -- even the Koreans' rivals -- ventures that the Koreans are the ones to beat, most everyone also mindful that, one, IOC elections are notoriously unpredictable and, two, the Germans and the French are in their separate ways likely to prove formidable competitors.

The perception of being the front-runner carries, of course, advantage and disadvantage.

Most bids furiously shy away from the label. Paris, for instance, was thought to be in front for the 2012 Summer Games -- for months and months, indeed all the way up to the final round of voting. London won.

Here, for instance, tensions with North Korea could erupt. Or some sort of internal bickering could derail the bid. Or some Mystery X Factor could surface.

In an Olympic bid campaign, literally anything is possible.

Then again, being the front-runner allows you to tell your story -- if you have a good one -- and to run the race the way you want to run it. The trick is to not be complacent, and to exhibit humility, and those are the mantras of the Pyeongchang campaign.

"We are ready to listen to what the IOC has to say about our weaknesses and work to resolve them," the bid chairman, Yang Ho Cho, said at the second of Saturday's news conferences.

Meanwhile, this bid has a ready-made story, arguably the most compelling narrative among the three cities in the race, one seemingly in line with the IOC's expansionist trend in recent votes (Sochi in 2014, Rio in 2016) -- a Korean Winter Games to grow winter sports in Asia.

It's a no-brainer, really. The demographics and the money are pointing toward this part of the world. It's inevitable the IOC is coming this way. The Winter Games have been held in Asia only twice, both times in Japan, in Nagano in 1998 and Sapporo in 1972.

The open question is whether the IOC is going to make the leap to Korea in 2018 or some other country in Asia (China? Kazakhstan?) in some other year (2022? 2026? 2030?).

As Won Ho Park, a professor at Seoul National University, explained in a briefing Friday, a 2009 bank study suggests that by 2030 development in Asia will underpin about 43 percent of annual worldwide consumption.

The consequence of that is simple and powerful:

Asian consumers are "likely to assume the traditional role of the U.S. and Europe's middle-class," he said, adding a moment later, "We're going to have a lot of potential consumers of winter sports with disposable incomes."

He also said, "No other region in the world even comes close."

That's why this Pyeongchang bid is tag-lined "New Horizons."

That's why there are now new Intercontinental and Holiday Inn hotels in Pyeongchang.

Four years ago, what is now called the Alpensia complex here, with the hotels and shops, was a series of potato fields.  When the IOC evaluation team was here four years ago, the Koreans had to say, this is where we're planning to build those hotels and shops and sports venues. Now they say, look, we got it done.

Not everything is built yet. For instance, the real game-changer would be the bullet-train yet to be built from Seoul. Getting down here from the Korean capital can still take as long as three hours-plus. The train, to be done by 2017, would reduce travel time to roughly an hour.

The 2010 and 2014 bids were seen to be provincial campaigns; for 2018, that train and everything about the Pyeongchang bid is a leading national priority, as the presence of South Korean President Myung Bak Lee on hand here this week made plain.

The downside of Alpensia is that it is, in essence, a self-contained village in southeast South Korea. That's why the plan here would be to create a "Best of Korea" experience during the 2018 Games and why completion of the bullet train -- to allow for the possibility of getting easily back and forth to the big city -- would be so vital.

The upside of Alpensia is that it is a self-contained village. Here the IOC could re-create that village experience that so many people say they loved so much in Lillehammer in 1994.

With a bonus that has clearly been downplayed but is patently obvious -- there's a 27-hole golf course here designed by Robert Trent Jones Jr.

The weather this week perhaps would not have allowed for golf -- they got record snow here, all of it cleared away in record time -- but if the Games went here in 2018 and you could play 18 (showing support for that new Summer Games sport) and then watch a little snowboarding or figure skating at night, that would make for an outstanding double dip, wouldn't it? Where else could you do that?

All it would take is the sort of under-course heating that's common already in certain golf courses as well as soccer and rugby pitches. It might be expensive but it assuredly could be done, leading golf officials said.

Again, they say that's not in the near-term planning. But you can't miss that golf course when you're standing on top of the ski jump, looking out at what has been built here over the past four years.

And you can't miss the enthusiasm of the Korean people, either.

"Yes, Pyeongchang!" they shouted time and again at a beachfront rally here Friday, many of them wearing masks they had made up reflecting the faces of the members of the IOC commission. Now that took initiative.

You'd think that everyone had just been put up to this by some local ward captain. Except that public opinion surveys tell you otherwise.

In journalism school, they teach you that nine of 10 people won't even tell a pollster they like their mommies. Here, 91 percent want the Olympics. 91 percent!

Another sign: the IOC commission was greeted like royalty by an outrageous number of Korean reporters here to chronicle the panel's every more -- 162 reporters and camera people, the Korea Times reported. 162!

The bid committee issued a release Saturday that said it had collected 1.4 million signatures of support,  roughly 2.8% of the South Korean populace. That's enormous. To put that into perspective -- if a similar campaign produced similar results in the United States, it would be like collecting a signature from every single person in New Jersey.

It's like this all the time, everywhere, in South Korea. A couple of months ago, during a casual chat at the national training center near Seoul with long-track speed skater Mo Tae Beom, winner of gold in the 500 and silver in the 1000 last year in Vancouver, the subject of Pyeongchang's campaign came up.

His eyes brightened. "It would be such a rare experience to be able to skate in an Olympics hosted in your own nation," he said. "If It happens in Pyeongchang, it would be a life experience I would never forget. It would be a dream come true."

Woo.

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A clarification: The name of the song is "I Have a Dream," and it's by ABBA.