The disconnect between Mr. Obama's actions, and his beautiful words

The 44th president of the United States ends his term this week, succeeded by the 45th, and in a ceremony Monday at the White House honoring Major League Baseball's 2016 World Series champions, the Chicago Cubs, Barack Obama proved his usual eloquent self in describing sport’s distinct role in American — indeed, global — society.

What’s now up to history to judge when it comes to sport is the demonstrable disconnect between Mr. Obama’s eloquence and his actions. Arguably no president in American history, none all the way back to George Washington, has been as disruptive as Mr. Obama.

Particularly in the sphere of international sport.

There can be no question, none whatsoever, that Mr. Obama talks a good game. On Monday, for instance, in the august East Room of the White House, jammed with dignitaries and Cubs fans alike, many in jerseys and caps, the president was funny, captivating, moving and profound, all of it, in a 20-minute address.

Referring to his campaign slogan in 2008 and the Cubs’ World Series drought, which would ultimately extend to 108 years before the Cubs last fall defeated the Cleveland Indians in seven games, Mr. Obama said Monday: “… Even I was not crazy enough to suggest that during these eight years we would see the Cubs win the World Series.  But I did say that there's never been anything false about hope.  

Everyone laughed and applauded as he added, “Hope — the audacity of hope.”

The president, a longtime fan of the Chicago White Sox, the 2005 World Series champs from the city's South Side, went on to say:

“All you had to know about this team was encapsulated in that one moment in Game 5,” meaning the World Series, “down three games to one, do or die, in front of the home fans when [the catcher] David Ross and [the pitcher] Jon Lester turned to each other and said, “I love you, man."  And he said, "I love you, too.”  It was sort of like an Obama-Biden moment,” a reference to the vice president, Joseph Biden, Jr.  

Later, referring to the Cubs’ victory parade: “Two days later, millions of people -- the largest gathering of Americans that I know of in Chicago. And for a moment, our hometown becomes the very definition of joy.”

And, finally:

“So just to wrap up, today is, I think, our last official event — isn’t it? — at the White House under my presidency. And it also happens to be a day that we celebrate one of the great Americans of all time, Martin Luther King, Jr. And later, as soon as we're done here, Michelle and I are going to go over and do a service project, which is what we do every year to honor Dr. King. And it is worth remembering — because sometimes people wonder, well, why are you spending time on sports, there's other stuff going on — that throughout our history, sports has had this power to bring us together, even when the country is divided. Sports has changed attitudes and culture in ways that seem subtle but that ultimately made us think differently about ourselves and who we were. It is a game and it is celebration, but there's a direct line between Jackie Robinson,” the first African-American major league baseball player with the Brooklyn Dodgers, in 1947, “and me standing here. There's a direct line between people loving Ernie Banks,” the Cubs star from 1953-71, “and the city being able to come together and work together in one spirit.  

“I was in my hometown of Chicago on Tuesday, for my farewell address, and I said, ‘Sometimes it's not enough just to change the laws, you’ve got to change hearts.’ And sports has a way, sometimes, of changing hearts in a way that politics or business doesn’t. And sometimes it's just a matter of us being able to escape and relax from the difficulties of our days, but sometimes it also speaks to something better in us. And when you see this group of folks of different shades and different backgrounds, and coming from different communities and neighborhoods all across the country, and then playing as one team and playing the right way, and celebrating each other and being joyous in that, that tells us a little something about what America is and what America can be.

“So it is entirely appropriate that we celebrate the Cubs today, here in this White House, on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday because it helps direct us in terms of what this country has been and what it can be in the future."

These are, genuinely, lovely and moving sentiments. Thank you, Mr. President.

Did Mr. Obama’s administration prove true to those sentiments?

During most of his two terms, it can be argued, Mr. Obama — or by way of extension, deputies in his executive branch — used sports to project the full power and authority of the United States, both by way of action and, in the case of the president himself, omission. The government ranged far afield in projecting distinctly American notions of equality and morality in sports, some of the very values Mr. Obama said Monday "America can be," though it remains far from clear the roughly 200 other nations in the world can or should be like the United States, or want to be. The U.S. government pushed its views of the law in the anti-doping arena. And, of course, though there had been no cry to do so, the U.S. government saw fit to deputize itself to police international soccer.

Was this all triggered by the International Olympic Committee’s emphatic rejection of Mr. Obama in 2009?

Recently having been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the president went to Copenhagen that October to lobby for Chicago, his hometown, then bidding for the 2016 Summer Games. Chicago failed to make it out of the first round, fourth of four, losing to Rio. Madrid and Tokyo were also in the race.

"Other than people who like to cheer, 'We're No. 4! We're No. 4!' I don't know how this is anything but really embarrassing," Republican strategist Rich Galen told CNN at the time, adding that Obama's failed pitch would “probably be the joke on Capitol Hill for weeks to come.”

Had Mr. Obama ever before suffered a defeat, indeed a rejection, so intense and so personal? Was it that Mr. Obama was himself stung? Or was it his longtime, and protective, aide, Valerie Jarrett? Or both? Or others in the president's close circle as well?

Seven-plus years ago, the president played off Chicago’s Olympic loss. He said it was “always a worthwhile endeavor to promote and boost the United States.”

His real feelings may have emerged in an interview published this past October in New York magazine:

“So we fly out there. Subsequently, I think we’ve learned that [the] IOC’s decisions are similar to FIFA’s decisions: a little bit cooked. We didn’t even make the first cut, despite the fact that, by all the objective metrics, the American bid was the best.”

As anyone who has spent the better part of a lifetime in politics can attest, “objective metrics” often mean nothing. Same for just four hours around the IOC, which is how long Mr. Obama was on the ground in Copenhagen that October morning. How could the president of the United States not have known that?

And what has been the fallout since?

— 2010, 2012, 2014, 2016: Olympics, Winter and Summer. Four editions of the Olympics during Mr. Obama's two terms, four opportunities to make an appearance, two — in Canada in 2010, the United Kingdom in 2012 — in countries as close and friendly to American interests as they might get, hockey rivalries or words like “trunk” and “boot” aside. Mr. Obama shows in none of the four. (Michelle Obama went to London.) Compare: President Bush attended the 2002 Salt Lake and 2008 Beijing Games. President Clinton made the 1996 Atlanta and Hillary Clinton the 1994 Lillehammer Games.

— September 2013: Thomas Bach is elected IOC president. Since, Mr. Bach has met more than 100 heads of government and state. But not Mr. Obama. In October 2015, Mr. Bach and most everyone in senior Olympic leadership traveled to Washington for a conference. Mr. Obama did not deem it worthy of his time. Late in the event, Mr. Biden — clearly pressured to show up on behalf of the administration — made a seven-minute cameo.

— February 2014: Mr. Obama, in response to a Russian anti-gay propaganda law, decides to try to stick it to his friends in the Kremlin by sending to the Sochi Games U.S. delegations for the opening and closing ceremonies that include a number of gay athletes, including the tennis star Billie Jean King. Why a tennis star, even one as superlative as Ms. King, ought to be featured at a Winter Games event is yet to be explained.

Mr. Bach said in opening the Sochi Olympics, in a shot at Mr. Obama, “Have the courage to address your disagreements in a peaceful, direct political dialogue and not on the back of the athletes.”

— 2015, FIFA indictments. This is not to say that there wasn’t wrongdoing on multiple levels in and around the international soccer scene. The relevant question for history is otherwise. Outside the World Cup, soccer is far from baseball, basketball and especially football in the United States. And by far the majority of those accused have not been American citizens. The Justice Department, when it brings an explosive case such as this, does so to score political points as much to make a case in court. So: why so important for the FBI, IRS and the Attorney General of the United States herself to make this a federal matter?

— May 2016: federal prosecutors in Brooklyn, from the U.S. Attorney’s office serving what’s called the Eastern District of New York, have opened an investigation into allegations of doping by top Russian athletes, the New York Times reports. For those keeping score at home: Loretta Lynch, the attorney general, used to head that Brooklyn office. For those further keeping score: this is the same Justice Department that brought cases sparked by allegations of doping against the likes of baseball stars Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds, couldn’t seal the deal, but now believes considerable taxpayer resource is well spent pursuing Russians?

President-elect Donald Trump, meanwhile, has already spoken by phone with Mr. Bach, expressing support for the Los Angeles bid for the 2024 Games. Paris and Budapest are also in the race. The IOC will pick the 2024 site in September at an assembly in Lima, Peru.

Mr. Trump takes office on Friday. For sure, he has a range of priorities to pick from. If he decides that one of them is making new friends, and fast, in international sports, he could make it plain to his pick for attorney general, the current U.S. senator Jeff Sessions, the Republican from Alabama, that the Brooklyn investigation ought to be dropped, and fast.

Like, why is the United States government interested in doping by Russian athletes?

Especially an administration directed by Mr. Trump, who has shown little to less than zero interest in pursuing allegations the Russians might have played an active role in pre-election hacking?

Mr. Trump wasn’t at the White House Monday. Not his moment. But in the Ricketts family, which owns the Cubs, here nonetheless was a little slice of America as it is right now: Todd Ricketts, Mr. Trump's pick for deputy commerce secretary, stood to one side of Mr. Obama while on the other stood Mr. Ricketts' sister, Laura, who during the campaign raised significant funds for Mrs. Clinton.

This past summer, as he was heading off to vacation at Martha’s Vineyard, the remote Cape Cod locale, Mr. Obama, with a nod to Mr. Trump, had this to say as the Rio Games were just about to get underway:

“In a season of intense politics, let’s cherish this opportunity to come together around one flag.”

And:

“In a time of challenge around the world, let’s appreciate the peaceful competition and sportsmanship we’ll see, the hugs and high-fives and the empathy and understanding between rivals who know we share a common humanity.”

Beautiful words. But — just that. Just words.

What's really what: from Doha, LA's why

In the aftermath of last week’s U.S. presidential elections, the news has been filled with, among other things, journalistic autopsies: how did so much of the media miss something so obvious?

Same Tuesday in a different political arena — the race for the 2024 Summer Games, and the first presentations by the three bid cities to significant numbers of International Olympic Committee members amid a meeting in Doha, Qatar, of the 205-member Assn. of National Olympic Committees.

Los Angeles, Paris and Budapest got their 20 minutes apiece, and the focus afterward in media accounts from all over was on the LA presentation and U.S. president-elect Donald Trump.

Evoking the same regrettable horse-race style coverage that dominated the election reporting, that made for “news” tied to the first major Olympic gathering since last Tuesday’s balloting.

So what? It had nothing to do with what really happened.

Be sure key Olympic officials, and others with a sense of the dynamics of bid-city campaigns, understand this all too well.

Every Olympic bid has to have two essential qualities — how and why.

LA on Tuesday put forward its why.

A little background first about the how:

— There’s nothing in memory like the LA how. With the IOC confronting widespread dissatisfaction in Europe and Asia over the ballooning costs of the Games, the LA proposal is simple: with the exception of a canoe venue, everything else is or will be built in a city already alive with dynamism, downtown in particular exploding with construction cranes. That means no crazy infrastructure costs.

— Further, LA mayor Eric Garcetti is a real person. He for sure is one smart dude. He also is personable and relatable. A recent picture of the mayor on a skateboard is surely a first in the history of Olympic campaigns.

For LA, how was thus always the easy part.

The hard part, seemingly: the why. On Tuesday, the LA people made that easy, too, and by taking on the really hard stuff:

America is not perfect. Far from it. The Games — they can help.

To expand:

The United States is a nation of immigrants. Most came willingly. A significant number, not. We are all in this together, the LA bid made plain Tuesday — a connection with the very essence of the Olympic message in our world.

An African-American athlete, Allyson Felix, the most decorated U.S. female track and field star in Olympic history, offered up real talk Tuesday, no spin, about the most vexing dilemma that has been at the core of the American experience from the beginning.

Here is the gist of her remarks and because they are of such import, at some length:

“I’m here,” she said, “to talk about America.

“I want to tell you about the America that I love, and the America that needs the Games to help make our nation better — now, more than ever.

“America is diverse. We are a nation of people whose descendants came from all over the world for a better life. 

“But we’re also a nation with individuals like me — descendants of people who came to America not of their own free will but against it. 

“But we’re not a nation that clings to our past, no matter how glorious – or how painful. Americans rush towards the future.

“We just finished our presidential election, and some of you may question America’s commitment to its founding principles. 

“I have one message for you: please don't doubt us. America’s diversity is our greatest strength.

“Diversity is not easy.

“Diversity is a leap of faith — that embraces all faiths. 

“And that’s why I believe LA is a perfect choice for the 2024 Games, because the face of our city reflects the face of the Olympic movement itself.”

This had — correction, has — zero to do with Trump.

Yes, Felix acknowledged the election.

No, she did not mention Trump.

If Felix had wanted to say the words “president-elect” or “Trump,” she surely could and would have. How do you know this?

Because from among dozens of Olympic bids over the past 20 years, there have been a grand total of two that have cut the BS and told the members straight-up what was what. If you really insist on U.S. presidential politics, to borrow from John McCain and 2008 — the Straight Talk Express.

The first such bid: Almaty, two years ago, which straightforwardly made its case for the 2022 Winter Games, losing narrowly to Beijing.

And, now, LA.

If Garcetti — a political veteran — had wanted to mention Trump, he too surely could have. Instead, Garcetti said:

“… What I’m going to say is a little bit radical, and I’m pretty sure it’s the first time you’ve ever heard it from an Olympic bid. 

“We believe our campaign isn’t just about the Games in our city in 2024.  We believe this bid is about ensuring that the Games are sustainable beyond 2024 as well.

“In other words, this bid isn’t only about LA’s future – it’s about our collective future. This is a stark and unique difference about our bid.”

Look, most bids feature warm and fuzzy videos along with officials and politicians talking about kids and dreams and getting a couch filled with kids off that comfy couch. No one says what’s really what. This, not incidentally, is how the IOC got in the mess it’s in now — with cities all over western Europe abandoning Olympic bids for 2022, 2024 and even 2028.

Here is where this column acknowledges one more obvious piece: I live in Los Angeles. But I have no — zero — affiliation with the bid. At the same time, having covered every Olympic campaign since 1999, it's time now to get to it plainly. Here is what's what:

— This 2024 bid is it for Los Angeles and the United States. The time is now. If the IOC opts to go to Paris or Budapest, good luck, and enjoy the run afterward of Games in places like Doha and Baku, because the Europeans are already squeamish, the next three Games are in Asia (2018, 2020, 2022) amid financial and other challenges and the Americans won’t be coming back for a long, long time — not if the IOC were to turn down the three biggest cities in the United States, New York (2012), Chicago (2016) and then, in sequence, LA.

“We have learned many lessons from our previous bids,” USOC board chair Larry Probst said at Tuesday’s meeting, “and failure can be a great teacher.”

— Unlike in other nations, an American bid has no government money. None. It must all be privately funded. With that in mind, there is no chance — zero — that Casey Wasserman, the LA bid leader, can go back to the assorted business leaders who in just a few days donated the likes of $35 million toward this 2024 effort and gin up enthusiasm for another round.

— Oh, and if LA gets dinged, good luck with sponsor and broadcast interest going forward, too.

These things are by no means threats. There’s no gauntlet. But unless we are all willing — together — to speak, and hear, the truth, the IOC and Olympic movement assume serious if not critical danger of losing their relevance.

That is the real news from Tuesday in Doha.

When he was 13, Garcetti told the ANOC assembly on Tuesday, the 1984 Olympics came to LA. Here is what he said next, and again at length, because these words are not just heartfelt — they need to be heard:

“I saw the face of the world on the streets of Los Angeles and I became a believer in the power of the Olympic movement to transform the world. 

“I still believe that today, more than ever. My first act as mayor on my first day serving,” three years ago, “was to write a letter to the IOC to pursue the 2024 Games.

“My vision of America is a country that is informed by that vision.

“I see an America that is outward-looking, ready to play its role alongside the community of nations to address our world’s most pressing challenges.

“Choose LA 2024 and help us show a new generation of Americans that our strength is being with the world, not turning our backs to it.”

An open letter: the White House delegation to Rio

President Barack Obama

1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW

Washington, DC 20500

August 2, 2016

Dear Mr. President:

Coming up on three years ago, I wrote you an “open letter” critical of your decision to send to the Sochi 2014 Winter Games an official White House delegation that did not include yourself, the First Lady, the vice president nor, indeed, any member of your cabinet.

On Tuesday, the White House announced that Secretary of State John Kerry will head the White House delegation to the Rio 2016 Summer Games.

Mr. President, I cannot emphasize strongly enough how much I respect you personally as well as the office you hold. I voted for you twice. If I could, I would vote for you again this November. I believe history will treat you kindly — that, with time, you will come to be seen as what you truly are and have been, one of our greatest presidents in more than 200 years.

With all that said, sir:

Please permit me the opportunity to address you in another “open letter,” mindful that I am grateful to call home a country where I may give voice to criticisms and that, as well, any such criticisms relate solely to matters of policy. In no way are they personal.

The announcement that Secretary Kerry will lead the 2016 delegation underscores the futility and hypocrisy inherent in what the White House tried to do — with, at best, limited impact — in connection with the Sochi Games.

Can we — you, me, all of us — acknowledge now the truth of the matter?

That what the White House sought in 2014 was to leverage the spotlight of the Olympic Games to exploit the American position in dealing with the Russians, in particular Mr. Putin, while simultaneously expressing considered frustration, if not more, with the International Olympic Committee?

And to what purpose?

The record is plain.

In October 2009, you and the First Lady went to Copenhagen to lobby the IOC for Chicago’s 2016 Summer Games bid.

In retrospect, we can perhaps observe it might be all to the good that Chicago did not win. Imagine, Mr. President, the worldwide media uproar in anticipation of a 2016 Chicago Games over the murder rate in Chicago and, by extension, American gun-control policies. Not to mention the national embarrassment that is Mr. Trump, whom you appropriately described on Tuesday as “unfit” and “woefully unprepared” for the presidency.

At any rate, you went to Copenhagen — the first sitting president, ever, to lobby the IOC in such a fashion.

The members not only awarded the 2016 Games to Rio de Janeiro, they booted Chicago in the very first round. Tales still circulate within Olympic circles of the IOC members idling on buses while waiting for your security detail to give the all-good to come in to the convention hall.

Since then, the White House’s — by extension, the federal government’s — relationship with the global Olympic movement and, more broadly, international sport, has deteriorated to the point of dreadful, and that is being generous.

Maybe you have forgiven if not forgotten. But it’s something of an open secret that your trusted advisers may hardly have done so.

Who brought the indictments against FIFA? The U.S. Justice Department, headed by Ms. Loretta Lynch. Assuredly, the Attorney General wields considerable latitude in her prosecutorial choices. At the same time, who does the Attorney General report to? That would be you.

Before you named her Attorney General, Ms. Lynch served as U.S. Attorney in Brooklyn, for five years heading the office for the Eastern District of New York. This past May, it was the Eastern District that opened an inquiry into allegations of state-sponsored Russian doping — as if a Russian matter should, on some theory, be a matter for American law enforcement.

Imagine, sir, if the tables were turned. The American court system, indeed the federal courts with their limited jurisdiction, are filled with allegations of wrongdoing each and every day. Are the Russians weighing in to impart their view of justice on our behalf? Are they mounting a campaign to convince Americans and others around the world that, for instance, the death penalty, legal in several U.S. states, is illegal it not immoral?

Perhaps there is this: at least you didn’t try to stick it further to the Olympic scene by naming Ms. Lynch to the 2016 delegation. Just Secretary Kerry; the U.S. ambassador to Brazil; three other federal officials, and the swim legend Mark Spitz.

The disregard with which your administration views the Olympic scene could hardly have been more apparent when, last October, the Association of National Olympic Committees held its annual meeting in Washington, just blocks from the White House.

Since becoming the IOC president in 2013, Thomas Bach has met with more than 100 heads of government or state. But, notably, not you.

Indeed, at the Sochi opening ceremony, Mr. Bach, obviously if indirectly referring to you, said the Olympics should not be “used as a stage for political dissent or for trying to score points in internal or external political contests.”

Mr. Bach also said in opening the Sochi Games, “Have the courage to address your disagreements in a peaceful, direct political dialogue and not on the backs of the athletes.”

At the ANOC event, no senior U.S. official had the courage to show until several days into the event when — your White House obviously alerted that this show of American defiance might not reflect well on a Los Angeles bid for the 2024 Summer Games — Vice President Biden appeared from behind the curtain.

Mr. Biden stayed for all of seven minutes.

As for LA, and its 2024 contest with Paris, Rome and Budapest: the heads of state or government of France, Italy and Hungary have all said they are coming to Rio for the Games opening ceremony.

But not you.

“It is absolutely normal that participating countries at major events such as the Olympic Games, being organized every four years, are represented by high-level state leaders,” the Hungarian release, issued Tuesday, said. “This is especially true for countries that have bid to host the Olympic Games.”

It’s in this full, indeed rich, context that one has to view the 2014 Sochi White House delegation — as one of a series, since that 2009 Chicago defeat, of provocations.

Perhaps it is the case that the dots don’t connect. But it plainly looks like they do. And we both know this truism: in politics, perception is as important than reality, if not more so.

To be honest, of course, in our popular culture, the Russians make for excellent villains. Think only of Ivan Drago in "Rocky IV," or the bad guys in James Bond movies, or even Boris and Natasha from “The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show.”

Mr. Putin, right or wrong, fair or not, plays the role for many of the arch-villain of our time.

How easy was it to tap into all that sentiment while amplifying a disregard for the Olympic scene?

The White House said in 2014 that your schedule simply didn’t allow you to travel to Sochi.

This, Mr. President, begs credulity.

The central issue was the controversy that you latched onto sparked by the Russian anti-gay propaganda law. A couple months before the Games, you remarked, “Nobody is more offended than me by some of the anti-gay and lesbian legislation that you’ve been seeing in Russia.”

For the opening ceremony, you named two openly gay athletes: Billie Jean King, the tennis star, and skating gold medalist Brian Boitano.

A tennis player — at the Winter Olympics?

For the closing, you threw a little more gas on the fire by naming Caitlin Cahow, winner of Olympic silver and bronze medals in ice hockey, another gay athlete, to the closing ceremony delegation.

You might remember that Ms. King ended up going to the closing ceremony; her mother passed away the day of the opening ceremony. Ms. Cahow took part in the opening ceremony.

You might recall, too, that in a commentary for CNN published a few weeks before the 2014 Games, Ms. King had said, in part:

“Is our nation making a statement on Russia’s anti-gay propaganda law by sending gay men and women to represent us in Sochi? Perhaps we are.”

Perhaps?

The right answer to Ms. King’s rhetorical question: obviously.

In that same piece, she also said:

“… I hope these Olympics will be a watershed moment for the universal acceptance of all people.”

That for sure has not happened. We all have a long way to go. Yes, the U.S. Supreme Court has since made same-sex marriage the law of our land. But that has hardly triggered a rush in other countries to follow our lead.

Ms. King also said in her piece:

“I have a saying that 98 percent of winning is showing up. So we will show up in Russia. We will support our athletes and cheer them as loudly as possible. And we will keep the equality conversation alive.”

When she got home from her White House-sanctioned Sochi-related activism, Ms. King, in an Associated Press feature, said she would like the IOC to add sexual orientation to the list of protections in its charter and to consider the issue when deciding host countries for future Olympics.

The IOC did add sexual orientation to its list of protections, as part of its Agenda 2020 “reforms” enacted in December 2014. But it would have done so regardless of Ms. King. Or anyone from the United States.

As for the second point: not so much. The IOC competition for the 2022 Winter Games got down to Kazakhstan and China. Neither can boast about its human-rights record. In 2015, the IOC went for Beijing.

And if it were the “equality conversation” that was the true impetus for the composition of the Sochi delegation, Mr. President, that imperative would hold even more validity in connection with Rio and 2016.

As the New York Times reported on July 5, Brazil is arguably the world’s deadliest place for lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgender people.

Over the past four-plus years, the newspaper reported, citing Grupo Gay de Bahia, an advocacy group, nearly 1,600 people have died in hate-motivated attacks. That means a gay or transgender person is killed almost daily in Brazil.

The Times story quotes the advocacy group’s manager as saying that the numbers represent “only the tip of the iceberg of violence and bloodshed,” since police here often, as the paper reported, “omit anti-gay animus when compiling homicide reports.” An Amnesty International Brazil official, the paper further reported, said, “Homophobic violence has hit crisis levels, and it’s getting worse.”

So much outrage over a Russian propaganda law in the run-up to Sochi 2014 but, in comparison, comparative silence in these weeks and months before Rio 2016 about horrific violence in Brazil?

Mr. President, you proved eloquent, as usual, in decrying the June massacre that took 49 lives at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida. Yet nothing about the slow, steady and awful rate of homicides in Brazil?

The Olympics are assuredly imperfect. But there is no other institution in our fragile world that offers the very notion you have spent much of your time in office promoting — we are all better when we stand, in peace, together.

With that in mind, please allow me to close with an unsolicited suggestion.

Next year, at an assembly in Lima, Peru, the IOC will decide the 2024 Summer Games site.

By then, you will be out of office. We can all hope that Ms. Clinton — an avid public supporter of the Olympic notion — is your successor. At any rate, if you were to appear in Lima, and once again address the IOC on behalf of an American candidate city, it might be therapeutic all around.

It also could be awesome.

You could even start by saying something like, “Sorry about that last time. I for sure didn’t mean to make you sit around for a few minutes just on my account.” Take it from there, sir. There’s a powerful argument that the world needs what Los Angeles, what California and what our great country can — in service and humility — offer.

As you have proven repeatedly, such humility, as well as considered doses of humor and empathy, can often achieve great things, particularly in the pursuit of pluralism and tolerance. Being strident rarely gets us anywhere.

Thank you, sir, for your attention and consideration. And for your years of leadership. Godspeed.

Sincerely,

Alan Abrahamson

3 Wire Sports

Los Angeles, California

A 4th of July story: Ashton Eaton, the anti-Trump

EUGENE — On this Fourth of July, when we celebrate America and Americans, here’s to a celebration of the U.S. decathlon champion, Ashton Eaton. Not to put too fine a tag on it but: Ashton Eaton is the anti-Donald Trump.

The very last thing Ashton Eaton would have done after winning — again — the decathlon here at the 2016 U.S. Olympic Trials would have been to proclaim, “I’m going to Rio and my point total is going to be huuuuuge!”

Nor did he say, “I have very big hands.”

As if.

Trump, as this year’s presidential politics has proven, is divisive, bigoted, obnoxious, loud and polarizing.

Eaton’s greatness, the position he has earned on the public stage, has come without him bragging about how great he is. His actions speak volumes. But when he does talk, he does so with intellect, eloquence, humor and, most important, humility.

Moreover, Ashton Eaton isn’t building a wall. He’s building bridges.

Eaton represents the emergence of the multicultural America that Trump, in particular, finds so threatening. Ashton grew up in central Oregon; his father is black, his mother white. As a single mother, Roz Eaton worked several jobs to see after her son, at a law office by day and waitressing at night.

Ashton, 28, and his wife, the Canadian multi-event talent, Brianne Theisen-Eaton, 27, are the model young couple ever mom and dad would like to see their kids grow up to be.

An Eaton story: Ashton and Brianne could drive anything. They drive a white Hyundai Elantra. It gets the job done. There’s no need for more.

The Eatons come by this honestly. It’s not just them. Their coach, Harry Marra, who is one of the most genuine people you might find not just in sports but in any endeavor, drives a 25-year-old white Mazda Miata. “It still looks good, man,” Marra said, laughing.

“It’s a simple statement and I know I have said it a million times,”  Marra said, and referring specifically to Eaton, “Everybody knows he’s a great athlete. But he’s a better human being.”

Another Eaton story: at the Olympics, they stay not in a five-star hotel but in the Olympic Village, he with the Americans, she the Canadians. In London four years ago, he brought her dinner and vice-versa.

Ashton Eaton is the London 2012 decathlon gold medalist. He is the world record-holder in the decathlon, the 10-event discipline that for generations has come to define the world’s best all-around athlete.

In 2012, here at venerable Hayward Field at the 2012 U.S. Trials, Eaton set what was then a decathlon points world record: 9,039.

Last August, at the world championships in Beijing, he upped that to 9,045. He ran the 400 meters in 45 seconds flat.

To give you an idea of how good that is: LaShawn Merritt on Sunday won the open 400 in 43.97.

To further emphasize how good 45-flat that is: Bill Toomey had run the prior fastest decathlon 400: 45.68, in the 1968 Mexico City Olympics. Bill Toomey!

Eaton, according to the authoritative track and field website Tilastopaja, has the 271st best performance in history in the 400; 147th in the 400-meter hurdles (48.69, in 2014); 191st in the long jump (8.23 meters, or 27 feet, 2012); and 152nd in the 110-meter hurdles (13.35, 2011).

To further amplify Eaton’s excellence in the all-around events, he is the Moscow 2013 world championship gold medalist (8,809 points); the Daegu 2011 world silver medalist; and a three-time world indoor gold medalist in the seven-event heptathlon, 6,470 points in Portland this past March, 6,632 in Sopot, Poland, in 2014 and a world-record 6,645 points in Istanbul, Turkey, in 2012.

It was in Portland that the Eatons, husband and wife, provided one of the sport’s indelible images. After Brianne clinched the pentathlon, Ashton, in his warm-ups amid the long jump competition, bolted onto the track to embrace his wife.

For all that he has accomplished, Eaton’s performance over two days in 2016 at Hayward may have been his best ever.

He was not only hurt. He was hurting.

Coming in, he had a quadriceps problem in his left leg. Then the right hamstring started acting up.

The second-day discuss throw — he fouled on his first attempt, threw just 122 feet on No. 2, which was good for 15th, then moved up to 10th on the third throw with a 135-9.

After that, he went second in the pole vault, fourth in the javelin and wrapped it all up with a fourth-place 4:25.15 in the 1500.

Total: 8750 points.

If 8750 wasn’t a world record, well — none of the decathletes heading to Rio, none of them from anywhere in the world, has a personal best that matches what Eaton did here over the weekend.

Jeremy Taiwo took second with 8425, Zach Ziemek third with 8413.

The nature of track and field — with the potential for injury and collision — is that anything can happen, anytime. That was never more evident than on Monday, when two of the favorites in the women’s 800, Brenda Martinez and Alysia Montaño, collided with about 150 meters to go, at roughly 1:36 in the race, Martinez staggering to seventh in 2:06.63, Montaño limping in to eighth about a minute later after picking herself, 3:06.77. At the finish line, she dropped to her knees in tears.

Kate Grace won, in 1:59.1; Ajee’ Wilson got second, 1:59.51; Chrishuna Williams third, 1:59.59.

https://twitter.com/NBCOlympics/status/750130824977100801

“Anything can happen,” Montaño would say later.

She also said of picking herself up off the track with about 150 meters to go, the others far ahead, “You get up and you’re, like, really far away, and your heart breaks.”

Ashton Eaton has been a model of consistency in a discipline in which consistency is everything.

After so many competitions, he said at Sunday’s post-event news conference, “Mentally, I think what happens when you get older is you have more experience,” adding, “If I’m in a situation in a decathlon, I have confidence I can handle it.”

That was the answer to the first question.

The second had to do with competing while injured.

Then, and this is testament to the kind of person Ashton Eaton is, he said, “I’m not answering any more until these guys get some questions.”

The ladies and gentlemen of the press dutifully asked some questions of Taiwo, who is incredibly thoughtful, and Ziemek, who is super-tough, having done another decathlon at the NCAAs just weeks ago.

“As soon as I crossed the line,” meaning at the final 1500, Taiwo said, “I remembered all those times: this is the hardest journey you’ve ever had. This is a deciding moment in your life, at 26. You know, you’ve had to beg, you’ve had to do this, you’ve wanted to give you, you’ve wanted to not go to practice — just go work at Whole Foods or something, because this hurts.

“Being a decathlete all year round — what are you doing? How are you going to pay for this? Just all that in my mind — I was so grateful.”

When the questioning turned back to Eaton, he was asked about the two charities — Right to Play and World Vision — to which he and his wife donate their time.

“For us, as a young couple to be put in a situation where you get to help someone — that’s pretty powerful stuff.

“The first experience these organizations gave us, what kind of I guess power we have in that area, was pretty emotional. So we feel really strongly about those organizations and organizations in general.”

He paused, choosing his words carefully: “As athletes, you really see a lot of — the Instagram paradigm, where it’s just, ‘Me, me, me, me, me.’ But when you realize [the alternative]: ‘Give, give, give, give’ — it’s very interesting.” Here, he worked hard to control his emotion: “It’s good.”

Eaton was asked, too, the obvious question: what can be done to get the decathlon back to the immensely popular event it once was?

“I think the question to ask is why was it so popular before and what happened to make it fade?

“But — I have noticed things in general tend to follow, like, an up-and-down trend. Perhaps in four years you’ll see decathlon being popular for some unknown reason. And for some unknown reason it started becoming unpopular a while ago.

“I’m not sure what to do to make in order to make it more popular. I think the media tend to have a lot of say in what gets promoted or not. So maybe if you guys — I don’t know. I don’t want to say anything right now but I feel like we train really hard to perform really well. We set ourselves to really high standards. Athletes are always set to super-high standards. What standards are the media setting for themselves? What is it like when you guys compete? Or do you compete at all? It’s an interesting question, a great question.”

The murmur from the assembled press: my friend, have you seen the economic upheaval in our business?

Eaton laughed: “You’re broke, too. So there it is.”

One final Eaton story.

Not content on Sunday with having to answer or forward questions, he decided to play guest moderator, too — another way to direct the spotlight onto the others who, it should be emphasized, had just made the Olympic team, too.

Turning to Taiwo and Ziemek next to him, Eaton asked, “Did you know, like in your mind, did you have the possibility that I could possibly do this? And is there any way you can articulate a possibility becoming a reality?”

Here is the mark of a truly great champion. He brings out the best in those around him.

“To be able to do it,” Ziemek said, “shows how much work I was able to put in and, I mean, doing a decathlon is so great because anything can happen.”

“I think that last statement that Zach made is one that stays in your mind,” Taiwo said. “In a decathlon, anything can happen. After the first day, I felt like, hey, this is going really well. But I still have five more events tomorrow. So I can’t get ahead of myself.

“There are ups and downs. And everybody knows Dan O’Briens’s story for trying to make the 1992 team, in Barcelona. You can be the best athlete in the world, and set the world record later but if you don’t perform at these Trials, the American Trials — these people are the best athletes in the world.”

O’Brien famously failed at the 1992 Trials to clear the bar on all three of his attempts at the pole vault; he didn’t make the team. He would come back to win Olympic decathlon gold at the Atlanta 1996 Games.

“You’ve got to be on it,” Taiwo said. “That now becoming a reality — it just makes every second that you questioned the journey, every second that you questioned if you are too tired or making excuses for yourself, you know it really just blows that all away.

“It makes you say, ‘Hey, I did everything right.’ “

The Olympics as canary in coal mine

If English is not your first language, or you have forgotten or never learned about the dangers inherent in mining, or you have (inexplicably) little to no regard for “Zenyatta Mondatta,” the classic 1980 album from The Police, herewith an appreciation of the phrase “canary in a coal mine.”

And why, like the canary, the Olympic movement is an eerily prescient predictor of change buffeting our uncertain, if not broken, world — the kind of change that produced Brexit, the vote Thursday that will now lead to the United Kingdom’s self-inflicted divorce from the European Union.

Brexit makes for nothing less than a seismic event in the history of all of our lives.

At the same time, the very same forces that came together to usher Britain out of the EU have been vividly on display for the past several years in any reasonable assessment of international sport, and particularly in reference to the International Olympic Committee: disdain if not outright rejection of political elites, bureaucracies and institutions, most if not all of it animated by grievance along with its historically volatile corollary, fear of the “other.”

Indeed, the evidence makes a strong case that the Olympic scene is arguably nothing less than a — if not the — leading indicator of big-picture trends in an increasingly globalized world.

That is, a canary in a coal mine.

The first coal mines did not feature ventilation systems. The legend goes that miners would bring a caged canary down with them. Why? Canaries are sensitive to methane and carbon monoxide. As long as the bird sang, the miners knew their air was safe. A silenced canary meant it was time to move, and fast.

Consider any number of recent IOC host city elections in the early years of the 21st century — indicators, all, of intensifying interconnected-ness:

— The tacks to China (2001 in 2008), Russia (2007 for 2014) and Brazil (2009 for 2016).

— The Olympic telegraph of the rise of Asia, both acknowledging and accelerating its economic and political might, with the awarding, after 2008, of three Games in a row there -- 2018 Winter (South Korea), 2020 Summer (Tokyo), 2022 Winter (Beijing).

Beijing will be the first city in Olympic history to stage both Summer and Winter Games, and China re-emerged on the Olympic stage only in the 1980s.

Beijing won for 2022 in an election last summer, defeating Almaty, Kazakhstan. Here was the flip side.

Six cities in Europe dropped out, five put off to varying degrees by the $51 billion figure associated with those 2014 Sochi Olympics: Oslo, Munich, Stockholm, Davos/St. Moritz and Krakow, Poland. A sixth, Lviv, Ukraine, fell out because of war.

Just two candidates for the Winter Olympics?

And maybe now just three for the ongoing campaign for Summer 2024?

The original 2024 list of five — Hamburg, Los Angeles, Paris, Rome and Budapest — is already down to four, German voters having rejected Hamburg. Four very well may soon shrink to three amid this week’s election of a new mayor in Rome, Virginia Raggi, for whom the Olympics is not a priority: "Already with 13 billion euros ($15 billion) in debt, Rome can't permit taking on more debt to make cathedrals in the desert."

Déjà vu all over again, maybe: in 2012, the then-prime minister of Italy called off Rome’s 2020 bid, citing uncertain [read: too high] costs.

And Los Angeles, of course, took over for Boston when locals objected vehemently to the notion of an Olympic invasion.

As telling as the Olympic indicators have been for the wider world, those same markers are equally if not more on-point for the Olympic movement itself and, especially, the IOC.

The collision of interests that gave rise to Brexit leads now suddenly if inevitably to the logical and legitimate Olympic question:

Can the structure of a club born in the 1890s and driven for most of these past 130 years by Europe find, by itself, a way to engineer an appropriate 21st-century governance that will help sustain its position in the world?

Or will change — in a form the IOC might or might not like — be imposed upon it?

In the way that it has been imposed, thanks to the FBI and Swiss authorities, on scandal-plagued FIFA?

In December, 2014, the IOC membership unanimously voted for a 40-point reform plan, dubbed “Agenda 2020.” Within the Olympic bubble, Agenda 2020 has become a ready point of reference — a talking point but, let's face it, lip service, really.

In the real world, Agenda 2020 has offered little if anything in response to the onslaught of challenges playing out in real time.

Any Games is supposed to be a celebration of possibility. With roughly six weeks to go, and keeping in mind that perhaps all will be steady once the Olympic cauldron is lit in Rio, those Games are on course to possibly be the biggest cluster of all time:

Where to begin? There's Zika and the withdrawal from the Games of golf and basketball stars, bad water, the collapse of political and economic institutions as well as even a showpiece beachfront sidewalk, allegations of major governmental corruption, street crime, uncertainty among the locals and, the latest, the shut-down of the Rio anti-doping lab.

And, of course, accusations of state-sponsored doping in Russia.

And more. Like, maybe the subway to Olympic Park gets finished. Or maybe not.

As it was winding around Brazil, the Olympic flame relay seemed to be the sole beacon of sanity — until someone had the dumb idea of using a chained jaguar, an endangered Amazonian jungle cat, as a relay prop. It somehow escaped its army handlers. An army officer thereupon shot and killed it.

For those looking deeper into the symbolism: the jaguar is the official mascot of Brazil’s Olympic team.

So, as NPR pointed out, they sort of went and killed their own mascot in Brazil.

This can lead to all manner of deep thoughts about existentialism. Such thoughts are perhaps better reserved for philosophy, and what-if’s.

What's real is relevance.

And the IOC’s No. 1 challenge, always, is to remain relevant in a changing world — to reach out to young people in hopes of serving as a bridge to connection and inspiration. To celebrate humanity, as one of its better marketing campaigns years ago put it.

Swinging away from the jaguar and back to the canary: if it were singing an Olympic song, it would ring out all about the three core Olympic values -- friendship, excellence and respect.

Where is that song?

Is it even being hummed amid the cha-ching that is Olympic cash flow?

Make no mistake: 21st-century sport is not just dreams and inspirations. It is also big business.

It is, at a very real level, institutional.

Perhaps at no time in its history has the acronym “IOC” served as an illustration of the contrast between what those inside the Olympic bubble believe it to be and, more important, those without.

There are, indeed, fascinating comparisons to be drawn between the IOC on the one hand and, on the other, Brexit and the EU.

Some observations from Friday’s reporting, and just substitute in “IOC” where appropriate:

Financial Times -- "Political elites are under pressure everywhere in the west. Donald Trump is a candidate for US president. Marine Le Pen is bidding for France’s Élysée Palace. But who would have thought pragmatic, moderate, incrementalist Britain would tear down the political temple? This week’s referendum result was a revolt against the status quo with consequences, national and international, as profound as anything seen in postwar Europe."

Washington Post -- “We are in the midst of a worldwide sea change regarding how people view themselves, their government and their countries. The Brexit vote and the rise of Trump — while separated by thousands of miles and an ocean — are both manifestations of that change. There will be more."

Another from the Post, and the strikethroughs are in the original -- “As Trump himself notes, the issues that dominated the Brexit campaign and his own campaign are similar: hostility to immigration, resentment at cosmopolitan elites, frustration with unelected officials telling ordinary citizens how to live, and a persistent perception that the status quo favors minorities layabouts over white ordinary, Anglo-Saxon decent, Christian hard-working citizens.”

New York Times:  “The European Union hasn’t done a good job of explaining its purpose — it’s too opaque, too bureaucratic, too confusing — and its slow handling of the debt crisis, especially in Greece, where it acted fast so French and German banks could cut their losses, but left Greece asphyxiated, had devastating consequences for all. Decisions made for short-term financial stability have led to long-term political instability.”

It’s all reminiscent of what the former IOC Games director Gilbert Felli said amid the 2022 drop-outs: “We lost good cities because of the bad perception of the IOC, the bad perception of how the concept could be done.”

At one point before Oslo formally pulled the plug, a poll suggested that 60 percent of the Norwegian public was against a 2022 bid, with only 35 percent in favor. Oslo! The very soul of winter sports, where Norwegian news outlets ran gleefully with reports about perceptions of the special privileges that would be afforded IOC members at a Games — including cocktail protocols, stocked hotel bars, even hotel room temperatures.

The IOC’s response when Oslo pulled out? It lashed out, saying politicians were misinformed, “left to take their decisions on the basis of half-truths and factual inaccuracies.”

Last November, voters in Hamburg became just the most recent in a succession of ballot initiatives to shoot down the IOC.

Why? A few weeks later, a local dentist told the Guardian, the British newspaper, “I think the people of Hamburg are fed up [at] being short-changed by private companies when it comes to major public projects.”

When voters in Bavaria said no the year before to Munich 2022, here was the key take-away, from Ludwig Hartmann, a Greens Party lawmaker and leader of the movement, called “NOlympia,” that led to the opposition to the project: “The vote is not a signal against the sport but against the non-transparency and the greed for profit of the IOC.”

The IOC, to be clear, is not a for-profit institution.

In other respects, it has real work to do.

It’s not that this is a secret in the Olympic world, either. At the SportAccord conference in Sochi in 2015, Marius Vizer, the-then SportAccord president who is also head of the International Judo Federation, called out the IOC in his usually direct way, accusing it of running a system that had become sclerotic.

In his words: “History demonstrated that all the empires who reached the highest peaks of development never reformed on time and they are all headed for destruction. The IOC system today is expired, outdated, wrong, unfair and not at all transparent.”

In effect, Vizer was the Olympic canary in the coal mine.

The IOC response: kill the canary -- er, the messenger.

Lamine Diack, the-then president of the IAAF, the track and field federation, served as the primary IOC proxy, taking the IAAF out of SportAccord and calling Vizer a “chief coming from nowhere.”

To make a long story short, Diack is now under criminal inquiry in France, suspected of accepting more than $1 million in bribes to help Russian athletes evade sanctions for tests.

Moreover, Tokyo’s winning 2020 bid is now under suspicion. In the months immediately before and after the 2013 vote for 2020, $2 million is thought to have been transferred from Japan to an account in Singapore controlled by a close friend of one of Diack’s sons, Papa Massata Diack, long an IAAF “marketing consultant.”

Vizer, in Sochi in 2015: “I dedicate and I sacrifice my family for sport. I mean sacrifice in the way of dedication. And in my eyes,” now referring to Diack, he is “a person who sacrifices sport for his family.”

Friday’s New York Times also included a column in which a reporter recalls being on assignment in Russia and, while there, hears a film producer make this sardonic observation: in Russia, “the future has become unpredictable — and so has the past.”

Substitute “IOC,” again.

And here, too, from the final paragraph of that same column — once more, plug in “IOC” or “Olympic movement” in place of the proper nouns: “Who inherits England? It’s a question that has obsessed British novelists for decades. And who inherits Europe? Today in Europe the past is equally unpredictable, and the path ahead looks very uncertain.”

Guilt by association is not cool

When Brock Turner was convicted of sexual assault, were the other swimmers on the Stanford men’s swim team sentenced to jail, too?

When Draymond Green was suspended for Game 5 of the just-concluded NBA Finals, were Steph Curry, Klay Thompson and their other Golden State Warriors teammates told to sit out, too?

On Monday, the Somali track coach Jama Aden was arrested in Spain after police raided his hotel room near Barcelona and, Associated Press reported, found traces of the blood-booster EPO and other banned substances. He coaches, among others, the Ethiopian star Genzebe Dibaba, the women’s 1500 world-record holder; London 2012 London men’s 1500 champ Taoufik Makhloufi of Algeria; and Beijing 800 men’s silver medalist Ismael Ahmed Ismael of Sudan. Should each or all of them be held out of the Rio Olympics? Or everyone on the Ethiopian, Algerian and Sudanese teams?

These examples — and there are many, many more — underscore the complexities of the legal, ethical and moral dilemmas now on the table amid the scandal sparked by allegations of state-sponsored or -sanctioned doping in Russia.

What about double Olympic champ Mo Farah, the British distance star? As the running-themed website Let's Run points out, he has a documented relationship of some sort with Aden. What is Farah guilty of? Anything?

These examples also make clear why the International Olympic Committee did what it did Tuesday in declaring, in a key clause, that every international sports federation “should take a decision on the eligibility of … athletes on an individual basis to ensure a level playing field in their sport.”

Everything else — everything — is just noise.

Or, maybe worse, piggy-backing for political advantage or leverage.

Last Friday, track and field’s international governing body, announced — to great self-congratulation — that it intended to sustain the ban on the Russians imposed months ago. In response, Russian president Vladimir Putin countered with this:

“Responsibility must always be individual and those who have no connection with these violations should not suffer.

“We ourselves are outraged when we’re faced with doping problems and we work to ensure that those guilty are punished. But the clean athletes, as they say, why should they suffer? I really don’t understand.”

At Tuesday's IOC meeting, Russian Olympic Committee president Alexander Zhukov said, “We consider it unfair on the vast majority of our athletes who have never doped and have not violated any rules. They will be punished for the sins of others.”

Zhukov also said, “Banning clean athletes from the Rio Olympic Games contradicts the values of the Olympic movement and violates the principles of the Olympic charter. It is also legally indefensible and devalues their competitors’ success.”

In a preface to the new novel, The Idealist, by the American George Hirthler about Pierre de Coubertin, widely credited with being the founder of the modern Olympic movement, the International Olympic Committee president Thomas Bach writes that the book “reminds us of the soaring idealism that motivated one relentless aristocrat to create a celebration of humanity the entire world could embrace.”

That’s not, for emphasis, the entire world except for the Russian track and field team.

— A THREE-ACT PLAY —

If the prelude to this geopolitical play with multiple dimensions was the imposition of the ban, Act One amounted to that IAAF meeting last Friday, in Vienna. Afterward, IAAF leaders promoted the notion that the federation's move amounted to an act of great courage. That is nonsense. It was political expediency. IAAF president Seb Coe did what he had to do — make it look like the IAAF had some backbone, which got the baying hounds of the press off his back, at least for a moment. All the while, the IOC kicked the decision upstairs, if you will, to the IOC.

Act Two: Tuesday’s IOC decision amid a so-called “summit” in Lausanne, Switzerland. It opens the door, the IOC emphasizing that any Russian who competes would be there as, you know, a Russian, not wearing the virginal white of some Olympic “neutral.”

Act Three: the rounds of forthcoming litigation, presumably before the Swiss-based Court of Arbitration for Sport.

To be clear, the allegations involving the Russians are dead serious.

And the intensity of the matter is all the more likely to ratchet up even higher next month, when a World Anti-Doping Agency-appointed commission led by the Canadian expert Richard McLaren releases a report into allegations of state action in connection with results from the Moscow lab.

McLaren has already reported a “preliminary finding” of “sufficient corroborated evidence to confirm … a mandatory state-directed manipulation” of results at the lab from 2011 through the world track and field championships in Moscow in 2013.

Systemic cheating is as bad as it gets.

Anyone proven to have cheated justifiably deserves sanction.

But, and this is the big but, right now what we have are allegations, not adjudicated proof.

Damning allegations, for sure. But, still — allegations.

Sanction rooted in allegation, not tried proof, is mob justice, fundamentally flawed. It's shameful. And on the wrong side of history.

What we also have is that worst of all situations: officials trying to make reasoned, calm decisions when time is short, the shouting from the media and from online trolls is intense and politicians of all sort are weighing in.

The Rio Olympics start August 5. That’s not anywhere near enough time to sort all this out.

In theory and in practice, too, some number of Russians may well be dirty. Some may be clean. But proving that you are “clean” is itself problematic if not impossible because, as the Americans Marion Jones and Lance Armstrong made abundantly clear, you can pass hundreds of tests and still be juicing to the max.

As the IOC noted Tuesday, the presumption of innocence from Russia and Kenya, in particular, where the national anti-doping agencies have been deemed non-compliant, has been “put seriously into question.”

Still, without direct or circumstantial proof that is tested by cross-examination and that rises to the level of a preponderance of the evidence if not more, in the instance of each and every individual athlete, it is very difficult — for emphasis, very difficult — to make the case that he or she, or for that matter an entire team, ought to be banned.

— OTHER BANS ARE NOT THE SAME —

Other bans in sport, even in Olympic sport, simply are not on-point.

For sure, if one runner on a medal-winning relay team gets busted, the entire relay squad is apt to lose those medals. But that doesn’t mean that a javelin thrower loses hers, too.

Why not? Because, obviously, the javelin thrower can’t be held to answer for the conduct of others.

Two real-life on-point examples:

The American sprinter Tyson Gay admits to doping. The U.S. team’s London 2012 4x100 relay medal? Oops. But does that mean that, for instance, the bronze medal that Justin Gatlin won in the men’s open 100 should be stripped? Of course not. Or that the entire U.S. track and field team ought to be DQ’d? Of course not.

If it turns out that Jamaica’s Nesta Carter really did test positive, as news reports have suggested, that might well mean the return of the Jamaican men’s 4x1 gold medal from Beijing 2008. But should Usain Bolt turn back his other five Olympic medals as well? Should he be banned by association from Rio 2016?

Yes, in weightlifting, bans can be applied to an entire squad. (See: Bulgaria.) But — and this is the big condition — only after a series of escalating, and well-known, preconditions are first met.

In the United States, it is true, the NCAA can impose, say, a post-season ban or strip scholarships for the infraction of a single athlete. But the team still gets to play, at least the regular season. (See: USC.) The lesson of the SMU football team from the 1980s has made plain the institutional distaste for the so-called "death penalty" — which in the case of most Olympic athletes is essentially what a ban from the every-four-years Summer Games would amount to. Beyond which, there is this key distinction: Olympic athletes are professionals, not college "amateurs."

So why the hue and cry, particularly in the United States, Britain and Germany, to ban the entire Russian track and field team?

Because it’s Russia, man.

It’s that simple.

And that profound.

Elementally, many people in the west simply do not like Putin. Probably, they fear the man.

“The overwhelming consensus among American political and national security leaders has held that Putin is a pariah who disregards human rights and has violated international norms in seeking to regain influence and territory in the former Soviet bloc,” the Washington Post wrote in a recent report on presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump’s financial ties to Russia.

Is that purported American standard the measure by which Putin ought to be judged? Within Russia, he seems awfully popular. There, for instance, the action in Crimea is widely hailed as the righting of a historical wrong.

To believe that this isn’t in many influential quarters all about Putin, in some fashion, is to beg credulity. The New York Times, for instance, is on something of a crusade about the Russians. Of the several stories it published after last Friday’s IAAF ruling, a featured column started out this way, “So the bear will be left to wander the athletic wilderness this August.”

The “bear”? What, are we back in the Cold War? Should we expect to see more of Boris and Natasha as part of a retro promotion of the 1960s hit cartoon, "The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show"?

The Times is so bent on its perspective that it took until the 10th and 11th paragraphs of the story about Tuesday’s IOC action to get to the point, sort of — the concept of individual scrutiny.

Associated Press? First paragraph, appropriately: “Some Russian track and field athletes could be competing under their own flag at the Rio de Janeiro Olympics after all.”

This matters because, for all the changes affecting daily journalism, the Times still tends to set the tone for a great many people. Especially in Washington.

On Monday, the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee sent a seven-page letter to WADA president Craig Reedie demanding answers to all sorts of questions involving the agency and the Russians.

Putin, whatever you may think of him, does not typically spend his time telling Americans how America should be run. Yet in the sport sphere the United States keeps trying to impose itself on him, and Russia — Democrats and Republicans alike, President Obama making a political statement in the choice of his delegation to the Sochi 2014 Games and, now, this letter from the Republican-led Senate.

This is the same committee, by the way, that used to be run by Arizona Republican John McCain, who every now and then finds international sport a compelling vehicle by which to try to score domestic political points. Now it’s overseen by John Thune, a Republican from South Dakota.

If you don’t think it’s exceedingly likely that McCain (standing or re-election in November) and, for that matter, U.S. Anti-Doping Agency chief executive Travis Tygart had some influence over the sending of that letter, then — to quote from the 1980 movie classic “Airplane” — you picked a bad week to stop sniffing glue.

The purported rationale for the letter is that, since 2003, the U.S. government has provided $25 million to help fund WADA.

For fiscal 2016, per WADA accounting, the United States contributed $2.05 million.

How you view that $2.05 million depends, as ever, on your point of view.

No question, $2.05 million marked the largest contribution from any government anywhere in the world to WADA’s budget, about $26 million. All of Africa contributed $27,888. Jamaica, among the Americans’ top rivals in track and field, ponied up all of $4,638.

Britain put up $772,326. Germany: $772,326. Russia: the exact same number, $772,326.

For a different comparison: the 2016 U.S. federal budget spells out expenditures of roughly $3.54 trillion. Not billion, trillion.

Let’s not make the math too complicated: $2 million equals 0.000002 trillion.

The Senate can’t take gun-control action even in the aftermath of 49 murdered at a gay bar in Orlando but finds it worthwhile to expend time and resource chasing answers in connection with an enterprise worth a barely-there fraction of the 2016 federal budget?

Here it is worth recalling what Bach said upon the opening of the Sochi Games, in an indirect but obvious reference to Obama, “People have a very good understanding of what it really means to single out the Olympic Games to make an ostentatious gesture which allegedly costs nothing but produces international headlines.”

— "... THIS NEEDS A FULL REVIEW" —

At the same time, it should be noted that Putin has used sport as an instrument of soft power — that is, to assert Russian standing in the international community and, probably even more importantly, at home.

The Russians spent a reported $51 billion on the 2014 Sochi Games. The track and field championships in 2013, the swim championships in 2015 in Kazan, soccer’s World Cup in 2018 and more — under Putin, Russia is indisputably one of the most influential destinations, and Putin himself one of the most important personalities, in world sport.

There are more than 200 national Olympic committees across the world. The U.S. Olympic Committee funds itself. Everywhere else, sport is typically an arm of the federal government, often its own ministry.

Who wants to believe that Russia might be the only place in the entire world where there might be a connection, provable by the weight of the evidence, to state-sanctioned doping?

For the sake of argument: let’s say, hypothetically, the Kenyans have had a thing going on. As the IOC noted, the Kenyan and Russian national anti-doping agencies are non-compliant. Is it fair to boot all the Russians but let in all the Kenyans? On what theory?

Further: who is to say that cheating in a country like the United States on a grand scale, like that perpetrated by Jones and Armstrong, isn’t all the more serious than cheating — again, if proven — in Russia?

When it comes to the use of illicit performance-enhancing drugs, concepts of “free will” and “choice” may mean one thing in the west and quite another in a place like Russia, given different expectations of and experience with compliance when it comes to "suggestion" or otherwise.

Cheating, ladies and gentlemen and everyone in between, is part of the human condition. If we — the worldwide “we” — want to rein in doping in the Olympic movement, the constructive thing is not seven-page letters looking backward in pursuit of blame.

This is another significant component of what happened Tuesday at that IOC meeting — the forward-looking call for an “extraordinary” world conference on doping matters, in 2017.

No. 1 on the agenda ought to be how to make WADA truly independent. That’s going to take real money, way more than $26 million. Something on the order of 10 times more, as Reedie has said in suggesting that perhaps a fraction of the television revenues supporting Olympic sport ought to go toward the anti-doping campaign.

What's fundamentally at issue is the tension-laden relationship between sport and government, as well as the corollary, the subject that's super-boring until it explodes, like now, in scandal — governance. Sport wants to be autonomous. In every country but one, though, sport largely depends on government funding. Sometimes that money maybe comes with some very complicated strings.

As Bach said Tuesday, referring specifically to the anti-doping campaign in remarks that apply fully in the most general context, “It has to be more transparent. Everybody has to understand better who is doing what and who is responsible for what and this needs a full review.”

100-days-out memo: oh, right, there's an LA24 bid

Curious: why, with a Los Angeles bid for the 2024 Summer Games underway, would the U.S. Olympic Committee opt Wednesday to have its 100-days-to-Rio-2016 event in Times Square in New York City? What about that, given the LA24 bid, makes any sense?

1. Times Square, dressed in neon, is unquestionably many things. Like, if you’re lucky, you can catch a glimpse of the Naked Cowboy — big hat, small underwear — picking at his strategically placed guitar and panning for dollars. Wow!

New York? Biggest (and most self-important) city in the United States. So what? LA is No. 2, with a much-richer Olympic history. Also this about New York: big-time 2005 loser for the 2012 Summer Games, which went to London.

On Wednesday evening, as part of the 100-day countdown, the Empire State Building was lit up red, white and blue.

Which leads to: what is the particular relevance this summer of plans to light up the Freedom Tower, built on the destroyed World Trade Center site, with the Team USA Rio medals count? Even the New York 2012 bid did not play on the 9/11 terror attacks. So what is it? There are tall buildings in New York? Please. Light up the top of the 73-story U.S. Bank Tower in downtown LA. Or Staples Center a few blocks away. Or the Hollywood sign.

2. If you're trying to convey the notion that Times Square is akin to Town Square USA, which is ridiculous in the first instance, how in the world does that promote an LA bid? The plaza at LA Live, which holds Staples and the Microsoft Theater, is plenty big enough, and has proven plenty cool enough for virtually every awards show there is.

3. If the USOC believes New York is all that great, move your entire office there. But no. The USOC manages quite nicely to do the bulk of its business from Colorado Springs, Colorado. So why New York? Bottom line: it would have been just as easy, and way more consistent with the 2024 bid, to stage this 100-days-out event in Los Angeles.

4. If the suggestion is that the event was not just for media and Olympic fans but for sponsors and donors (party Tuesday evening at the Museum of Modern Art for 300 “Team USA supporters”) — uh, sophisticated donors and businesspeople do business, and lots of it, in California. If California was a stand-alone country, it would be the eighth-largest economy in the world as measured by gross domestic (or, the case of California, state) product, immediately behind Brazil, where — oh — the Games will be held in 100 days.

Rhetorical question: wouldn’t it make sense to invite important people to SoCal and showcase not only Rio 2016 but LA24?

As for parties — again, it’s awards season, and more, every week in Los Angeles and Southern California.

Another rhetorical question: so you want, like the IOC and USOC, to find imaginative ways to connect young people with the Games? Music and sport are the two universal languages. The Coachella festival just ran for the past two weekends. Come on.

5. The Paris people had their 100 days out in — Paris. Not Lyon or Marseilles. And not just any old spot in Paris. It was at the Palais de Chaillot at the Trocadero by the Eiffel Tower.

Incidentally, the Paris 2024 team — including the city's first female mayor, Anne Hidalgo — did go earlier this week to Marseilles, to promote the bid. But when it came to 100 days out, it was back in Paris all the way. Just like the USOC should have been Wednesday in LA.

6. The Associated Press story out of Times Square dutifully noted that First Lady Michelle Obama appeared in front of dozens of U.S. athletes, and quoted her as saying she was a “real, lifelong, die-hard Olympics fan.”

For an American audience, that’s perhaps lovely. But in the midst of a spirited bid campaign, who are the target audiences?

If the point was to appeal to a U.S. audience exclusively — why? There’s a bid campaign going on! Kill two birds with the one stone, please.

Not to mention: the Obamas, after their appearance at the IOC session in Copenhagen in 2009 at which Chicago got kicked out of 2016 voting in the first round, are the favorites of few, at best, in the International Olympic Committee.

At any rate, not one word in that AP story about Los Angeles bidding for 2024. Maybe the reporter opted not to include anything. Or maybe it wasn’t a USOC point of emphasis Wednesday that, you know, LA is bidding for the 2024 Olympics, even though — outside of the performance of the team at the Rio Games — the bid is the undeniable No. 1 USOC priority for the next 17 or so months, until the IOC election in September 2017 in Lima, Peru.

As a maybe-not-so-helpful reminder Wednesday of that trip by President Obama and First Lady to Copenhagen, here was Republican front-runner Donald Trump, speaking in Washington at the Center for the National Interest, in a story reported at length by the Chicago Tribune:

"Do you remember when the president made a long, expensive trip to Copenhagen, Denmark, to get the Olympics for our country? And, after this unprecedented effort, it was announced that the United States came in fourth. Fourth place.

"The president of the United States making this trip, unprecedented, comes in fourth place. He should have known the result before making such an embarrassing commitment. We were laughed at all over the world as we have been many, many times. The list of humiliations go on and on and on.”

It’s easy to dismiss Trump’s comments, to assert they bear no relevance to the Times Square event. But maybe they do. If only one IOC voter reads his rant and goes, yep, maybe he’s right, then what? Especially since that Tribune story duly connected Trump’s remarks with Mrs. Obama’s appearance at the Times Square production, quoting the First Lady at length:

"’To this day, I still remember the excitement that I felt as a little girl growing up on the South Side of Chicago when Olympic season would roll around,’ she said, adding how her friends would gather with her to watch the Games on TV. ‘I mean, these times meant the world to kids in neighborhoods all over the country.’” Especially, obviously, Southern California, where there’s an Olympic bid going on.

7. At any rate, compare and contrast the AP story Wednesday out of Paris.

Headline: “Passing Security Test at Euro 2016 Will Help 2024 Paris Bid.”

Sixth paragraph, quoting French Olympic Committee president Denis Masseglia: “‘It's important to prove that our system — to guarantee everybody's security — is the best system, and the [April 3] Paris marathon was a success,’ said Masseglia, who was speaking at an event to mark 100 days until the start of the Summer Games in Rio de Janeiro.”

8. If the reason the USOC event went down in New York is because it's easier for NBC, the U.S. television rights-holder, that doesn't really make a lot of sense.

NBC has a travel budget; see the social media shots posted Tuesday of longtime Olympic host Bob Costas along with senior executives Jim Bell and Joe Gesue, and others, in Rio. Moreover, NBC has a brand-new newsroom in Los Angeles' San Fernando Valley, in Universal City (where the main press and broadcast centers would be if LA wins for 2024). Other networks: CBS? Big facility in midtown LA. ESPN? Studio downtown at Staples. Fox? Century City studio.

Wheels up for day of 100 days prep work in Rio #RoadToRio #BobInRio

A photo posted by NBC Olympics (@nbcolympics) on Apr 26, 2016 at 6:23am PDT

9. If the thinking was that the other 'important' media are in New York, that is way old school, and not remotely true anymore, a nod to the East Coast bias that regrettably permeates way too much regressive thinking about the way our country works. Plain and simple: Los Angeles and California are the present and, more important, the future. That’s why LA is the 2024 bid.

At the risk of being super-obvious, having this kind of promotional event in New York serves as a profound disconnect from the core message the USOC purportedly is seeking to send the IOC about LA and California as the future of media and technology.

When IOC president Thomas Bach came to the United States earlier this year, his check-the-box visit to LA — in keeping with similar trips he had made to the other three 2024 bid cities, Paris, Rome and Budapest — provided necessary cover to meet with Google, Facebook, Twitter and other California-based technology executives. At the SportAccord convention last week in Switzerland, who served as key presenters at the so-called “Digital Summit”? Executives from Facebook, Twitter and Venice, California-based Snapchat.

Why give even one IOC member any opportunity to think the institution can count on the full support of those companies, along with others up and down California, if LA doesn’t win?

10. You want a disconnect? One of the promoted features of the Times Square event involved the unveiling of 47 full-sized surfboards, one for each Team USA sponsor, that had been individually decorated and turned into what a USOC release called a “piece of customized art.”

Everyone knows that surfing and Times Square go together like pickles and maple syrup.

If you want to buy tickets to “Les Miserables,” cool, see you at TKTS at Times Square. But surfing? See ya at Zuma, dude.

Further, as the USOC pointed out, three extra surfboards — an Olympic, Paralympic and Team USA board, bringing the total to 50 — were designed by Hurley. The company traces its roots to the Southern California surf industry in the 1970s. Maybe that’s because it’s based in Costa Mesa, California.

A photo posted by NBC Olympics (@nbcolympics) on Apr 26, 2016 at 6:14pm PDT

Let’s not forget that the USOC is the institution that a year and a half ago couldn’t figure out that it should have gone to Los Angeles in the first instance, not Boston.

Memo to the USOC: there is a 2024 campaign going on, and LA is your candidate. Why make this even the least bit difficult  when some things should be so easy?

Trump: the peril and limit of the 'moron' vote

In the spirit of Chris Rock at the Oscars on Sunday night, let’s get right to it, the elephant in the room. In this case, the room is decorated with the five Olympic rings and the elephant — ever-so-figuratively, given that he is running for the Republican presidential nomination — is Mr. Donald Trump. Straight talk: if Mr. Trump were to win the general presidential election in November, it’s difficult to draw up a scenario in which that would play well for Los Angeles’ bid for the 2024 Summer Games.

In the 2024 Olympic campaign, Los Angeles would seem, right now, to have a lot going for it. LA has all the ready advantage of being the center of all that is SoCal, plus the huge boost of not having to build hardly anything to get ready for a Games, plus the full attention of the International Olympic Committee's focus on technology and innovation -- California being home to Facebook, Google, Apple, Twitter, Snapchat, Disney and more. Look, if California were a nation, it would boast the world's eighth-largest GDP. And, of course, ridiculously great weather.

All IOC elections are unpredictable. Just the same, LA stands at least a reasonable chance of convincing the IOC to bring the Summer Games back to the United States for the first time since 1996 and Atlanta.

And then there's Mr. Trump.

It is the case that, over the years, Mr. Trump has been linked with elements of the Olympic scene, in particular New York’s bid for the 2012 Games. At the same time, his political rhetoric, and in particular over the past several months, has — this is being gracious — hardly been in keeping with the Olympic values.

The Olympic movement is about building bridges between people. Mr. Trump talks about walls.

At its best, the Olympic movement promotes dialogue, understanding and a more peaceful world. On the campaign trail, Mr. Trump is often about — again, being generous — intolerance.

Here is a prediction:

By September 2017, when the IOC picks its 2024 winner, Hillary Clinton will have been the U.S. president for about eight months. Mrs. Clinton has long shown significant support for the Olympics — as First Lady through the 1990s and then, in 2005, via in-person support as New York senator at the IOC vote at which London won out for 2012. Significantly, Mrs. Clinton has longstanding ties with LA24 bid leader Casey Wasserman and mayor Eric Garcetti.

Los Angeles is vying with three other cities for the 2024 Games: Paris, Rome and Budapest.

Be assured that Mr. Trump is already the subject of much discussion in Olympic circles. Bet that his name comes up many times over at the three-day IOC’s policy-making executive board meeting starting Tuesday in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Bet, too, that Mr. Trump’s political ascent puts the U.S. Olympic Committee and the LA24 people in a delicate position. On the one hand, it’s presidential politics — what is the USOC or LA24 to do? (Answer to rhetorical question: nothing.) On the other, it’s American politics, which carries a disproportionate weight, the U.S. president nominally being leader of the free world, and all that.

Keep in mind, always, that the IOC is European-dominated. Thanks to a round-up published Monday in the New York Times, we can be perfectly clear that Mr. Trump "elicits shock and biting satire" in any number of European nations, including Germany (Der Spiegel front cover, “Madness: America’s agitator”), Britain (580,000 sign petition seeking to ban him from the country), France (Liberation: “Trump, From Nightmare to Reality”) and Spain (letter from imaginary 16th-century king to Trump advising him to “consider bringing back the Inquisition”).

Jean-Marie Le Pen, the 87-year-old founder of the far-right French National Front, who as recently as last year referred to the Holocaust as a “detail” in the history of World War II, had this to say Saturday on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/lepenjm/status/703625793814003712

Translation: “If I were American, I would vote for Donald Trump … but may God protect him!”

Mr. Trump has a “budding bromance” with Russian president Vladimir Putin, according to that same article in the Times, citing — among others — favorable comments on RT, the Kremlin-funded broadcaster.

For those who might be unfamiliar, Mr. Putin is by any measure one of the most important figures in the Olympic and international sports scene. That’s what happens when 1. you are the president of Russia, 2. you spearhead the spending of a reported $51 billion to organize the 2014 Winter Games and 3. you are in line to stage the 2018 soccer World Cup.

It’s no secret President Obama is not a significant personality in the Olympic world. After campaigning in person in 2009 at the IOC vote in Copenhagen at which Chicago, the president’s home town, went out first, Rio ultimately prevailing, the president seemingly has had enough of the IOC. Recall the politically charged delegation President Obama sought to send to Sochi? Featuring, among others, Billie Jean King (who ultimately made the closing ceremonies)?

Maybe that helps explain the Russian love for Trump. Then again, maybe the Kremlin ought to take a second look at Mr. Trump’s Facebook account. Here, from just after those Sochi Games, and does this express the foundational Olympic values — friendship, excellence, respect — or what?

Who knows, of course, what a Trump presidency — perish the thought — might really mean for the Olympics? Mr. Trump, for those keeping track of his Olympic connections, ran with the Olympic torch in New York on June 19, 2004.

As part of the New York bid, Mr. Trump appeared in a 2002 film that played at least a small role in the USOC decision to pick New York — over San Francisco — as the 2012 U.S. entrant. Later, as the New York campaign rolled along, he was photographed signing a balance beam.

He also opted last summer on Twitter to weigh in on Boston’s failed 2024 effort:

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/625816370849181696

Heading into the Super Tuesday series of primary elections, Mr. Trump may well be in position to win the Republican nomination.

But the odds of him winning the general election are about as likely as that 9/11 tale he tells in which “thousands and thousands of people” — in New Jersey, with a “heavy Arab population” — “were cheering as that building,” referring to the World Trade Center tower, “was coming down.” That never happened.

About as likely as his plan for a wall to go up between Mexico and the United States, and Mexico paying for it — as if, former Mexican president Vicente Fox saying, “I’m not going to pay for that fucking wall,” and offering this about Trump, among other things, “I mean, he reminds me of Hitler.”

Speaking of references to fascists, here is Trump himself favorably retweeting a post — from, as it turned out, a parody account — that included a quote widely attributed to Mussolini.

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/703900742961270784

In the end, the odds of Mr. Trump winning are about as likely as the real-ness of another urban legend he has related, about Muslim extremists being killed by a World War I-era general with bullets that had been dipped in pig’s blood. That never happened.

There are many, many reasons not to vote for Mr. Trump. On the campaign trail, he has revealed himself to be a racist, a bully, a misogynist, a serial liar, someone who throws insults at the handicapped and the Pope and decries the press — and much, much more.

None of this seems to have made a significant imprint in certain precincts of the American electorate, where anger and discontent are manifest.

If you went to public high school — guilty — you come to understand, maybe even just by looking around each morning in home room, the delight in the American system: when you turn 18, and if you register, you get to vote. As the former LA Times columnist T.J. Simers used to love to say, these people live among you.

Even so, for presidential voting purposes, these are the real questions: how many morons are out there, and how many of those morons will actually vote?

The Onion, the satirical news site, put it this way in a story posted Tuesday, a report on a made-up 36-year-old delivery driver from Youngstown, Ohio: " 'I'm Trump All the Way,' Says Man Who Will Die from Mishandling Fireworks Months Before Election."

As Bill James, the father of sabermetrics, the empirical analysis of baseball, put it in a recent blog post, referring to Trump’s status as reality-TV star for the last 20 years and expertise at attracting media attention:

“Trump gets a grossly disproportionate share of the attention, and thus a disproportion share of the idiot vote.”

James also wrote:

“I don’t think that Trump can win, frankly, because I don’t think there are enough morons to elect him. A certain percentage of the American public is just morons; that’s the way it is.”

During this primary season, as James makes clear, the other Republican candidates are playing right into Trump’s hands. What Trump is doing is winning a plurality of a Republican electorate divided multiple ways — that is, at least until after Tuesday, there are still five guys in the race, one of whom, Dr. Ben Carson, has a less-than-zero chance of winning.

This fractionality is essential to understanding what’s going on, as James outlines:

“When you divide the public in two and then divide the voters in one of those halves among five candidates or more, a candidate can win by dominating the moron vote because it only takes about one-seventh of the total population to take the ‘lead’ under those circumstances. But when you’re talking about needing 51 percent of the whole population, rather than needing 30 percent of half of the population, you run out of morons. I hope we will; I hope Trump will lose because I hope that he runs out of morons to vote for him.”

President Obama may not be a big hit in the Olympic world, but he — and President Reagan, too — understood better than almost anyone in the past several decades what a presidential election is about.

It’s not fear, Mr. Trump’s calling card.

It’s hope.

That is the essence of the Olympic spirit, too, and it’s why the election this season of Mrs. Clinton — for all her debate-worthy flaws — is so important.

"Despite what you hear, we don’t need to make America great again — America hasn’t stopped being great. But we do need to make America whole again," Mrs. Clinton said Saturday in South Carolina, mocking Trump's campaign slogan, as the website The Hill reported.

"Instead of building walls, we need to be tearing down barriers. We need to show, by everything we do, that we really are in this together.”

Poll: 88 percent - 88 percent! - support for LA 2024

In a western democracy such as the United States, it’s hard to get nine out of 10 people to agree on pretty much anything. Is the sky blue? Does the sun rise in the east? Is Donald Trump an idiot? A poll released Tuesday found that 88 percent of Los Angeles County residents want LA to play host to the 2024 Olympic Games.

Again, and for emphasis: 88 percent.

The International Olympic Committee, when it evaluates candidates for a Games, typically cares about one figure more than anything, and that is public support. The IOC, like each of us, wants to feel wanted, welcomed and encouraged.

This telephone poll, the first major independent survey to assess local Olympic support, was conducted by Loyola Marymount University and sponsored in part by Southern California-based public radio station KPCC. It underscores why — among many reasons — it’s now time for the IOC to take a good, hard look at returning its franchise to the United States for the first time in 28 years.

Once more: 88 percent.

Those results also stand as vivid contrast to the IOC’s messaging failure in advancing its purported Agenda 2020 reforms, a breakdown highlighted by a column written just four days ago by Paul Newberry of Associated Press, an Olympic veteran. The piece, quoting a Holy Cross college economics professor and others, suggested the Games are a “risky financial gamble” and a bid like LA was being unreasonable in looking at turning a 2024 surplus, just like the 1984 surplus, $232.5 million.

“… It’s difficult to see how hosting the Olympics would benefit Los Angeles,” Newberry wrote.

“Paris, Rome or Budapest, for that matter.

“This is a race where the losers get the gold.”

Olympic cost overruns are overwhelmingly a function of big construction tabs. In LA, 97 percent of the venues are already in place or are planned by private — again, private — investors (one venue outstanding: canoe slalom).

And that doesn’t include the new $2- to $3-billion LA Rams football stadium and complex in Inglewood, near LAX international airport. For sure, it would be ready — for free to LA Olympic organizers — way before 2024.

To the point that it’s difficult to see how hosting the Games would benefit LA: over the past 30-plus years, that $232.5 million has turned into more than $220 million in grants for youth sport. And the LA84 Foundation still has millions left.

This is why there’s 88 percent support for an LA Olympics: 1984, as experts agree, offers sustainable proof that the Olympics not only can but would be a good deal, for taxpayers and for the IOC.

“The data nerd in me — I have never seen one of my surveys have this much support for anything,” said Brianne Gilbert,  associate director of the Thomas and Dorothy Leavey Center for the Study of Los Angeles at LMU as well as a professor at the university of both political science and urban studies.

The poll surveyed 2,425 people during the first six weeks of 2016; it was specifically designed to represent LA County’s extensive demographics, with respondents including blacks, whites, Latinos, Asian-Americans and “others.” It was translated into Spanish, Mandarin and Korean. Regardless of group, researchers found almost no difference in support. The poll’s margin of error: plus or minus 3 percent.

Opposition: 12 percent. (Math made easy.)

When the poll includes those who did not answer in the survey: 85 percent in favor, 11 against, 4 not answering.

To be blunt, 88 percent is the kind of number you might get when polling in a country with a very different form of government. Like, an autocratic system. Where maybe it might be better form to just fall in line.

An IOC-commissioned poll in December 2014 in China, measuring support for the 2022 Winter Games bid: 88 percent in Beijing proper.

The LA 88 percent figure is higher even than the result the IOC found when polling in Sochi ahead of the 2007 election that would give the Russian city the 2014 Winter Games: 79 percent.

Fun with numbers: a poll a year ago found that 85 percent of Russians trusted president Vladimir Putin, with experts saying that in the context of a real presidential election (not on the agenda until 2018) Putin would win with a result approaching 90 percent.

Those Sochi Games now come associated with a $51-billion figure. The Games in Rio this summer are running way, way over initial projections, too — now $10 billion or more in public and private money, with organizers searching high and low to cut about $500 million to balance a $1.85 billion operating budget.

That’s why this 2024 race is perhaps the most critical election in IOC history. Not just recent history but — ever. The IOC, when it picks a 2024 winner in September 2017, really has no choice: it has to go somewhere where the Games make hard-core financial sense and, critically, where it’s wanted.

The 88 percent figure also offers a fascinating trend line for the LA effort:

Before the early 2015 decision at which the U.S. Olympic Committee preliminarily chose Boston for 2024, the poll numbers in LA, depending on whether you wanted the LA city or USOC poll, were 77 or 78 percent.

Last August, a USOC poll put the yes-for-24-in-LA figure at 81 percent.

Now, 88.

A cautionary note: at 88 percent, is there any way for LA's poll numbers to go but down, even if a little?

Then again, who knows? It’s LA.

Raphael J. Sonenshine, a professor, author and expert on almost everything Los Angeles who is now executive director of the Pat Brown Institute of Public Affairs at Cal State-LA, said, “You cannot overemphasize what a success the 1984 Games was.”

He added a moment later, “It was a ridiculous thing to take on the Olympics the way LA did in 1984. It is still paying off. LA residents have actually seen a case where [a Games] still pays off and provides benefits years later.”

Compare the LA numbers to Boston. There, polls consistently reported in-favor figures in the 30s and 40s, and opposition at 50.

Indeed, the USOC — when Boston finally and mercifully sank last July into the death star — specifically said it “did not think that the level of support enjoyed by Boston’s bid would allow it to prevail over great bids from Paris, Rome, Hamburg, Budapest or Toronto.”

A side note: pretty much every round of dismal Boston polling produced glee not just from opponents but from many in the press, and in particular the New York Times, which — like it or not — often drives what happens in a lot of other outlets. Not that Boston didn’t deserve it. Even so, we live in a world fueled by considerable skepticism. So now in Los Angeles, the city that has twice (1984, 1932) played host to, and loves the Games, a poll comes out that documents that passion — and where is the mainstream coverage? Anything in the New York Times? Six paragraphs in USA Today?

Toronto, for the record, opted not to get in to the 2024 derby. Hamburg has since been voted out by referendum.

The IOC typically wants to see bids with public support at 70 percent or better.

Budapest? 57 percent “expressed support” for the Games, 70 percent said hosting would “make them proud.” Results, per the recently filed campaign bid book, based on a December 2015 poll of 2,000 residents of Budapest and three regional cities.

Rome: 71 percent in the Rome metro area, 75 percent nationally “expressed support.” Figures come from a January 2016 survey of 2,200 cited in the bid book.

Paris? 74 percent support in the city, 77 percent Paris region, 80 percent France. Source: January 2016 poll cited in bid book, no methodology or details offered.

For a little contrast and context, it’s worth recalling Chicago’s unsuccessful bid for 2016. That bid started with a poll that purportedly put support at 77 percent; subsequently, an IOC-commissioned poll fixed it at 67 percent. Rio and Madrid both came back in that IOC poll at 85 percent, Tokyo at 56 percent.

The IOC voted for 2016 in October 2009. Chicago went out first. Then Tokyo. Rio then went on to beat Madrid.

One final time: LA24, 88 percent.

LMU’s Gilbert said, “Believe me, we checked and double-checked to make sure. Because our name is on the line as well. People are just really excited about it.”

USA Swimming's night to celebrate

NEW YORK -- Bob Bowman, Michael Phelps' coach, came first. At a filled-to-the-max ballroom here at the Marriott Marquis Hotel in Times Square, Bowman won USA Swimming's "coach of the year" award at its annual gala, called the "Golden Goggles," and when he took to the stage he had this to say: "Michael, it has been a privilege to be your coach. It has been even better to be your friend."

A few moments later came Phelps, introduced by the strange-but-awesome pairing of Donald Trump and Gary Hall Jr., the former sprint champion -- on a night when the invite said, "Black Tie" -- wearing, indeed, a funky black-and-white tie draped over a black T-shirt that blared out in pink letters, "Barbie," the ensemble dressed up with a black jacket.

Phelps, Trump allowed, was "a friend of mine." He riffed a little bit more, "You think he's going to win?

Of course he was going to win for "male athlete of the year," and when Phelps got to the stage, he said, referring to London 2012, his fourth Games, "This Olympics was the best Olympics I have ever been a part of."

No one in the American Olympic scene -- arguably not even the U.S. Olympic Committee -- puts on a show like USA Swimming. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg was also among the celebrity presenters. The comic Jim Gaffigan came out for a 20-minute riff that only marginally touched on swimming but did include references to Phelps and Subway sandwiches as well as Gaffigan's much-applauded routine on Hot Pockets, the microwaveable turnover.

Out in the hall there was a silent auction with all manner of stuff for sale -- including a framed picture, signed by both Phelps and Serbia's Milorad Cavic, of the 2008 Beijing 100-meter butterfly, which Phelps famously won by one-hundredth of a second.

It's not simply that American swimmers are so good.

It's that the culture of the U.S. swim team creates success.

That is what was fully and richly on display Monday night at the Marriott Marquis ballroom: a program that dares to dream big and that celebrates the role everyone plays in achieving those dreams, from support staff to coaches to athletes.

Indeed, when the night began with introductions across the stage, it wasn't the athletes or the coaches who came first. It was the support staff. And they got just as loud a round of applause from those on hand.

There are other well-run national governing bodies -- the ski and snowboard team, for instance, which claimed 21 of the world-best 37 medals the U.S. team won in Vancouver in 2010.

That said, virtually every other U.S. Olympic federation could learn a little something, or maybe a lot, from how the swim team gets things done. In London, the swim team won 31 medals -- 16 gold, nine silver, six bronze.

As good as the U.S. track team was -- it won 29 medals -- the numbers don't lie. The No. 1 performance in London came in the water.

It was observed by NBC's Bob Costas, the night's emcee, that if the American swim team had been a stand-alone country it would have finished ninth in the overall medals table -- and fifth in the gold-medal count.

When the 49 athletes on the London 2012 team were introduced, two by two, they showed just how much they genuinely liked each other -- the fun that was so vividly on display in the "Call Me Maybe" video they had produced before the Games, which became a viral internet sensation.

Ricky Berens and Elizabeth Beisel didn't just shake hands when they met at center stage; they executed a chest-bump. Missy Franklin did a twirl, courtesy of Jimmy Feigin. Cullen Jones and Kara Lynn Joyce struck "007" poses.

Time and again, the winners Monday took time to say thank you to their families, coaches, staff and teammates.

"It's just -- just amazing to be here," said Katie Ledecky, the Maryland high school sensation who took home two awards, "breakout performer" and "female race of the year," for her dominating 800 freestyle victory in London. She said of the London Games, "I just had a blast … I got to be inspired by all of you."

Nathan Adrian, the "male race of the year winner" for his one-hundredth of a second victory in the 100-meter freestyle, said, "One last note. Thank you to my mom. I know you're watching online. I love you."

"I've never been on a team that was a close as this one," Dana Vollmer, the 100 fly winner who swam in the world record-breaking, gold medal-winning 4 x 100 women's medley relay, along with Franklin, Rebecca Soni and Allison Schmitt, said.

Of the relay team, she said, "We were called the 'Smiley Club.' "

Echoed Franklin, "My teammates are the best people you would ever meet in your entire life." She also said, "With Thanksgiving coming up, I realized I don't have a single thing in my life not to be thankful for."

Phelps provided the valedictory. He was up for "male athlete of the year" against Ryan Lochte (five medals, two gold), Adrian (three medals, two gold) and Matt Grevers (three medals, two gold).

Phelps followed up his eight-for-eight in Beijing with six medals in London, four gold. He became the first male swimmer to execute the Olympic three-peat, and he did it in not just one event but two, the 200 IM and the 100 fly. His 22 Olympic medals stand as the most-ever. Eighteen of those 22 are gold.

Trump, ever the sage, opined, "No athlete has ever come close," a reference to the arc of Phelps' dominating career, adding, "I don't think they ever will."

All of that is why Phelps, who has repeatedly announced that London marked his last Games as a competitive swimmer, had to be the slam-dunk winner. And if it felt Monday like USA Swimming was maybe -- if reluctantly -- turning the page from the Phelps years, there was that, too.

In London, Phelps embraced his role as veteran team leader. He showed anew Monday how much that meant to him.

The others in the "male athlete" category? "We were all in the same apartment in the [Olympic] village," Phelps said, making it clear that while they might sometimes be rivals in the pool, they were, beyond that, teammates, now and forever.

And, he said, as for that "Call Me Maybe" video: "At first I didn't want to do it. And now I'm really glad I did it because," like the swim team's Olympic year and the celebration Monday of that season, "it turned out to be something really special."