As we get older in life, we learn a few things. Human beings need hope. And we need each other.
This is the story of Ed Hula, a pioneering Olympic journalist in the United States, and Miguel Hernandez Mendez, who for most of his life has been a journalist in Cuba and is now, in significant measure because of the goodness of Ed Hula, a new American citizen.
“Olympic brothers,” Miguel said in a recent telephone call.
From the get-go, there was never any question there was a substance in the Russian skater Kamila Valieva’s 15-year-old body that shouldn’t have been there.
The issues all along were: 1/ where did that substance, the banned substance trimetazidine, or TMZ, come from, 2/ and what to do about it, since she was 15, and in theory someone who is 15 ought not be treated the same under the rules, anyone’s rules, as someone who is, say, 32.
Put aside everything else – and there’s so much connected to the Valieva matter, which threatened to all but eclipse everything that wasn’t Valieva at the Beijing 2022 Winter Games – and those two keys make up the core of Monday’s Swiss-based Court of Arbitration for Sport judgment, which said those rules mean Valieva deserves to be treated like a grown-up.
So, it said, she got what she deserves, the usual: a four-year ban.
For, let’s note, a first offense.
In 2024, it would make for an excellent debate at an Oxford or Cambridge about what constitutes a World Athletics-driven “boycott” of Russia and what amounts to a punitive exercise in keeping them out that is indisputably and irrevocably at odds with the fundamental principle of the Olympic charter, which calls for inclusion.
Because, in the end, who gets punished? Vladimir Putin? Or the athletes?
What would the 1980 version of Seb Coe say? What would the 1980 version of Seb Coe tell the then British Olympic Assn. chair Denis Follows, who defied the then prime minister Margaret Thatcher and ensured a British team went to Moscow? Maybe, you know, thanks for letting me live my dream? Which is what an athlete asks?
News: Jon Rahm, the 2023 Masters champion, signs with the Saudi-backed LIV golf tour, for $300 million per many reports.
Like a game of whac-a-mole, some number of PGA Tour golfers claim betrayal. Predictably, too, some number of writers scream about 9/11 or Jamal Khashoggi or blood money or sportswashing.
As challenging as it is for some people to read or hear what’s next, these things must be said, because journalism is about the truth.
From the front lines of campus unrest here in the United States, this dispatch from the University of Southern California, where the mood decidedly is, to be gentle, unsettled.
One of my best students in last year’s sophomore news writing cohort was personally called out, by name, at an on-campus protest—right in front of the j-school building that, you should know, is due to be the main press center at the 2028 LA Games. One of my current sophomore standouts, 19 years old, covering a rally, was so rattled by taunts she asked to be driven home in a police cruiser. She called me, her professor, from the back of the car, saying, am I going to be OK?
This, so we are all clear, is the key demographic — teens, college kids — the International Olympic Committee is seeking to draw to the Paris 2024 Games in eight short months. Prediction: uphill climb.
MUMBAI — Presenting Monday to the International Olympic Committee at its 141st assembly, Casey Wasserman, chair of the LA28 organizing committee, said, “I unequivocally stand in solidarity with Israel.
“But let me be clear. I also stand with the innocent civilians in Gaza who did not choose this war.”
Wasserman’s remarks marked part of a stirring one-two combo in which he and former Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, now the U.S. ambassador to India, served noticed that sports and politics assuredly do mix.
MUMBAI – International Olympic Committee president Thomas Bach’s manta, change or be changed, is apt.
The challenge facing the IOC, the Olympic Games, indeed the wider Olympic movement, is both fundamental and existential. All of it is a 19th-century construct. Owing to broadcast television, U.S.-driven corporate sponsorship and, to some extent, Cold War rivalries, it found its footing in the 20th century. Now it is struggling to find a way in our 21st century.
Television ratings are down. The sponsor program needs a far-reaching re-do. Change is not an option. It’s a must. It’s why, as part of his speech Saturday night here opening the IOC’s 141st session, Bach for the first time made extensive reference to the possibilities of artificial intelligence and, too, announced the IOC would study the creation of an “Olympic Esports Games.”
Change is one thing. But the IOC is furiously slapping at different currents, trying to find direction, not least about its own rules and about whether Bach or someone else ought to be in charge come 2025, when Bach, in theory, is due to step down.
MUMBAI – Squash? Really? That’s part of a purportedly cool plan to draw in tweens, teens and 20-somethings? Weed is legal in California, no problem out of competition, thank you doping control, but that is the idea? Seriously? Squash?
I teach college students at the University of Southern California, a key piece of the International Olympic Committee’s target audience. When the discussion came up this week in class about the five new sports the Los Angeles 2028 said it was proposing, squash, yay, and four others, a package the IOC executive board ratified here Friday for confirmation by its assembly in a few days, one of my students who consistently sees right through institutional BS called it the way it is:
“What,” he said, “is squash?”
The raging and political posturing in Lausanne outside the Kamila Valieva hearing is, like almost everything about this case except for the one thing that matters most, absurd.
You would think, listening to the American figure skaters, that seemingly no one in the United States of America has ever committed a doping violation, and that by trying to pressure the Court of Arbitration panel hearing the case that they – and the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, willing participants in this kabuki theater – are standing up for truth, justice and the American way.
What silliness.
Here is what matters: Valieva, as this column has pointed out time and again, was 15 years old when all of what happened went down.
In his keynote address Thursday to the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic assembly, Gene Sykes, the chair of the USOPC board, offered a few words about the role of U.S. athletes. A few minutes later, the USOPC bestowed its Jack Kelly Fair Play Award on Hunter Armstrong, an American swimmer.
The Olympic movement can often seem rough around the edges. It carries with it the attributes of a very big – a billion-dollar – business. The geopolitics of it all can be wearisome to many. Then there’s the doping, the corruption, the hard realities of living in a world often at odds with the aspirational ideals, the best of each and all of us, that the Olympics stands for.
It served then as a genuinely lovely reminder Thursday to listen first to Sykes, and then to Armstrong, to remember what’s at the core of the Olympics. Why it matters so very much in our broken and fragile world. Still.
