Jumping for joy, finally

LONDON -- Sometimes long, hard fights take a long, long time. And when you win, it's that much sweeter.

That's how it was Wednesday for advocates of women's ski jumping. For years, they tried to get into the Winter Olympic Games. For years, they met mostly with resistance and heartache and frustration.

On Wednesday they knew elation.

The International Olympic Committee's policy-making executive board approved women's ski jumping, along with four other new events, for the Winter Games in Sochi in 2014.

""I’ve dedicated my life, hopes and dreams to ski jumping and I’m thrilled that our sport will be showcased at the 2014 Olympic Winter Games in Sochi," American Lindsey Van, the 26-year-old 2009 world champion, said. "We are ready.

"For our sport this means a huge step in the right direction. Women's ski jumping has been developing a lot over the past 10 years, but the Olympics is what our sport really needed to take the next step."

Coline Mattel of France, a 2011 world championships bronze medalist, said, "The fact that women's ski jumping has finally been recognized rewards all the girls that have been fighting for such a long time, and gives me the motivation to work even harder."

The other four events also added to the Sochi program: ski halfpipe, biathlon mixed relay and team events in luge and figure skating. The figure skating event is not, IOC sports director Christophe Dubi hastened to add, a synchronized swimming-style event; one skater will follow the other on the ice.

IOC President Jacques Rogge called the additions "exciting, entertaining events that perfectly complement the existing events on the sports program, bring added appeal and increase the number of women participating at the Games.''

Bill Marolt, the president and chief executive of the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Assn., said, "This is a special day. The IOC's decision to include women's ski jumping and halfpipe skiing marks a truly progressive era in the Olympic sports movement.

"Today is the beginning of a chapter in the history books that will showcase these great athletes' talent and dedication on the world's stage in 2014 and beyond."

The IOC put off for a couple of months consideration of proposals for inclusion of slopestyle events in snowboard and freestyle skiing and in team alpine skiing.

The lengthy process by which women's ski jumping finally made the program shows in revealing detail how the IOC truly moves.

For one, the IOC absolutely, positively refuses to move until it is ready to do so.

Moreover, it does not like being told by outsiders what it should be doing, or that it should be moving for reasons of political correctness, or being compelled to move by the threat of legal action.

None of those things typically occasion the desired response -- not even the whole court case thing.

In 2006 the IOC turned down a women's ski jumping event for the 2010 Vancouver Games. The jumpers took their case all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada, but lost, the court saying it wasn't its place to tell the IOC what to do -- which was what the IOC knew all along was what would happen.

The IOC was never against women ski jumpers. Just the opposite. It's in the IOC's interest to have more women at the Games -- as Rogge observed in welcoming the women jumpers.

After all, ski jumping -- and, now, Nordic combined -- were the only disciplines in the Winter Games that did not allow women to take part. No matter what anyone might think, that's not what the IOC is about anymore.

All along, the IOC wasn't simply being patronizing or paternalistic. After all, Joan Benoit ran that marathon in Los Angeles a long, long time ago.

The IOC kept saying to the jumpers --  show us that there are more of you, from more countries, and that you're better at this, and we'll let you into the Games and we'll do it with big smiles all around.

In 2006, according a release put out Wednesday by the advocacy group Women's Ski Jumping USA, 83 women from 14 nations were registered to compete on the FIS Continental Cup. In 2010: 182 from 18 nations.

In 2009, according to that same release, 36 jumpers -- from 13 nations -- took part in the world championships, held in Liberec, Czech Republic.

This year's world championships were held in Oslo, before a crowd of some 10,000 people, and in super-crummy weather that tested fan and athlete alike. There were 43 jumpers from 15 countries; five of the six top finishers were from different countries and ranged in age from 14 to 27.

"You have much more quality and depth," Dubi said. "If you compare to Liberec back in 2009, you had a handful of top jumpers. Now you have 30 jumpers who would jump between 80 and 97 meters."

Dubi was asked point-blank if the IOC needed to see something big like that in Oslo for the jumpers to make it. Yes, he said: "It was really critical. And what we've seen there is extremely positive."

As for Nordic combined? "Well, obviously, for Nordic combined there is not yet the universality and the numbers to consider it [for women] an Olympic sport," Rogge said at a Wednesday evening news conference.

He added a moment later that if time shows better quality and quantity in participation in women's Nordic combined events -- then the IOC will bring it on board, too.

He said, "You need the numbers … you  need more competition, you need more international participation and hopefully I would say the example of women's ski jumping will serve as a catalyst for that sport, too."

The athletes themselves, finally, had reason Wednesday to jump for joy. Here was another American, Alissa Johnson: "This inspires me to continue training hard to be the absolute best athlete that I can be, so that when I have my chance at the Games I can finally fight for the gold medal I have been dreaming of since I was five."

A very British row that matters well beyond Britain

LONDON -- Sign the thing, Dan Doctoroff and Jay Kriegel kept saying, the leaders of the New York 2012 bid about out of time and out of patience. It was extraordinarily late in the game, already July in 2005, the International Olympic Committee poised to decide after a campaign that had carried on for nearly two years who was going to get the 2012 Summer Games, and still this one document had yet to be executed. Too, it was late at night in Singapore, then morning, the vote now just hours away. Peter Ueberroth, the chairman of the United States Olympic Committee, simply did not want to sign the joint marketing and promotional agreement, as the document was called. It simply was not good for the USOC, he believed.

What to do?

If Ueberroth didn't sign, New York might as well withdraw from the contest. But if he did, it would be with the greatest reluctance. Moreover, everyone already knew that the Americans didn't really like the deal, or want it, and so even if he signed New York's chances were already dimmed.

Ultimately, Ueberroth agreed to a basic set of terms. Even so, New York got all of 19 votes, bounced early in the voting, won by London.

Now, as history would have it, that very same sort of document is at the heart of a disagreement between the London 2012 organizing committee and the British Olympic Assn., a dispute that underscores both the present and the future of the way cities and countries bid for the Olympic Games.

On one level, the issue is simple enough: does a one-size-fits-all marketing agreement work?

The battle has erupted here amid an annual Olympic-themed convention called SportAccord at which the International Olympic Committee's policy-making executive board also convenes. This year's convention is being staged in London; it got underway here Tuesday.

An "embarrassment," the British Olympics minister, Hugh Robertson, acknowledged Tuesday.

Four of the first five questions IOC president Jacques Rogge was asked at a news conference Tuesday related to the dispute. He dodged them all, saying the issue is for lawyers to decide.

Which is true enough.

But the reality as well is that the matter presents a far more fundamental issue --  has it become all but mandatory that a national Olympic committee be fully funded by its federal government?

The emerging trend certainly seems to suggest so. See, for example, Russia in 2014, Brazil in 2016. And, for good measure, China in 2008.

Meanwhile, the losing efforts of New York for 2012 and Chicago for 2016 offer instructive evidence to the contrary.

As does the London battle of 2012 and the ongoing case of the British Olympic Assn., complicated by personality politics involving the polarizing figure of Colin Moynihan, its chairman.

In its particulars, the dispute revolves around how one defines the word "surplus." The BOA wants more of any such surplus the 2012 Games generate. Under that joint marketing agreement, signed in 2005, it's entitled to a 20 percent cut. The BOA maintains that cut should be calculated before the costs of the Paralympics are figured in.

Get real, London 2012 says. For accounting purposes, it counters, the agreement is straightforward -- both the Olympics and Paralympics should be treated as one event. The IOC agrees with London 2012.

The BOA can hardly be faulted for seeking money. That's its job -- to get money to boost the performance of the British team.

You have to wonder, though, about the efficacy of a tactic that involves trying to obtain more money by, in effect, being widely portrayed as being against disabled people. Which the BOA has strenuously argued that it's not -- indeed, it shares office space with the British Paralympic Assn.

Though this issue has erupted publicly over the past few weeks, it seems difficult if not impossible to believe that the BOA didn't tell the IOC about it long ago, perhaps even years ago.

Why? Because this was eminently foreseeable. Like the USOC, the BOA's challenge is that it must raise its own money.

This is why the USOC has -- and by extension, American bids have -- repeatedly faced such challenges in the bid game, and why until this issue is re-framed it's not at all clear that the USOC should entertain, even for a minute, another bid.

Again -- why?

To reduce a complex economic matter to a simple math problem:

Let's say the USOC generates $100 million annually in domestic sponsorships (a tad high, perhaps, but rounding things up to make the example easier).

It's roughly seven years from the day you're awarded the Games until they're over.

That means the USOC would be walking away from some $700 million in revenue.

What national Olympic committee could afford to do that? More precisely -- without the security of a federal-government guarantee, could do so?

Is it really any wonder why Peter Ueberroth had qualms?

This math problem is why the Atlanta marketing program for the 1996 Games and the Salt Lake program in 2002 were set up differently -- staffed jointly by the local organizing committees and the USOC and marketed together with revenue shared on a sliding scale.

This, you might say, is a form of American exceptionalism.

In the Olympic movement, American exceptions have consistently been viewed dimly.

It's widely known within the movement, of course, that the USOC -- and only the USOC -- gets special broadcast and marketing revenue shares. Rogge said at a meeting early Tuesday with the summer sports federations that ongoing talks with the USOC aimed at re-calibrating those shares after 2020 are "making good progress." He declined to provide details.

The summer sports assembly, which goes by the acronym ASOIF and represents the 26 sports in the Summer Games, asked Rogge if a new deal could start sooner than 2020. ASOIF president Denis Oswald said, "It seems a long time to wait."

"The answer is no," Rogge said.

It remains uncertain, meanwhile, how the dispute between the BOA and London 2012 will ultimately be resolved.

The BOA wants to take the case to the Lausanne, Switzerland-based Court of Arbitration for Sport, the sport's world's highest tribunal; CAS has yet to say whether it will hear the case; London 2012 chairman Sebastian Coe has called the BOA's move "spurious"; Oswald, who is also the IOC's chief liaison to the London 2012 Games, said the IOC believes CAS has no reason to hear the matter.

"It is an embarrassment and we need to get it sorted out," Robertson said Tuesday at a forum sponsored by a British sports journalists association.

Perhaps the time has come as well for the IOC to take a fresh look at the way it approaches marketing agreements in bid-city arrangements. Rightly or wrongly, this one has caused a significant "embarrassment" in the run-up to the 2012 Games. Fairly or not, the standardized approach has sharply limited the ability of the United States to compete for the Summer Games.

Maybe that's the sort of thing the IOC might want to get sorted out.

Update: In a move welcomed by the IOC, the BOA announced Wednesday that it had suspended the CAS case and would start talking again with London 2012 in hopes of resolving the dispute.  IOC spokesman Mark Adams observed, "It's a good thing if people are talking. As Winston Churchill would say, 'Jaw-jaw is better than war-war.' "

Kelly Clark's season for the ages

The calendar says it's already April. Track and field's outdoor season will soon be here, and swimming's, too, and with world championships coming up in both sports -- this the year before the London Olympics -- it promises to be a summer to remember. But before the likes of Usain Bolt and Michael Phelps dominate the headlines, before the skis and snowboards get put away, it is appropriate indeed to single out the one and only Kelly Clark.

She had a winter for the ages.

It is an amazing thing, really. Snowboarding is hip. Perhaps the teenager in the house could thus readily dish about Kelly Clark, who won nine of 11 halfpipe competitions. If you include the Burton New Zealand Open last Aug. 14, make it 10 of 12.

On top of which -- she became the first woman to land a 1080 (three full revolutions) in competition, at the X Games in Aspen in late January.

The crowds at the X Games were, as is typical at a snowboarding jam, feverish. Yet for all the fun and for all its sizzle, snowboarding -- like all winter sports -- typically remains consigned to the back pages of most newspaper sports sections. It's even buried in web-only full-featured sports sites.

Attention, newspaper editors and internet sports savants. Wake up!

You want a winner?

You want a role model?

You want someone who not only brings it but is thoughtful and articulate and can describe not only why she wins but how she goes about planning her victories and then executing them?

America, once again -- we present Kelly Clark, your 2002 Salt Lake Games halfpipe gold medalist and 2010 Vancouver Games bronze medalist. And, as well, the fourth-place finisher in Torino in 2006 -- fourth because she went for it all in a bid to get back to the podium but crashed, a thing that those who know and appreciate snowboarding appreciated profoundly.

Kelly Clark is now 27. "I know who I am," she said. "My identity isn't wrapped up in my snowboarding. My identity isn't wrapped up in my results. So I am able to enjoy them."

She said, "After these last Olympics," in Vancouver, "some of my competitors came up to me and said, 'I am so glad it's over. I don't have to compete anymore.' I had to go to my coaches and say, 'I want to go compete,' " to finish out the season.

"I was like, 'Is that OK?'

"'They're like, 'OK!'

"I have fun."

That, truly, is the amazing and genuine thing about Kelly Clark, the difference-maker.

She has been competing for roughly 12 years. There is an undeniable glamor to the circuit. But there is a grind to it, too.

For her -- it's still fun.

That mental edge is huge. What pushed her this winter back to the top was the other part of the equation -- the physical part of being a top athlete.

Last summer, she committed herself to being in better shape than she had ever been before. She ran miles. She ran intervals. She did core work, agility work, cardio, weightlifting and more.

The goal, she said, came in two parts:

-- In prior years she might max herself out at 100 percent at a particular competition. She might win but feel exhausted. This season the idea was to raise her baseline fitness level to a solid 80 or 90 percent. That way she could run solid and tough from December through March without feeling worn out.

-- She also wanted each and every weekend, moreover, to be in such good shape that her last run of the day in the halfpipe not only could but would be her best run of the day.

That 1080 in Aspen, for instance? That  came on what snowboarders call the "victory lap," a final run. She had already won the competition.

"From the beginning of the season, I decided to be intentional," she said, meaning to approach each competition with deliberate intent -- a plan and purpose.

"That was one of my core values. Whether it was an Olympic year or not, whether it was a big contest or not, I had goals and tricks and things I wanted to accomplish.

"That's why you saw at events if I had first place -- then on the victory lap you saw tricks. I had things I wanted to accomplish. I did things because I wanted to. It simplifies things a lot."

Kelly turns 28 this summer. You bet she's planning to be at the Winter Games in Sochi.

In February of 2014 she would be 30. Laughing, she said of the entertainment value of being a 30-year-old halfpipe icon, "I am aware."

Someone, however, has to be the first. And in her career, that has typically been Kelly Clark.

First and, often, best.

This 2011 season -- for sure the best.

"I want to inspire people and show them what's possible on a snowboard. I want to bridge that gap between the possible and the impossible. I want," she said, "to lead the way."

IOC's Urs Lacotte resigns

The press facilities at the Chateau de Vidy, the International Olympic Committee's lakefront headquarters in Lausanne, Switzerland, used to be an after-thought. Whatever little closet they could squeeze us into -- that's where we went. Now, though, thanks to a recent remodel at Vidy, there's a real press room, with pretty much everything you'd want, even space to just hang around after the news conferences that are held there break up, and that's what the IOC director general, Urs Lacotte, and I were doing after the most recent executive board meeting, this past January.

For a good long while, he and I talked about matters philosophical. Lacotte, and this may surprise anyone who doesn't know him well, who knows only that he came to the IOC after years at the top echelon of the Swiss military, can be a surprisingly gentle, indeed soulful, guy. He cares deeply about the values that underpin the Olympic movement.

We talked about the ancient Games, and then generally about the state of the movement now, about threats such as doping and gambling, and then about the IOC's myriad social responsibilities. Then, though, he excused himself because he had another meeting to make, and as I always did after such conversations, I thought it a very good thing indeed that someone with such conviction played such a central role in IOC decision-making.

The IOC on Monday announced Lacotte would be resigning from his post, effective Thursday, for health reasons.

The bad news is that his day-to-day counsel will surely be missed.

“Urs Lacotte has performed his functions with competence, integrity and loyalty, and the IOC looks forward to benefiting from his commitment and experience in the future," the IOC president, Jacques Rogge, said in a statement, adding, "The IOC thanks Urs Lacotte and extends its best wishes for his health.”

The good news is that Lacotte will continue to serve. In that same statement, the IOC said the position would be called "assignments adviser." In a phone call, Lacotte said his new role might best be described in French as chargé d'affaires, in English as special adviser.

It is certainly a positive that Lacotte will continue to be around, in his low-key way.

"I have tried," he said, "to manage the organization from the backstage."

Lacotte joined the IOC in 2003, taking over from François Carrard. The director general's job is to oversee the IOC's administrative offices in Lausanne.

Carrard served as something of a highly visible prime minister in the presidency of Juan Antonio Samaranch -- that is, Carrard was often in front of the cameras and microphones, in measure because Samaranch was far more shy, because the IOC during those years could be less press-savvy and because Carrard was not only fluent but fluid in American-style English. Also, as a general rule, Carrard kind of liked hanging out with the press gaggle, and vice-versa.

Lacotte, from the outset, was far more of a -- as he aptly put it -- backstage presence. He would seek you out to talk one-on-one, quietly.

And make no mistake. He was, and is, a man of distinct values.

To be sure, the IOC president and others in his cabinet, among them Christophe de Kepper, arguably Rogge's key adviser, understand fully and wholly, with moral and ethical certainty, the raison d'être of the Olympic movement. So did Samaranch. So, too, does Carrard.

To offer praise of Lacotte is by no means to diminish Rogge or anyone else, even by implication.

"Let's face it," Lacotte said in our phone call Monday. "The Games are the engine of the movement. We need a healthy Games. It's a big business," meaning the movement.

"But for me, it's absolutely clear the movement survives when we are clear and credible," in particular on challenging issues such as those he and I discussed in that quiet corner of the press room in January, doping and gambling.

The reason for the IOC's announcement Monday was hardly a surprise. In 2007, Lacotte underwent bypass surgery. The next year a neurological issue emerged.

Lacotte is 58. He and his wife, France, have two children, a 27-year-old son who is an engineer, and a 24-year-old daughter who restores antique furniture. They were trying to balance his work life with his health and their personal lives.

"I didn't imagine to step down," he told me. But in the end, he said, "I had no choice."

De Kepper will take over Lacotte's duties, and it's unlikely Lacotte will make an appearance at SportAccord, the convention at which the IOC's executive board will next convene, in London early next month.

He may well be afforded the opportunity to address the IOC session in Durban, South Africa, in July.

If so, and for the record, I will be among those keenly interested in what he has to say that day from the lectern. The wisdom he has offered in those quiet corners fully deserves that wider audience.

Joey Hagerty, and the Olympic journey

In baseball, when a really good guy retires, they have a ceremony on the field for him, and sometimes they go the extra mile and give him a brand new car. Maybe even a convertible. In Greco-Roman wrestling, they have a neat tradition when a guy retires. He takes his wrestling boots and puts them at the center of the mat.

In gymnastics, there's no such ceremonial farewell.

It's too bad. A class act like Joey Hagerty deserves better.

We in the press are all too ready to pay attention to our Olympic athletes while they are in the white-hot glare of the Games themselves. But when the spotlight fades, what then?

The truth is that in many ways large and small Joey Hagerty embodies what the Olympic dream -- more, the Olympic journey -- is all about.

He didn't get into gymnastics to make a ton of money, and didn't. He didn't get into it to become the star of stage and screen; he's not.

He got into gymnastics because he loved it.

He chased the Olympics because he had a dream.

He got to live that dream -- against, frankly, crazy odds.

Joey Hagerty, who turns 29 next month, leaves competitive gymnastics an Olympic medalist -- even though he never once made a team that represented the United States at a world championships.

If you know gymnastics, you know that's just implausible.

But it's so.

Joey said, "I was never on a worlds team. Never on a big, huge team. I always had surgeries. My name was never out there -- well, it was out there in a small way. I never had huge accomplishments. I never won the [national all-around] championship. I was the Trojan horse -- that's what Ed Burch called me," a reference to his coach at Gold Cup Gymnastics in Albuquerque, where he grew up.

New Mexico is obviously not densely populated. But Gold Cup has sent a remarkable number of talented gymnasts to the U.S. team, including 1992 gold medalist Trent Dimas.

So that's one reason for his success. He had role models.

Joey has three older sisters. He got into gymnastics in the first instance by tagging along after them.

Then, it turned out he was pretty good.

It turned out, too, that he had the one thing you have to have to be an Olympic athlete -- the killer passion for whatever sport it is.

That's what kept Joey going through the surgeries and all the ups and the downs.

Joey's time came in the spring and summer of 2008.

First, at the national championships in Houston, he won the high bar and took third in the all-around.

Then, at the all-important U.S. Olympic Trials in Philadelphia, he won both the floor exercise and the high bar, and took second in the all-around.

Nine guys make up a U.S. Olympic gymnastics team. Six are in the starting line-up; three more, at the outset, are designated as alternates. There are all kinds of permutations involved in who makes the list of nine. Who, for instance, could help get points on the still rings? Who on the pommel horse? And so on.

Suffice it to say that a guy who wins two disciplines at Trials, who comes in second in the all-around -- that guy, even if he had never before been on a worlds team, that guy was going to be on the Olympic team and, moreover, in the starting-six line-up.

"It didn't even sink in until we got off the airplane in Beijing -- holy cow," Joey said. "We're here. We did this -- there were 'Beijing' signs everywhere. It was really surreal.

"Then we got to the Olympic village and the place was huge. The cafeteria was the size of football fields. It kept getting more and more overwhelming, and exciting, and fun. It didn't stop. Stuff happened every day. Like, look, there was Kobe Bryant. Oh, my god. There was Roger Federer. Every moment was -- precious."

Practice -- even that was a big deal at the Games. "We only got to see the arena once before we competed and seeing 14,000 people -- I don't know if you've ever been to a normal gymnastics meet, with a couple thousand people, maybe, but this was a sell-out.

"I wouldn't say it was intimidating," Joey recalled. No way. "It was that much more exciting."

The U.S. team's journey to and through its week of competition in Beijing was marked by ongoing dramas involving injuries to both Paul and Morgan Hamm. Raj Bhavsar replaced Paul. Sasha Artemev replaced Morgan, in an announcement made Aug. 7, 2008, literally the day before the Games would begin.

Artemev in particular was a gamble. For the U.S. men to have a shot at a medal, he had to produce on the pommel horse.

The U.S. gymnastics team -- unfazed.

"Never count us out," Joey recalled. "We were pretty determined to do our jobs.

"It didn't even matter who stepped in. It was going to get done. If they had chosen [David] Durante," at that point the sole remaining alternate, "instead of Sasha, we had the confidence it was going to get done.

"We were a group of nine. We were a clan. A family. All nine of us. They are my brothers for life."

The competition, predictably, came down to Sasha, and the pommel horse. The gamble paid off. He got it done. The American men took third -- a result they calculated on the sidelines as the German team was finishing their final turns.

"We had to calm ourselves down," Joey said. "We didn't want to be jerks. We had to contain our excitement. That was really hard. But once the meet was done and we knew we had won the medal, you could see the smiles on our faces."

And as for stepping onto the podium?

"How do you describe the best moment in your life, other than having a child and getting married? There's nothing else like it. There's no way to describe what you trained for your whole life and what you've dreamed of. You can't put words to that."

Life goes on after an Olympics, of course, and doctors said Joey had to clean out his right shoulder, which he did in December of 2009.

He came back from that, enough at least to do what needs to be done in the gym -- you're always sore if you're a gymnast. And now the London Games are only about a year away.

But, you know, that passion -- it's just not there anymore.

To be clear: There is no shame in that. None.

They say it takes courage to acknowledge that, and maybe that's the case, but it takes something much more.

It takes fulfillment, and peace of mind, and serenity.

That's what Joey Hagerty has.

He earned all of that.

"You have to enjoy what you do," he said. "I was getting to the point where I didn't want to go to the gym every day. My body was hurting and still hasn't fully recovered from the shoulder surgery. I was just ready to move on with my life."

Joey and his girlfriend, Ashley Van Orren, who is 23, have been together for two years. They're going to move back to New Mexico and consider their options. Maybe do a little traveling, figure stuff out.

"I was happy being an Olympian," he said. "The medal on top of that -- it's the frosting on top of the cake. I couldn't be happier with my career."

You lived the dream, Joey. Maybe you and Ashley can send us all a photo of the two of you together in Paris, or wherever, okay? Have fun out there.

Thud of a World Cup ski season ending

In an anticlimactic thud of an ending to one of the most exciting alpine ski seasons ever, Germany's Maria Riesch on Saturday beat her very good friend, American Lindsey Vonn, for the women's World Cup overall title when crummy weather forced the cancellation of the year's final race, a giant slalom. How thoroughly, profoundly unsatisfying.

"Win or lose," Vonn said afterward, "I just wanted the chance. I feel devastated.

"The cancellation of this race doesn't just hurt me. It hurts the fans and the sport of ski racing as a whole."

Indeed, that is the bottom line.

Not to take anything away from Riesch.

She finished with 1,728 points.

Vonn ended up with 1,725.

Riesch's victory marks the first time a German has won the women's World Cup overall since Katja Seizinger in 1998. That's a big deal.

To be very, very clear: This is not about Riesch. Kudos to her. Over the course of the season, she amassed enough points to prevail, and that's how the system works.

But like all systems, with rules and regulations,  you have to ask whether it produced an outcome that served its stakeholders well. Who feels good about this?

Vonn had launched one of the great late-season charges in World Cup history, her charge launched in a bizarre way by an early February concussion. The concussion forced her to take time off. After she felt better, she said many times, she decided she had nothing to lose -- and so she decided to just let it rip.

In late February, at the World Cup stop in Sweden, Vonn was 216 points down.

Then, though, after a great weekend in Tarvisio, Italy, just 96. Then, after a stop in the Czech Republic, 23.

The tour moved this week to the World Cup finals in Lenzerheide, Switzerland, and after the first of four scheduled races, a downhill won by American Julia Mancuso, Vonn fourth, Riesch 17th, Vonn found herself back in the overall lead, with 1,725 points, Riesch with 1,678.

Weather forced the cancellation of the next event, the super-G, arguably Vonn's best event. She had clinched the season's super-G title two weeks before, along with the downhill and super-combined crowns. That super-G cancellation probably deprived Vonn of critical points.

They managed to run, albeit on a shortened course, the third race of the four on the schedule, a slalom. Vonn finished 13th, Riesch fourth, enough to put Riesch back on top in the overall standings by -- three points.

Pending the fourth, and final, race, the giant slalom.

At the Czech World Cup stop, last week in Spindleruv Mlyn,  Vonn's third-place in the GS was the very first of her career. So she might well have been looking at points in the GS as well.

"I'm really disappointed (Thursday's) race was canceled," Vonn had said, looking around at the yucky weather in Lenzerheide, adding about Saturday, "I really hope they try, because I know I have a chance."

Thirty years from now, when Maria and Lindsey are sitting around the Christmas tree, reminiscing about their years dominating the ski circuit, and the 2011 season comes up, and the kids with their shiny faces say, tell us the story again about how it was that Grandma Lindsey won three straight World Cup overalls in 2008 and 2009 and 2010 and then in 2011 Grandma Maria beat Grandma Lindsey by three points for the championship but is it true, Grandma Lindsey, that you didn't even get the chance to race Grandma Maria on the very last day to find out who was best?

How's that going to go over around the Christmas table?

Right. Which is why this situation should never, ever be allowed to happen again.

There has to be a better way. Not saying the answer is immediately apparent.  Just saying there has to be a better way because, as Vonn points out, alpine racing is an extraordinary sport and yet it struggles for attention outside the Olympic spotlight. This is the sort of thing that does not lend it credibility.

Indeed, this -- to relate it in terms an American audience might understand -- is like the baseball version of a five-inning no-hitter. It counts but -- yech.

"I think they could have been working on [the course] like they did yesterday," to get it ready for the slalom, the U.S. women's head coach Alex Hoedlmoser, said Saturday. "I have the feeling they didn't try everything."

Query: Why, in Switzerland, of all places, was there not sufficient snow-making equipment on hand -- or, for that matter, stored-up snow -- to ensure a suitable course?

Or are these finals a clear sign of the ominous global warming issues that have been an undercurrent of the World Cup circuit for the past several years? If that's the case, perhaps some good might come out of this thud of an ending. Maybe it could serve as the spark for a meaningful, high-level FIS-led analysis of climate change and whether the federation's rules ought to be reviewed to allow for winners to be decided where they ought to be decided.

On the mountain.

To ask a simple question: Shouldn't that be obvious?

Lindsey Van is a hero, too

It is perhaps Lindsey Van's lot in life that her name sounds a lot like Lindsey Vonn's, and while Lindsey Van is a world-champion ski jumper and her sport isn't even in the Olympics -- not yet, anyway -- Lindsey Vonn is an alpine racer and an Olympic gold-medalist who gets loads of attention and commercials and even a spot on "Law and Order" and generally gets treated like the American hero she is. But Lindsey Van is a hero, too.

Lindsey Van, the 2009 ski-jumping world champion, spent Monday in San Francisco with a needle in her right arm and another in her left.  One needle sucked blood out of her. The other put it back into her. Her blood will help save the life of a man she has never met.

All she knows about him is that he is 49 years old and has leukemia.

Any number of athletes talk a good game about doing the right thing. Then there is someone like Lindsey Van, who submitted herself to nasty drugs and endured the discomfort if not outright pain of a procedure that no one forced her to do -- that she did because it was simply the honorable and decent thing to do.

"I just think," she said beforehand, in an interview from Park City, Utah, where she lives, "it's the human thing to do."

She also said, "If my family was sick, if I was sick -- I would want someone to donate for me or my family. If you want to expect a transplant, you have to elect to give one. You have to donate yourself."

Such simple logic, such elemental humanity, and yet there is all the more dignity in the story because, after all, the rules are that Lindsey doesn't know who she's donating to.

This, though, didn't exactly start that way.

Lindsey's former roommate, Seun Adebiyi, had been diagnosed with a rare leukemia.

He needed a bone-marrow transplant.

He tried, and he searched. But he could not find a match. Naturally enough, he turned to his friends, and asked them to sign up for a donation registry.

So Lindsey did -- at a website called bethematch.com, which coordinates potential bone-marrow donors.

It turned out she was not a match for Seun.

As it turned out, she said, about a year ago, Sean did get a transplant, and he seems to be getting better.

Meanwhile, she said, after signing up at the website, she got a call. Did she want to follow through?

This is where the story turns. Instead of saying, no, I was in this only for Seun -- Lindsey said, sure, of course, I am glad to help.

Be the Match sent her a cheek swab; she sent it back.

At this point -- really, at any point -- she could have withdrawn her name from the registry.

That, though, was never really an option for Lindsey. Once she was in, she was in.

And then came another call: you're a perfect match, they said, for this 49-year-old man.

The rules don't permit Lindsey to meet him on the grounds that he -- like all recipients -- should focus strictly on recovery.

The timing, as it were, couldn't have turned out better. The 2011 ski-jump championships were held in February, in Norway, so the season was essentially over.

The International Olympic Committee is widely expected in the coming weeks to announce it will add women's ski jumping to the program for the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi, Russia. But because women's ski jumping is not yet formally part of the Olympic program, the blood-boosting drugs that Lindsey had to take last week at home in Utah to get her system ready for donation Monday in San Francisco -- well, none of that formally had to be of any concern to the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency.

Last week, in Park City, the doctors' orders were to sit around and do not much, to let the drugs do their thing. There was time to be philosophical.

"There's life outside sport," Lindsey was saying on the phone. "You have to be thankful for what you have. You have to give back. If it's something big like this -- ok, awesome. If it's something little, that's awesome, too.

"Life is bigger than sport. His life will change because of this. So for me -- why not jump on it?"

On Monday in San Francisco, the needles were in Lindsey's arms by 6:30 in the morning. She spent the next three hours watching her blood go out, and in, and spin -- that is, to a machine that spun her blood around and around, multiple times separating out plasma and stem cells, the stuff that will go into a 49-year-old man she has never met.

"I was feeling pretty good," she said afterward, though "a little strange after having been on the machine for hours."

There were supposed to be multiple sessions on the needles. But the technicians got all they needed from Lindsey that first time -- perhaps the benefit of being a world-class athlete.

"I plan to start training again, doing active activities, yoga and skiing again this week," she said. "It wasn't even a week of down time for me.

"If you consider that somebody who's going to receive what they took out of me has been sick for a very long time -- I really don't think this has been too much to ask.

"Really, I don't."

Lindsey Vonn back in the lead

There are three races to go, and the way this World Cup season has gone, it's stating the obvious to observe that anything can happen. But suddenly Lindsey Vonn is leading the World Cup overall points race. Two weeks ago, that seemed -- if not impossible -- surely improbable.

As of last week it seemed only marginally possible but hardly probable.

Now, after the last downhill of the season, it is fact. Attention, Hollywood screenwriters  -- is this a gift, or what? In early February, Vonn was knocked out with a concussion, and now -- now she has roared back to lead the standings, with just three races to go. Could you dream it up any better?

American Julia Mancuso, who has herself had a great season, won Wednesday's race in Lenzerheide, Switzerland, her first victory on the World Cup tour in four years. Vonn took fourth. Vonn's very good friend, Germany's Maria Riesch, who has for most of the season held the overall points lead, finished Wednesday's race in 17th place, a strangely cautious run that earned her zero World Cup points.

Vonn earned 50 race points.

She now has 1,705 points.

Riesch has 1,678.

"It's tough," Riesch said later, according to Associated Press, "when you have led the whole season and suddenly you get knocked off the top."

The wire service also reported that Riesch slumped to the snow in the finish area and was later shown on television sitting with her head in her hands in the equipment inspection hut.

All of which is a reminder that for all the physicality of elite alpine racing the sport is so much a mental game.

Particularly these past couple weeks for Vonn and Riesch.

Again, to be obvious -- there are three races to go, and anything can happen.

Anything. That is the nature of ski racing.

But if you are in the American camp you have to like the trend.

Over the first weekend of March, skiing in Tarvisio, Italy, Vonn clinched the downhill, super-G and super-combined season titles and cut Riesch's overall points lead to just 96 points.

Last week, at the Czech resort Splinderuv Mlyn, Vonn took a career-best third in giant slalom, with Riesch 29th. That cut Riesch's lead to 38.

Then, in the slalom, Vonn finished 16th -- which, remarkably, was her first completed slalom run since late November. Riesch, meanwhile, skied out. Riesch's lead: 23.

If you are in the American camp, meanwhile, what you really have to like is where Lindsey Vonn's head is at -- and while high school English teachers everywhere might not approve of the construction of that sentence, that's the way it is.

Rarely in world-class sport do you hear an exposition of the sort that Lindsey Vonn delivered Wednesday, at a news conference, when she was asked why it's all going so right. Like her skiing, she just let it rip.

Here, according to an audiotape of the news conference posted by the U.S. Ski Team, is what she said:

"I mean, honestly, it would be much better, much easier, if I were in the lead by 200 points. But it has been really exciting to be the one chasing the overall, to be the underdog.

"Maria has been in the lead of the overall since like right after christmas and I have been chasing her, chasing her, chasing her ever since.  You know, I feel like after Are," the World Cup stop in Sweden the last weekend in February, "I just said, 'OK, you just have to risk everything every day. You have to ski as best you can. You can't be nervous. You can't hold back. You have to give it everything you have.'

"I think I have been skiing more relaxed than I ever have because of that. It is definitely a different tactic. It is definitely a position I have never been in before. It's exciting. I don't know -- I kind of enjoy the new challenge. The last three weeks have gone really well. Like I said earlier, I'm proud of myself for being able to come from behind, to say I'm in the hunt at the finals. So -- yeah."

To know Lindsey is to know how much that little, "So -- yeah," at the end really says. It says she is on her game, and totally.

If she holds on, she will win her fourth straight World Cup overall title. She said a couple weeks ago that if she were to win this fourth in a row it would be the "most rewarding" of her career because, obviously, she was down by so many points.

She said Wednesday, "I still feel like I'm an underdog," adding a moment later, "Maria is dangerous in all events. I have to be ready and on my game in every race."

Three to go.

Fun at the ol' USOC

The U.S. Olympic Committee's two-day board of directors meeting in Atlanta wrapped up Tuesday, and what was notable was not that it produced any big news -- none was expected -- but that it was, as new board member Dave Ogrean put it, well, "fun." "Fun" is not a word that has not often in recent years been associated with USOC precincts.

Then again, as has been observed repeatedly in this space over the past 15 months, since board chairman Larry Probst hired Scott Blackmun to be the chief executive officer, this is indeed a new USOC.

Ogrean, who has pretty much seen and done it all in an extensive career that has traversed the American Olympic stage and who is currently the executive director of USA Hockey, said in a conference call with reporters, referring to the USOC's management and, as well, its outlook, "I think things are in better shape today than they [have been] in a decade."

It is perhaps the nature of what's now to suffer some amnesia when recalling what has come before. So let us not so easily dismiss the domestic stability that Peter Ueberroth and Jim Scherr brought through the Athens and Beijing Olympics; that stability was much needed after the wholesale convulsions and governance reforms that immediately preceded their tenures.

Then, though, came Stephanie Streeter, who as USOC chief executive showed that she knew of the intricacies of the international Olympic movement about what you'd expect from someone who had run a printing company. Like -- what?

And then came the debacle of the aborted USOC television network.

And then, worse, Chicago's beat-down in the first round of the 2009 International Olympic Committee vote at which Rio de Janeiro won the 2016 Summer Games -- the president of the United States summoned to the scene in Copenhagen just before the vote, and for what? For Chicago, his hometown, to win just 18 votes?

None of that could in the least be described as "fun."

Of all the things they have done, Blackmun and Probst have spent considerable time and effort working at the one thing that counts more than anything else in the Olympic scene -- relationship-building.

Last September,  Dick Ebersol, his title now chairman of NBC Sports Group, appeared in Colorado Springs, Colo., at the annual USOC assembly, with words of praise for both Probst and Blackmun.

News item, Feb. 17: Online broker TD Ameritrade Holding Co. agrees to sponsor the U.S. Olympic team through the 2012 Games, the deal marking the first-ever USOC sponsorship in the online broker category as well as the first collaboration with NBC, which will receive a commitment for a certain level of media buys from TD Ameritrade, according to the USOC. Terms were not disclosed.

News item,  March 10: NBC and the USOC sign Citi as an official bank partner of the network and the 2012 U.S. team. The USOC had been without an "official bank" since Bank of America had bowed out in 2009. The USOC's chief marketing officer, Lisa Baird, tells the Sports Business Daily of the novel deal, "Partners are responding to the integrated marketing and media package. We're proud of both of these coming on and doing so in quick time is evidence this is working.”

Disclosure: I am a former NBC employee.

More: I had no idea any of these deals were coming and I have zero idea if any other USOC contracts are coming.

But I can put two and two together, and I know this: whether or not Ebersol was in the least bit involved in any of this deal-making or not, the fact is that the climate between NBC and the USOC is totally, totally different than it was not all that long ago.

Here, from October, 2009, was Ebersol, to the Washington Post: "IOC members 'don't hate America, they hate the USOC, and with good reason. Congress doesn't need to do any new reform. The USOC just needs new leadership.' "

And here, just a couple days ago, after the announcement that Probst and Blackmun had been appointed to IOC committees, was Ebersol, in the New York Times: "This is exciting news for all of us involved with the Olympic movement in the United States. It is clear evidence that the re-energized and clearly focused USOC under Larry and Scott is being recognized not only by the IOC but by the entire international Olympic community."

To be sure, the USOC in March 2011 still faces significant challenges.

It must yet strike a deal with the IOC to resolve a longstanding revenue dispute. Talks are ongoing, and Probst said Tuesday, without providing any details, that he and other senior USOC officials are "encouraged by the tone of the discussions."

A U.S. television rights deal for 2014 and 2016, and perhaps beyond, is now at issue. That deal is the key to the IOC's financial well-being. Meanwhile, how it plays out -- and for a variety of reasons it is almost sure to play out in the near term,before July -- is central to perceptions of the USOC in IOC circles, and certain to be a key factor in whether and when the USOC gets back into the bid game.

A whole host of other concerns are also up for discussion. Just to pick a couple:

For funding purposes, how best to determine which national governing bodies are more or less likely to reach or sustain "sustained competitive excellence," to use USOC lingo?

Are there security-related concerns beyond the usual at the 2011 Pan American Games in Guadalajara, Mexico?

Such matters were on the table Tuesday in Atlanta for the board, which now totals 15, and the new members: Ogrean; former Visa executive Susanne Lyons; Nina Kemppel, a cross-country skier who raced in four Winter Games; former John Hancock chief executive James Benson; and former Microsoft executive Robbie Bach.

"These are talented people and they are not wallflowers," Blackmun said.

Probst echoed, "They were happy to speak up -- to share their opinions."

Ogrean said the dialogue was "always civil," a point that, again, could not always be said to be the case with the USOC. He said, "It was, quite frankly, fun."

USOC leaders get IOC appointments

Each March, the International Olympic Committee announces the make-up of its various committees. The 2011 list contains two notable newcomers, and for those who are looking to see tangible signs in relations between the IOC and the U.S. Olympic Committee the IOC 2011 commissions list offers evidence that the USOC's go-slow approach to building bridges may be proving fruitful.

There on page 27 of the 30-page document: Larry Probst, a new member of the IOC's international relations committee. Probst is of course chairman of the USOC's board of directors.

And there on page 11: Scott Blackmun, the USOC's chief executive officer, has joined the IOC's marketing commission -- which, given the financial tensions that have strained the relationship over the years between the two entities, is relevant, indeed.

The USOC's strategy since Chicago's unceremonious first-round Oct. 2, 2009, exit in the 2016 Summer Games vote, won by Rio de Janeiro, has been classic Dale Carnegie -- win friends and influence people, the emphasis now on the "winning friends" part. The "influence people" part can come later, whenever that might be. The thing now for the USOC is to again assert itself as a partner in good standing in the movement, to do the right thing without having to be in the bid game.

The announcement Friday doesn't mark the end of the road. Hardly. But it does show the USOC is heading in the right direction. To put it simply and plainly, the commission list makes for IOC recognition of the USOC's efforts all these past months.