Again with the pre-Games FUD? Everyone deserves better. Especially the Chinese

Again with the pre-Games FUD? Everyone deserves better. Especially the Chinese

Here we go with the déjà vû all over again, only this time it’s China.

Right on schedule, it’s time for Olympic-style FUD — fear, uncertainty and doubt.

Stories about how big, bad and awful it’s all going to be at the Beijing 2022 Winter Games — especially for the dogs and mongrels of the working press — are going to be the norm from here until the opening ceremony on February 4.

Didn’t we just go through this? In Tokyo and the Summer Olympics? Where the hue and cry was that the Games were going to infect the city (didn’t happen) and that the Japanese people were against the Games (they just re-elected, comfortably, the very same majority political party to office).

Now Beijing, and the Winter Games.

The closed loop! The bubble! A “level of control never before seen at the Games,” a New York Times headline decried in a late-September story in a deliberate attempt to set the tone for Beijing 2022 coverage.

Let’s be blunt: this narrative is absurd and more. It not only shapes perceptions but feeds malicious preconceptions. And that’s inappropriate.

Time for Shelby Houlihan to come clean

Time for Shelby Houlihan to come clean

Two things ought to happen now that the Court of Arbitration for Sport has issued a technically detailed but, in the end, common-sense ruling in the matter of Shelby Houlihan, the American distance runner, banning her for four years for nandrolone — through January 2025 — while thoroughly rejecting the ridiculous burrito defense.

One, Houlihan ought to come clean.

Two, all the journalistic sheep who wanted to believe, who maybe still want to believe despite the overwhelming evidence against Houlihan, that there was no way, just no way, a white American distance runner affiliated with the Bowerman Track Club could test positive — all these people, and the readers they misled, ought to take a crash course in Doping 101 and the things people will say and do, meaning anything and everything, to avoid getting busted.

Jacques Rogge, a figure of humanity and stability

Jacques Rogge, a figure of humanity and stability

Jacques Rogge, the eighth president of the International Olympic Committee, has died, the International Olympic Committee announced Sunday, and now closes a chapter in Olympic history.

He was 79.

The fullness of time, as it always does, will tell all.

For now, it is enough to say that Rogge was a bridge — a figure of humanity and stability — between arguably the most important of the IOC presidents, Juan Antonio Samaranch, and the ninth and current president, Thomas Bach, who against considerable currents is vigorously trying to institute a series of reforms aimed at pulling the original 19th century construct that is the IOC into the 21st century.

First, Elaine Thompson-Herah. Last, and a call for context, empathy: Sha'Carri Richardson

First, Elaine Thompson-Herah. Last, and a call for context, empathy: Sha'Carri Richardson

First and foremost, let us pay tribute to Elaine Thompson-Herah, winner Saturday of the women’s 100 at the Prefontaine Classic at Hayward Field in Eugene, Oregon. This summer, Thompson-Herah has cemented her status as one of the finest female sprinters of all time, if not the best.

In Tokyo, Thompson-Herah completed the two-time Olympic double-double, winning — again — the women’s 100 and 200, just as she did in Rio. Then, on Saturday in Eugene, she ran 10.54 to win the 100.

10.54.

This is the second-fastest 100 ever, behind only Florence Griffith-Joyner’s 10.49 in Indianapolis in 1988. It’s a bunch of other stuff, too — personal best (obviously); world lead (ditto); national, Diamond League and meet record (same) — but the important thing is that it’s only five-hundredths back of FloJo, and ETH, as she is known in track speak, is hot, and there are meets coming up, including in Lausanne, Switzerland, on Thursday, where she is already due to race, and it’s clear she wants 10.48 or lower.

That is one story. To be blunt, Elaine Thompson-Herah deserves far more credit than she is getting from the pack of journalistic sheep covering track and field. Way, way, way more.

Gunnar Bentz quietly gets to put Rio, and all that, behind him

Gunnar Bentz quietly gets to put Rio, and all that, behind him

TOKYO — If redemption is the most American of stories, then Gunnar Bentz — five years later — gets his chance here at the Tokyo 2020 Games.

It was nearly five years ago that Bentz and three other U.S. swimmers were involved in what came to be widely known as Lochtegate, the infamous episode at the gas station at the Rio 2016 Olympics.

None of the other three are on the Tokyo team.

The IOC's new way brings the done deal of Brisbane for 2032

The IOC's new way brings the done deal of Brisbane for 2032

TOKYO — The International Olympic Committee on Wednesday confirmed Brisbane, Australia, for the 2032 Summer Games. No surprise. This deal was done months ago.

In contrast to the prior city selection process, global spectacles that would match cities against each other, contests running into the hundreds of millions of dollars, this was the IOC’s — and president Thomas Bach’s — new way of getting the job done.

Quietly, efficiently, a meet-up of a qualified city and an interested franchisor.

Will Brisbane turn out to be great? Who knows? Will the Australians turn another bit of magic, like Sydney in 2000? Who knows? What we do know is that Brisbane and Australia are secure enough, now, for the IOC and Bach to say, OK, let’s do this.

And that’s the thing — security.

Team USA to Asia this summer and next winter -- and China, take note, is rising

Team USA to Asia this summer and next winter -- and China, take note, is rising

In 2015, the American sprinter Justin Gatlin had been on fire. He came into the track and field world championships that August at the Bird’s Nest in Beijing having run the 100-meter dash in 9.74 seconds in May and then 9.75 twice, once in June and again in July.

In the world semifinals, Gatlin ran 9.77. He was, as he had been all season, the heavy favorite for gold.

In the final, nearing the finish line, Gatlin’s form caught just enough to throw him off stride. Jamaica’s Usain Bolt won the race, in 9.79. Gatlin finished in 9.80.

That race would prove emblematic of the American performance at those 2015 championships. The U.S. team won just 18 medals, only six gold. Kenya and Jamaica won more gold, both seven. Now, with the Tokyo Olympics coming up, the question is whether that 2015 trip to Asia was an aberration for the American team or whether it’s a signal of what’s to come this summer.

And, for that matter, next February — at the Beijing 2022 Winter Games.

Context and empathy, please: Richardson very unlikely to run at all in Tokyo

Context and empathy, please: Richardson very unlikely to run at all in Tokyo

Sha’Carri Richardson is not going to run in the women’s 100 meters at the Tokyo Olympics. That race is at the start of the track and field competition at the Games.

For that matter, she is very unlikely to run in the women’s 4x100 meter relay. That relay is run near the end.

“We have not focused on the relay,” her agent, Renaldo Nehemiah, said Friday afternoon in a telephone interview. “I just felt that was not healthy for her to get excited about possibly being in Tokyo. I felt it would be a shock and a surprise. Her sights are going to be on the Prefontaine Classic,” on August 21 back at Hayward Field in Eugene, Oregon, a World Athletics Diamond League meet.

Richardson’s 30-day marijuana-related suspension does far more than seemingly take one of the brightest young U.S. stars out of the Tokyo Games, which begin July 23.

It also highlights the need for context and empathy — and a renewed appreciation for athlete mental health — when bright young talents, burnished on the star-making machinery of television as the next big thing, are revealed behind the scenes as human beings like the rest of us, in this instance, a 21-year-old young woman desperately grieving the loss of her mother.

In this context, it also highlights the way that USA Track & Field, under the leadership of chief executive Max Siegel and chief operating officer Renee Washington, have again, indeed relentlessly, stepped up to provide precisely such empathy and athlete support — in direct contrast to the way such matters might have been dealt with in the past.

Reality, perceptions, relationships: will AIBA get time, and a chance?

Reality, perceptions, relationships: will AIBA get time, and a chance?

Zeina Nassar is a German boxer and national champion. She is a trailblazer. Two years ago, at her urging, AIBA, the international boxing federation, changed its rules to allow female fighters to box wearing the hijab, the headscarf worn by Muslim women.

“We are all responsible,” Nassar said Monday at a wide-ranging news conference organized Monday by AIBA in Lausanne, Switzerland, the Olympic capital, “for a change.”

The changes at issue Monday were those AIBA has furiously been implementing for the past months under Russia’s Umar Kremlev, elected president last December. The aim: being back as the sport’s governing body for the Paris Games in 2024. An IOC task force overseen by gymnastics president Morinari Watanabe will run the boxing tournament at the Tokyo Olympics.

Kremlev has been outspoken about instilling an AIBA culture rooted in transparency and in globally recognized best practices of good governance; putting the federation on solid financial ground; identifying past and current instances of corruption in and out of the ring, in particular in AIBA financial dealings; and, as if all that wasn’t enough, fixing the seemingly eternal problem of badly judged or officiated— the skeptic would say fixed — fights.

It’s little wonder boxing’s place on the Olympic program is threatened.

A $270-million spaceship in remote Eugene is not how to grow track and field in America

A $270-million spaceship in remote Eugene is not how to grow track and field in America

EUGENE, Ore. — Maybe you are one of those people who believes that Paul McCartney has been, you know, dead for all these years.

Maybe you believe that Britney Spears has thoroughly enjoyed every minute of the 13 years under the conservatorship that has controlled her life and money.

Maybe you believe that the Houston Astros were just learning new syncopation skills when they were beating on garbage cans.

If you are one of these people, or maybe you just belong to the Cult of Running and don’t want to listen to logic and facts, then maybe you believe the new Hayward Field here in Eugene is the lynchpin to a revival of U.S. track and field. And you likely believe, too, that this week’s U.S. Trials, which are essentially a dry-run for the stadium, are a precursor to next year’s track and field world championships that will change everything for the sport in this country.