A win for Jessica Hardy, and common sense

Jessica Hardy, who never did anything wrong but who had to sit out the 2008 Olympic Games anyway, was cleared Thursday to try to make the 2012 London Games. Good for her.

Good for the U.S. swim team, for the U.S. Olympic Committee and for the International Olympic Committee.

Finally, common sense prevailed.

"This feels great. This is, like, the best feeling ever," Jessica Hardy said in a telephone interview.

Echoed her attorney, Howard Jacobs, ""It's great for her. Finally. No question marks for Jessica."

The decision announced Thursday also marks yet another example of the warming relationship between the USOC and IOC, and comes the day after the two committees said they had mutually agreed to take the case involving the U.S. sprinter LaShawn Merritt to sport's top tribunal, the Lausanne, Switzerland-based Court of Arbitration for Sport, for expedited resolution.

Here is the difference between the two matters:

Merritt, who tested positive for a banned substance found in a male enhancement product, received a 21-month suspension from competition. His ban ends this July.

Before the 2008 Summer Games the IOC enacted what's commonly known now as the "six-month rule." It  purports to bar any athlete hit with an anti-doping ban longer than a half-year from competing in the successive edition of the Games -- in Merritt's case, London in 2012, even though his ban is due to end in July 2011.

Behold the complications:

Technically, Merritt would be eligible for the 2012 U.S. Olympic Trials. But would he want to run at the Trials if he couldn't compete at the Games themselves? If he did run, and qualified, could an American or English court compel his position at the Games? Big picture -- is the "six-month rule" an impermissible double penalty on top of the 21-month ban or is it merely, as the IOC contends, an eligibility rule?

All these questions. Both the USOC and IOC need answers. That's why they moved together to take Merritt's case to CAS.

And now for the Hardy case.

She tested positive in July 2008 for the banned substance clenbuterol. It somehow got into a dietary supplement she had been taking.

The two-year suspension typical in even a first doping case was later cut in half.

So what about the six-month rule?

The rule went into effect on July 1, 2008; she tested positive on July 3; there was no way she would realistically have known about it.

In an April 21 letter to USOC chief executive Scott Blackmun, the IOC said it simply would not apply the rule in Hardy's case.

The very, very best thing about this is that Jessica Hardy gets to hold her head high on the pool deck. She doesn't have to worry about anyone whispering anything -- anything -- about her. She didn't do anything wrong.

It took a long time for the authorities to say so. But that's exactly what they said: Jessica Hardy did not do anything wrong. Now all she has to do is go out there and swim.

"It's really, really, really amazing," she said. "It was a long three years waiting around, hoping and training and preparing for the best. Now I can not wait for the future.

"It has been kind of hard," she admitted. "I have been emotionally fragile this whole time. To have a definite answer three years later is amazing. I am more excited than ever."

Allyson Felix: the complete package

In some parts of the country, they know it's spring when the daffodils start poking their way out of the ground.

Or when the first red-breasted robins show up from warmer climes.

In Southern California track circles, it's the arrival of the Mt. SAC Relays in way-out-there Walnut, located precisely near nowhere. Despite the geographical undesirability, thousands of high school kids, college runners and several Olympic standouts make the Mt. SACs, testament in part to the efforts of long-time meet director Scott Davis, one of the all-time good guys. Scott died last August.

Two Saturdays ago, they held the 2011 Mt. SACs. Scott surely wouldn't have wanted it any other way. Allyson Felix, who by now has her pick of meets to run in, very deliberately ran at the Mt. SACs, leading the  "Kersee All Stars" to victory in the women's 400-meter relay in 43.1 seconds.

As was Scott Davis, so is Allyson Felix.

It's Allyson Felix's relative misfortune to be great, truly great, at a sport that gets remarkably little attention in a country seemingly desperate for genuine heroes.

I mean, what else would you want?

She ran on the 2008 Games gold-medal winning 1600-meter relay team.

She is the 2004 and 2008 Games silver medalist in the 200 meters.

She is the three-time world champion in the 200 -- 2009, 2007 and 2005.

Last season, she won the inaugural Samsung Diamond League titles in both the 200 and 400 meters, and was named the Jesse Owens Award winner as the top female athlete in the United States.

One of the sport's storylines for 2011, and probably 2012, is whether Allyson will run the 200-400 double at the world championships this summer in South Korea and then, presumably, at the London Games. She said she'll decide by this summer's U.S. nationals.

A back story: One of the Kersee assistant coaches, Valerie Briscoe-Hooks, was the first to do the 200-400 double at a single Games, at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics.

More Allyson:

She excels in the relays. Examples: She runs the second leg (2010 Penn Relays 400-meter relay). She runs anchor (2010 Penn Relays 1600-meter relay). She executes clean passes (both). She wins (both).

Allyson will run the Penn Relays again this coming weekend; her open season gets underway next weekend, in Doha, Qatar, the first 2011 Diamond League meet. In Doha, she will run just the 400.

Allyson runs clean. No one whispers about doping, the scourge of track and field, when it comes to Allyson Felix.

She has great form. The way she runs -- it looks almost effortless, which of course it's not. "I get that a lot," she said. "You have to watch the background. It's my long legs and long stride that make it seem like I'm not moving.

She runs with character. She serves on President Obama's Council for Fitness, Sports and Nutrition.

Allyson, who is University of Southern California through and through, said, "Sports are so uncertain. You work so hard but you never want to be in a situation where you can't do anything else. We," she and her brother, Wes, "were always encouraged to put academics first.

"It's great to make sure younger kids see that. To make sure kids who aren't so serious about sports -- to let them know that they can be great at anything. Having that complete package is a great thing."

Which, in its roundabout way, is why Allyson dropped in at the Mt. SACs a couple weeks back. Allyson is the complete package. And to get to where you're going you can't ever forget where you're from.

And, like thousands of other kids in Southern California, Allyson started at the Mt. SAC Relays.

"When I was in high school, Marion was running at the meet," she said, and that would be Marion Jones, of course.

"To me, she was everything. This was right before Sydney," when Jones would win five medals,  all of which would ultimately be given back amid revelations of doping, "and I remember I stood in line with all these little kids fighting to be in front to get an autograph.

"Just to be able to get close to someone I had looked up to was such a big deal. I think it's so cool to go back and see those kids. I would never have thought," Allyson Felix said, "I would be in that position."

A band of sisters on the road to making history

It's not that Lolo Silver wasn't already a world-class athlete and in what the rest of us mere mortals would consider great shape. Among her many accomplishments, she was the leading scorer for the winning U.S. women's water polo team last summer at the FINA World Cup, with 11 goals. Then again, the American women's head coach, Adam Krikorian, had promised the U.S. women that over the course of this winter, water polo's off-season, they would -- at his direction -- come to know what it was like to get in amazingly, ridiculously phenomenal shape.

Water polo demands ferocious mental will.  That mental edge is rooted in physical toughness. It's at once that simple and that complex.

The U.S. women's water polo team has won virtually everything it could win over the past decade -- with one exception, Olympic gold.

At the close of the 2010 season, the U.S. women were the No. 1 team in the world. To be atop the podium at the close of the 2012 London Olympics, however -- that is the manifest goal, and that's why Krikorian undertook at the start of 2011 a studied journey to take this team where it has never gone before.

It is, indeed, a journey. It can't be anything but. It's essentially a new team, a younger team and -- let there be no doubt -- Krikorian's team.

Which means it's of necessity going to be a long and winding journey. And a compelling study in both coach and team dynamic.

In sports, there can be no guarantee of anything. Beyond which, water polo is just too hard. If anyone in the American camp needs a vivid reminder of how hard, there is always Sydney and 2000 for a reminder -- one goal shy, just one very late goal, from gold.

That said: Krikorian, who came to the U.S. team from UCLA, is quietly but assuredly confident in himself and his means. The players have seemingly bought into his program.  Already, there is about this U.S. women's team a buzz, a feeling, a hard-to-describe sense that they are a band of sisters on the road to making history.

Perhaps the rest of the world doesn't know it yet.

But they do.

"Definitely," Lolo Silver said at practice this past Friday at their home base, a military base -- for real -- at Los Alamitos, Calif.

"We have all been pushed past anything -- pushed mentally and physically past anything we thought possible. Even the girls who have been to previous Olympics haven't had this sort of training this far away from the Olympics.  It has us focused and it has us getting together and it has forming friendships that are going to last forever."

At the outset, Krikorian made plain that despite the team's many past successes every spot on the roster was up for grabs.

No one was guaranteed a spot -- not even Brenda Villa, arguably the team's marquee player over the past three Olympic Games. She, like everyone else, would have to earn her way onto the 2012 Olympic team.

"Brenda has done a good job. She has gotten herself in probably the best fitness level she has been in, in a very long time," Krikorian said as he monitored the team, split into squads of three doing catch-and-shoot drills in the Los Alamitos pool.

"She has put herself in a pretty good position at this point. But," he emphasized, "there's no out here that's guaranteed a spot."

Of course, Villa was not among the women in the pool that day. She was nine time zones away, in Italy, playing for her club team, Orizzonte -- though Krikorian and the other Americans had just come back from playing against her, in an exhibition in Italy, but also with her, in another exhibition, against a team in Holland.

For extra fun this week in Los Alamitos, several of the women had started wearing 7 1/2-pound weight belts during their morning practices. Understand -- that is, in the pool. They were swimming or treading water or doing those shooting drills wearing those belts.

"Those are our new little gifts," Lolo said.  "To help us improve our leg strength."

Over the course of the winter, practice started at 7 and ran until 10, running again from 1:30 in the afternoon until 4:30, with a variation in the schedule on Wednesdays, to break things up.

There was time for both basic conditioning and for strength training.

Over the course of the winter, in a 200-yard swim test, Silver shaved 40 seconds off her average time.

At that level -- that is a huge drop.

She was hardly, however, alone.

Elsie Windes, who scored five goals during the 2010 FINA World Cup, is also 40 seconds faster now.

She said, "I did things I thought I couldn't -- things you thought you couldn't do but you did, and with your teammates."

Tanya Gandy, a standout at UCLA and who joined the U.S. national team in 2009, who scored five goals at the 2010 FINA World League Super Final, cut a full minute off her time.

"I still think the clock was lying," Tanya said. "It was good to see -- I didn't think I could get that fast. and I can get faster. It's very motivating to know how far you can come and how you can be pushed. Every day you can be pushed. It's testing you. It's testing your mental state."

"Maybe," Lolo Silver said with a shy smile, referring to Adam Krikorian, "there's a method to the madness."

USOC's classy visit to Tokyo

The chairman and chief executive of the U.S. Olympic Committee flew to Tokyo a couple days ago, where with their counterparts from the Japanese Olympic Committee they signed a mutual cooperation agreement.

Routine stuff in the Olympic scene. Except this wasn't. Judging from the way they were greeted there by the media, with flashbulbs flashing and cameras rolling, you might have thought Larry Probst, the USOC's chairman, and chief executive Scott Blackmun were rock stars.

It just goes to show you what happens when you do the right thing -- when you act with honor, dignity and class.

Probst and Blackmun are believed to be the first senior officials from another national Olympic committee to have visited Tokyo in the aftermath of the March 11 magnitude 9.0-earthquake, tsunami and resulting nuclear disaster in northeastern Japan.

To be crystal clear:

This was no grandstanding effort, no deliberate publicity play.

This was a trip that had been many months in the making. Indeed, it had been scheduled for earlier this year and then re-scheduled for April 21-22.

On one level, all the Americans did was honor the commitment they had made to their Japanese friends to show up.

But of course they did.

This is precisely the sort of thing Blackmun and Probst have been saying they would do.

Go back to what Blackmun said the very day he was hired, in January 2010, about the formula for re-establishing the USOC's station within the Olympic world.

He said then, "Internationally, it's just a lot of blocking and tackling. At the end of the day, relationships are a function of time and commitment, and we need to start spending that time and making that commitment and becoming engaged in the movement. The IOC is the leader of that movement and we intend to become a much more regular guest over there.

"It's not something we can fix overnight but it's something," he said, "we can address overnight."

Though Probst and Blackmun often travel as a team, the focus is and has to be, truly, on Probst. As the "president" of the American NOC -- in Olympic jargon -- he is the figure protocol demands must see and be seen. In a typical month, he's on the road  for USOC-related business 10 days, maybe more, out of 30. This month: London, Israel and now Japan.

Of the trip to Tokyo, Probst said, "We didn't do anything heroic or special. We did the right thing. We made a commitment to these guys to come visit and sign a coöperation agreement and we stuck with that commitment. It's as simple as that."

It is, but at the same time it's much, much more.

The follow-up this visit might well ignite could prove powerful, indeed.

"It is our great pleasure to have our friends from the United States with us, and by signing an agreement today, the firm partnership between the two Olympic Committees was confirmed," the president of the Japanese committee, Tsunekazu Takeda, said in a statement released by the USOC.

"I would also like to thank the USOC for their kind and prompt offer of support for the devastated people and damage caused by the tragic events. I look forward to continuing our cooperation as a partner NOC for further development of the Olympic movement in both countries."

Here, then, are some unsolicited ideas for further coöperation:

Perhaps other American athletes might want to do like former U.S. bobsledder Brock Kreitzburg? He plans to spend three months in northern Japan working on recovery efforts.

If enough American athletes, some well-known, some not so much, signed up to spend, say, a month in Japan, it could well be one of the most significant projects the USOC has ever undertaken. Could such a project intrigue the White House? Sponsors, too?

Maybe the IOC would want to get involved?

This doesn't need to be just fanciful thinking. There's real potential here.

On Saturday, before the opening match of a five-game series at the Olympic Training Center in Chula Vista, Calif., with the Japanese team, USA Field Hockey presented the visitors with a check for $11,316 -- all of it donations that had been raised for the recovery effort.

"While it's going to be a small amount in the big scheme of things, we hope that our gesture can provide some sort of relief to them," the U.S. national teams director, Kate Reisinger, said in a statement released by the federation.

To switch gears:

If it was understandable that for a whole host of reasons it might have been untenable to stage the world figure skating championships scheduled for late March in Tokyo (they get underway Monday in Moscow), now it seems reasonable to take a breath and assess whether other events due to take place this year in Tokyo ought to go on  as scheduled.

For instance -- the world gymnastics championships are due to be held in Tokyo in the fall.

In this regard, Probst's and Blackmun's trip last week ought to prove instructive. And Probst's extensive experience with Tokyo, and his observation of the scene there, ought to prove particularly relevant.

"I have been to Tokyo probably 30 to 40 times in my business career," Probst, the chairman and former president and CEO of video game giant Electronic Arts, said. "It just seems like normal, safe, comfortable Tokyo."

Chris Pearson: an American boxer you want to root for

The last American boxer to win gold at the Summer Olympics was Andre Ward. That was in Athens, in 2004, in the light-heavyweight division, 178 or so pounds. It has been a long, dry run. Everyone who knows the first thing about the sport in the United States understands that, and immediately.

"We're going to go back to the golden days of boxing and the USA is going to reign again in the future!" the president of USA Boxing, Hal Adonis, all but shouted into the microphone this past Sunday night between matches as the first season of the World Series of Boxing came to a close in Los Angeles.

The crowd roared -- a standing-room only mass of some 600 people at the Music Box, just steps from the iconic corner of Hollywood and Vine. In the house: Sugar Ray Leonard, Evander Holyfield, Lou Ferrigno, Jenny McCarthy, Julie Benz and "swimgerie" (that would be "lingerie-inspired swimwear") designer Lilly Ghalichi, along with swimergie models Johanna and Kristen.

What would the Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the reputed founder of the modern Olympic movement, have thought of such a scene?

"This is innovation," said C.K. Wu, the president of the international boxing federation, which goes by the acronym AIBA.

Giving the baron the benefit of the doubt:  if the intent has always been to get young people involved in sport, the swarms of young men wearing replica USC jerseys who cheered boisterously for the fighters and then lined up to get their photos taken with Johanna and Kristen in those revealing "swimgerie" suits -- it all seemed good.

As did the real surprise of the evening, and perhaps the reason there might be -- genuinely -- reason for optimism in Mr. Adonis' corner.

In boxing, you never know. The sport can be so political. Then again, as the saying goes, you simply can not teach speed, and Chris Pearson is mighty fast.

In the third fight of five Sunday, Pearson, a 20-year-old left-hander from a little town northwest of Dayton called Trotwood, Ohio, defeated a 2008 Beijing Games gold medalist, Bakhyt Sarsekbayev of Kazakhstan.

Pearson had come to the Matadors late in the season, referred by Rau'shee Warren, the 2007 flyweight world champion (112 pounds) and 2008 U.S. Olympic team member. Warren is also an Ohio guy. He's from Cincinnati, about 50 miles south of Dayton.

In a March 14 fight, Pearson, now fighting as a middleweight, at 160 pounds, had defeated one of the league's top fighters, Yamaguchi Florentino.

In the third round against Sarsekbayev, the 2008 welterweight gold medalist now fighting up as a middleweight, at 160, Pearson opened up a big cut over the Kazakh fighter's left eye. From then on, Pearson controlled the bout. He won a split decision: 50-45, 49-46, 47-48.

You want to root for a guy like Chris Pearson. He was raised by a single dad, Milton. Dad has been working for the Montgomery County court system for 21 years now. Chris' grandfather, Troy, and his grandmother, Zell, have been married for more than 50 years -- they were college sweethearts at Fort Valley State. Troy used to run a youth basketball program that's famous in and around southwest Ohio, the Dayton Mohawks.

Chris was a really good high school basketball and football player -- he was being recruited by big-time college programs -- until he tore up a knee.

It's not that he wasn't known as a boxer. He was, after all, a 2009 national PAL champ.

But now he's older, and bigger, and stronger -- after time at Northern Michigan University, at Marquette, Mich., and the U.S. Olympic Education Center there. While he has been earning two years worth of college credits, Chris Pearson said, way out of the spotlight up there in northern Michigan, he has been working on his boxing, and he has been working hard.

"Going in," meaning to the fight with Sarsekbayev," Milton Pearson said, referring to his son, "he told me, 'If I beat him, I am going to open some eyes.'

"I told him, 'Just go in and do what you know how to do.' "

As Chris Pearson later said in a telephone interview, "He knew he wasn't fighting no slouch."

There's a long way to go before Chris Pearson makes the Olympic team -- he's going to have to choose, for instance, whether to fight at the 152- or 165 1/2-pound Olympic weight classes -- and there are bound to be a lot of good fighters to be in his way.

But, as he proved Sunday night, he's pretty good himself. And bound to keep getting better.

Andre Ward, for one, has already told Chris Pearson that the sky is the limit.

This is why you really want to root for Chris Pearson. He says, "Yes, sir," and, "No, sir," when he speaks to you because that's what his father and grandfather taught him to do. He's humble about his accomplishments and his prospects even if, truly, the sky might be the limit.

All he will say, with an eye on London and 2012, is this: "I'm thankful for the opportunity to take my fighting to another level."

A healthy Hunter Kemper still has it

Seventeenth in the Sydney Games in 2000, ninth in Athens in 2004, seventh in Beijing in 2008, Hunter Kemper, who turns 35 next month, made plain this past weekend that he's very much in the mix for a fourth Olympics by winning the ITU Triathlon World Cup race in Ishigaki, Japan. To be a four-time Olympian is, of course, a comparatively unusual thing. You have to stay motivated. You have to stay healthy. You have to maybe even be a little bit lucky.

To be a four-time Olympian in an endurance sport -- that's asking even more. More than anything, you have to have what Hunter Kemper has at his core. "I still have a love and a passion for it," he said.

The question that plainly presents itself, at 34 going on 35: is that going to be enough?

When healthy, for sure, it's enough.

That's what Ishigaki showed. When he's healthy, he's still as good as anyone.

The victory Sunday made for Kemper's World Cup win since 2005.

He finished in 1 hour, 50 minutes, 32 seconds. The Olympic-style event, of course, includes a 1.5-kilometer swim, a 40-km bike ride and then a 10-km run.

Artem Parienko of Russia took second, 15 seconds back; Marek Jaskolka of Poland came in third, just two seconds behind Parienko. The World Cup medals were the first won by either racer; Jaskolka's was the first won by any Polish triathlete.

Mark Fretta of Portland, Ore., finished 14th.

Kemper had finished second in Ishigaki, twice, in 2005 and 2006, both times behind five-time winner Courtney Atkinson of Australia.

Ishigaki, located in far southern Japan, is the longest-running World Cup race in ITU history -- held every year since 1996. It's an island, and it's so far south it looks out toward Taiwan. It's more than 1,200 miles from Ishigaki to Tokyo, and farther still to the areas to the north of Japan more directly affected by the earthquake, tsunami and radiation.

Of course, the disaster was on everyone's minds at the Ishigaki race -- particularly because the ITU was still wrestling over the weekend with what to do with a race scheduled for May 14  in Yokohama, about 185 miles south of the damaged Fukushima nuclear reactor.

ITU President Marisol Casado on Tuesday announced a postponement of that May 14 event, saying the situation was "too risky," adding the federation would try to reschedule it. The event is an Olympic qualifier.

Ishigaki, though -- that race went on.  "I felt totally safe," Kemper said.

He added, "I was glad to do it, glad to support that race, celebrate sport in a few hours that might give some joy to the Japanese people."

In the swim, Russian brothers Ivan and Denis Vasiliev tried to break free from the rest of the pack. Jens Toft of Denmark joined them in the bike. Going into the transition to the run, those three were up 50 seconds against the main pack of 40.

Kemper caught them in the first lap of the run, took the lead by himself in the second lap and held to win easily.

Sounds simple enough, and it is -- again, when you're healthy.

Which Kemper hasn't been until recently.

2008 -- the dreaded sports hernia.

2009 -- a succession of nagging injuries. He raced only three times all year.

2010 -- a pelvic stress fracture and a broken collarbone.

Ouch, ouch and ouch.

Now -- better.

"The number one goal for me this year," Kemper said, "is staying healthy. If I can go the whole year and race 10 times, that's going to be a good year."

A good 2011 would, logically enough, lead to a good 2012. If logic has anything to do with it, there's this: 17th  in his first Olympics, ninth in his second, seventh in his third -- that's a trend that would seem to be pointing in the right direction.

"I like," Hunter Kemper said, "where it's going."

Awaiting the secrets of the "Richard W. Pound Olympic Collection"

The University of Texas at Austin has announced that it will collaborate with Montreal's McGill University to digitize the "Richard W. Pound Olympic Collection," and the only bummer is that it's going to take a good long while to see what's in the 400,000 pages that fill 350 or so boxes. Pound, the former World Anti-Doping Agency chief and International Olympic Committee vice-president, is of course well known within Olympic circles for his candor and wit. So there's bound to be some juicy stuff in those boxes.

The collection, which marks a remarkable coup for the Texas Program in Sports and Media, includes not only Pound's papers, among them some 700 printed titles, but his computer files, pretty much anything and everything relating to his years at the Canadian Olympic Committee, the IOC and WADA, dating back to the late 1960s.

Let's see. The investigation into the Salt Lake City corruption scandal. The founding of WADA. The boom years of U.S. marketing and television rights.

And more.

"I don't want this thrown in some vault where it's not used," Pound said in a telephone interview. "The purpose is to have available for scholars a resource that is probably unique in North America, perhaps the world …

"The further advantage is because it's mine it's not subject to the organizational limitations," meaning for instance IOC rules about mandatory waits that run to the decades to see certain materials, such as the minutes of executive board meetings.

Now the cautionary note to all this.

There is still going to be some waiting. It's likely going to take months, maybe years, before anyone sees any of this stuff in any significant detail.

Think about how long it takes you to scan stuff on your own home computer. Now think of scanning 400,000 pages. That's what "digitizing" means.

Moreover, some of this stuff is bound to be sensitive; there are bound to be reputation interests that come up. The University of Texas has really good lawyers on staff, and the University of Texas is simply not going to open these files up to just anyone when it might be sued for doing so.

Now, for another of the interesting corollary questions.

Why Texas?

After all, Pound would seem to have no obvious connection to Texas, or to Austin.

Three reasons.

One, they think creatively there. Woodward and Bernstein's Watergate papers, for instance, are now in Austin.

Two, they have resource. In January, ESPN and the university said they would be launching a new network dedicated solely to all things UT. The deal is worth $300 million over 20 years. The "Longhorn Network," as it will be called, is due to go live later this year.

Three, they have vision. The Texas Program in Sports and Media, announced in late 2009, would seem poised to become an Olympic study center of a sort the United States has arguably never had. (Disclosure: I saw it for myself first-hand last month, invited to Austin to speak to journalism and law school students.)

"The Pound Collection is a gem and will be a great asset to scholars and researchers studying the interface of sports, business, law, broadcast rights and the culture of sports media," said Steven Ungerleider, the program's chair who is also a psychologist and author of the 2001 book "Faust's Gold," an insightful study of the East German sports doping system.

As ever, the last word here ought to go to Pound. When the files finally do get opened up, he said. referring to the IOC, "You can find out whether they served croissants or fruitcake for 30 years."

Remembering Michael Lohberg

Two summers ago, during a break in the action at the world swimming championships in Rome, Michael Lohberg and I found a quiet little trattoria on the east bank of the Tiber River, just across from the Castel Sant' Angelo. We had a lovely lunch. The antipasti was excellent. So was the spaghetti carbonara. And the tiramisu, too.

Both of us knew enough about what was really going on to savor the moment. He was desperately ill. Neither of us knew how much time he had left.

Michael had been diagnosed with a rare blood disorder called aplastic anemia. The disorder causes the bone marrow to shut down -- that is, the factory that makes blood cells within the body stops making them. He was alive solely because of regular transfusions of blood and platelets.

It is testament to Michael's resolve and zest for life that he hung on for a good long while. But now he is gone. He died last week, just 61.

His passing is beyond sad. It is heartbreaking.

Not Michael's courage in fighting the fight. That was amazing.

It's just so sad because Michael Lohberg was one of the most genuinely decent people you would ever want to meet.

Michael was, in recent years, swim star Dara Torres' coach. He came to the United States in the early 1990s, from Germany, and quickly became a fixture in the South Florida swim scene.

Two years ago, he was inducted into the Broward County Hall Sports Hall of Fame.

Michael was a great coach at the elite level -- he coached at six Olympic Games. His swimmers qualified for every Games from 1984 through 2008. They held national records in places as diverse as Germany, Kazakhstan and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

He was a great coach at the local level, too.

He was, physically, a big man. At first he could come off as all gruff. But he was really all teddy-bear. Maybe that's why hundreds and hundreds of people turned out for the post-funeral reception at (where else?) the pool, the Coral Springs Aquatic Complex.

"He had such an ability to communicate, whether you were 15 or 44 years old," Dara was saying on the telephone.

So true.

I loved hanging out with Michael in person at meets, or following him with up on the phone or by email. He had a real way with words.

One story:

At the 2008 Games, Dara finished second in the 50-meter freestyle. A year later, essentially racing on one leg and with limited training, she somehow gutted it out and made it to the 50 finals in Rome. She finished eighth -- that is, last in the race.

No matter -- she had made it to the finals. She was, at age 42, still one of the eight best in the world.

"She deserves all the respect in the world for stepping up against the odds," Michael said then, adding, "With basically 20 percent of training September through April, two months of training, no leg work … I think to expect anything else is unrealistic and somewhat stupid."

Another:

Last September, Dara announced she was planning to launch a try for the London Games. I suggested -- using this reference from Michael -- that  pretty much anything Olympic was more interesting with Dara around: "The movie is more attractive when Julia Roberts is in it."

If Dara qualifies for London -- by then she'll be 45 -- perhaps enough time will have passed so that any racing she does there can serve as a tribute to Michael.

Bruno Darzi and Chris Jackson, who had helped Michael get her ready for Beijing and 2008, are still on board, so there's continuity.

Right now, though, no one's thinking much about any of that.

Right now, it's all just so raw. Right now, every little thing feels like heartbreak.

At practice these past couple days, Dara said, she does a flip-turn and sees the flags at half-mast -- and here come the tears.

"This whole week there hasn't been a time at practice when I haven't been crying," she said.

"I know it's going to take a while," she said. "Everything in my swimming world is a reminder. It's really tough right now."

For her and for all of us who knew, and appreciated, Michael Lohberg, a good and decent man.

On Natalie Coughlin's greatness

Natalie Coughlin, who over the past two Summer Olympics has won 11 medals, opened her 2011 season by racing in three finals this past weekend at the Eric Namesnik Michigan Grand Prix, held at one of America's best swim halls, Canham Auditorium, in Ann Arbor. She won the 100-meter backstroke and came in second in both the 100 freestyle and 100 butterfly. Dana Vollmer won both those events.

It is the nature of Olympic-style racing that when a great swimmer such as Coughlin goes one-for-three in an early-season meet there is the temptation from some quarters to wonder if something is somehow amiss.

As if she's supposed to win every single race she enters.

"Am I supposed to?" she said with a bewildered laugh.

That, truly, is the greatness of Natalie Coughlin.

She has won three Olympic gold medals. She has won four Olympic silver medals. She has won four Olympic bronze medals. In London next year, Coughlin could become the most-decorated American female athlete in Olympic history, depending perhaps in part on Dara Torres, who -- like yet another swimmer, Jenny Thompson -- has 12 medals.

If it can be incredible to be normal, what sets Coughlin apart within the Olympic scene is her normal-ness -- arguably, that's not even a word but there's seemingly no other way to put it - as well as her remarkably refreshing perspective on competition and on what constitutes success.

Indeed, her attitude ought to be packaged up and shipped out to playgrounds everywhere where winning-is-the-only-thing jerks hold sway.

It's a little bit like the bit of philosophy she offered in her Twitter feed from the Michigan meet: "Swimming is funny; effort & force don't always translate to fast swims. The water is dynamic & doesn't always respond to sheer force."

Natalie Coughlin is living proof that you can train hard, eat right, maintain balance in your home and professional lives, be happy puttering around your garden, derive satisfaction as an amateur photographer, root for the California Golden Bears, watch the sun set over the Golden Gate, all of that.

And win, at the highest level. More -- not only win but win with great elegance.

And reflect thusly: "Swimming is important to me. It's not everything to me."

That is not to minimize the import of swimming in her life.

Rather, Natalie Coughlin offers evidence that what counts in life is really living -- that it can be a good thing to, say, step out of your comfort zone by doing something like going on "Dancing with the Stars."  All along, that was the sort of deal that carried the risk of messing up in front of millions of people. So what? Moreover, everyone knew from the get-go that she was a swimmer, not a dancer. So she didn't come in first place. Again, so what? She loved it, loved the experience. That's a win.

"The reason I did [the show] and I don't think people believe me," she said, "is I just wanted to learn how to dance."

Success, she said, is "different for everyone."

"For me," she added, "it's doing my best. Obviously, I am not saying I don't appreciate gold medals or world records or winning. I don't think that should define a career. For me, that doesn't define a career."

She also said, "One of the most frustrating things for me, after watching a competition or the broadcast of something, is when the announcer says, 'How disappointing for so-and-so -- they get the silver medal.'

"I don't think anyone but the athlete gets to decide that. It's a dangerous message to kids to tell them they have to win to be successful. There's only one winner in every event. If everyone else is a failure, what are we doing?"

Think back, she said, to the 2008 Summer Games in Beijing, and the men's 200-meter freestyle. Michael Phelps won, and set a new world record. "The silver medalist in the 200 free," Park Tae-Hwan of South Korea -- "wasn't he successful?"

She paused. "Because he was beaten by Michael, that doesn't mean he wasn't successful."

Another pause. "If you can say you did your best, that's all you can do."

And enjoy it along the way -- you have to enjoy it along the way. There's so much attention in a sport such as swimming to the peak moment that is the Olympic Games. But the focus on that moment, even if it's understandable, ignores all that it takes to get there.

"I love training," Coughlin said. "I love pushing myself every day. I love working out."

Soon enough, it will be summer, and the world championships in Shanghai will be here. For Coughlin, that meet in Michigan was not only her first long-course meet of the year, it made for her first long-course meet since last summer.

Those second-place finishes behind Vollmer, who is herself of course an excellent swimmer -- in each of the two races, they came by about a half a second. Come on. It's April.

Again from her Twitter feed -- Teri McKeever, her coach, had told her to "fly & die" in the 100 free, which she did, finishing in 54.93, just back of Vollmer's 54.52. "Great start to the longcourse season," Coughlin wrote.

She said, "If you're going to be sad you lost a race -- how many people are in a race? 200? 199 are going to cry about it? I've been competing for 20 years. If I freaked out about little things I would have gone crazy by now."

No crazy here. It's all good.

Her times were good. Her strokes "felt great." Overall, she said, "I was really, really happy."

Money, geography and a three-horse race

LONDON -- From the moment in December that Edgar Grospiron resigned, throwing Annecy's bid for the 2018 Winter Games into turmoil, it was never quite certain whether the campaign from the French Alps would ever again regain enough balance to again become a credible contender. At times, to be frank, it was like watching a train wreck. The Annecy bid stumbled along for weeks without a leader. Finally, Charles Beigbeder, a French entrepreneur, was convinced to take the job. Budget-wise, they've acknowledged many times since, they are running on the low side. They have struggled to cobble together a narrative.

On Thursday, however, here before the SportAccord convention of influential sports leaders from around the world, it all came together.

For arguably the first time, the Annecy campaign put together a coherent and credible pitch for a village-style Alpine Games: A  "bid from the mountains with the athletes for the future," with an emphasis on what they called an "authentic" Winter Games.

People noticed.

"It is a much better race than many in the IOC thought it would be six months ago," Craig Reedie, the British IOC executive board member who helped lead London's winning 2012 bid, said after watching Annecy's presentation, along with those from rivals Munich and Pyeongchang.

"The two front-runners," he said, "have developed extremely well."

And, Reedie said, "The improvement in Annecy is -- "and here he paused, searching for just the right word -- "marked."

Annecy's chances? There aren't even 100 days to go until the IOC's July 6 vote for 2018 in Durban, South Africa.

Does Annecy have enough on stage and screen to overcome the strong presentations from Munich and Pyeongchang?

The odds remain long, particularly because Annecy was yet again lacking again on Thursday the key element -- the in-person presence of Jean-Claude Killy, the superstar of French and Olympic winter sport, who appeared Thursday only in a short video?

Yet for Annecy -- indeed, for the IOC -- the issue has always been to make this 2018 derby a three-horse race, not just two.

"It's a three bid-city race. That's clear," Beigbeder asserted at a late afternoon news conference, adding a moment later, "They have to choose one, meaning the IOC, "and we have to make a difference."

Annecy went first Thursday. Then Munich. Then Pyeongchang.

No surprise, Munich's presentation proved robust. Following a strong presentation in March to the IOC's evaluation commission, the Munich team proved strong here in London, too.

The chair of the Munich bid, Katarina Witt, in a pinstriped black Strenesse coat-dress and stunningly high Michael Kors pumps, in her best breathy stage voice, kicked things off by unveiling the "vision" of a "festival of friendship in a setting that reveals the full possibilities of Olympic sustainability for all the world to see."

From there, the Munich team talked up money and geography.

Ian Robertson, BMW's head of marketing and sales, noted the Munich-based company now supports not only the bid but London 2012, the U.S Olympic Committee, national Olympic committees in France, Greece, China and several international sports federations. German business, he said, underwrites 50 percent of the revenues of the seven sports on the Winter Games program.

This winter, he said, Germany played host to 12 World Cup events and three world championships that attracted nearly one million spectators and a cumulative German television audience of over one billion viewers. "That's the kind of reach sponsors want," he said.

Back to Katarina for Munich's line of the day, and an unsaid but nonetheless obvious poke at Pyeongchang.

"… When you choose a host city for the Olympic Games -- Summer or Winter -- it is about more than just geography," she said, Pyeongchang touting "new horizons," the promise of taking the Winter Games to new markets in Asia.

She said, "It is about the kind of experience the athletes of the future should have," a suggestion that there might be a livelier place to spend 17 days in February -- say, Munich, one of the world's most interesting cities -- than, oh, Pyeongchang.

Which is why, the Koreans said as part of a powerful performance of their own, they've planned for a "Best of Korea" experience in Pyeongchang. Already, they said, they've signed up 39 companies with 120 brands -- world-class amenities, dining, shopping, entertainment and more.

You want to talk money?

The Koreans clearly had been anticipating the German strategy. Let's put it this way: if 50 percent of your portfolio rested in one stock, wouldn't you kinda want to diversify?

"We believe," Theresa Rah, the Pyeongchang director of communications, said from the stage, "that diversifying the financial support of winter sport from new markets makes sense for the winter sport industry, federations, the athletes and the Olympic and Paralympic movements."

By 2030, according to an Asian Development Bank Study, Asia will comprise 43 percent of worldwide consumption. From 1990 to 2008, the middle class in Asia grew by 30 percent, and spent an average of an additional $1.7 trillion annually. "No other region in the world even comes close," Rah said.

The South Korean sports and culture Minister, Byoung-gug Choung, announced Thursday that the government would invest $500 million to help promote winter sports and groom Korean athletes in a program dubbed "Drive the Dream" from 2012-2018.

Also in the works -- a $1.8 million plan to pay for visits from national Olympic committee officials from 2012-2017, and a $1.05 million plan for trips by international federation experts.

Completed in October, 2009: the Alpensia resort in Pyeongchang, at a cost of $1.4 billion.

You want to talk geography?

"The argument," Rah said, in front of a map of the world that showed the Winter Games having visited Asia only twice, both times in Japan, in 1972 and 1998, "really isn't about 'new versus old' or 'traditional markets versus new markets' or even clever metaphors about 'roots and new horizons.' No.

"The real decision is about maximizing the opportunity for winter sport for as many young people as possible, wherever they may be."

All of which surely made for Pyeongchang's counter-punch of the day.

But not the line of the day.

That went to the French sports minister, Chantal Jouanno, as part of an again-relevant Annecy bid.

"It is a great pleasure to be here in London," she said, "a city that in the sporting context has taught us French two things:

"That favorites don't always win," a reference to the 2012 contest. Paris was heavily favored to win. Instead, London did.

When the laughter in the hall died down, the minister, smiling, finished: "And that any bidding city must understand the challenges sport faces -- and offer a true global vision to resolve them."

--

Of special note:

The Korean presentation opened with Yang Ho Cho, the Pyeongchang 2018 chairman, saying:

"Before I begin, please allow me to send our deepest sympathies to the people and the [national Olympic committees] of both New Zealand and Japan.

"The world is with you, and we look forward to seeing your great teams in London next year."