Bolt the "legend," and the joy of six

MONACO — Once again, here was a pack of journalists circled around Usain Bolt. Here came the familiar sorts of wacky questions: Was he interested in doing bobsled like the Jamaican “Cool Runnings” team that went to the 1988 Winter Games? (No.) Could he see himself playing NFL football? (No.) And more.

Bolt, the self-proclaimed "legend," has said — many times — that he intends to retire after the 2017 International Assn. of Athletics Federations world championships in London. If so, the clutch gathered Friday around Bolt at the Fairmont Hotel, in advance of the evening’s IAAF awards gala, where he would — for the sixth time — take home the trophy as best male athlete, was both familiar and melancholy.

Track and field has a storied history that stretches back into the dawn of time. Even so, it is quite possible there has never been anyone quite like Usain Bolt. As Seb Coe, the IAAF president, said at Friday night's awards shoe, referring to Bolt's third Olympic sprint triple in Rio this past summer, "Usain Bolt dazzled us with his brilliance once more."

For his part, Bolt said, "I live for moments when I walk into the stadium and there's a loud roar."

Will such brilliance -- will anyone quite like him -- pass this way ever again? Will that roar ever be the same? Can it, without Bolt?

“If you accomplish your goals, there’s no reason to stay around,” Bolt observed Friday. “You got what you wanted. Let’s move on.”

It has been Bolt’s destiny to stand as the upside of the sport in an era in which so much has gone bad — the sport beset by, in particular, chronic doping and staggering allegations of corruption within the prior generation of the sport's top international governance circles. Indeed, the IAAF is due Saturday to convene a special assembly at which Coe, elected IAAF president in 2015, is pushing a wide-ranging reform plan.

To be blunt, track and field needs that reform.

It also needs more joy. It needs more Bolt, and the way he plays to and with the crowd, almost all of whom invariably have come to see one guy, and one guy only: him.

Asked Friday night what his next act could be, he said maybe TV, adding with a smile, "I look good in a suit."

Or maybe the big screen. "I definitely think," he added, "that I would be a great action star. The next Jason Bourne.

"I'm not," he said, "a Bond guy," and the crowd ate it all up.

Too bad. Bolt in a re-make of "The World is Not Enough," the 1999 Bond flick? Can someone take a meeting?

In the meantime, there's track and field, at least for one more season. And then? When Bolt steps away, who -- if anyone -- can take over his role as the sport's leading man?

Maybe the South African Wayde van Niekerk, winner in Rio of the men’s 400 in a stupendous world-record 43.03 seconds, who has trained with Bolt and observed Friday, “We are all just people wanting to achieve a dream out there.”

This, in essence, is what Bolt — along with Michael Phelps — brought the world: the idea that you not only should but can dream big and that big dreams can become real.

There are similarities and parallels but, of course, distinct diversion in what they have done and what they stand for.

For one, as Bolt said Friday, he absolutely, positively will not retire and then un-retire, like Phelps. This even though Bolt has those nine Olympic golds,  and Carl Lewis has 10, nine gold and one silver, and would it really be all that hard for Bolt to take a little time off, then come back and run, say, the relays in Tokyo in 2020?

No way, Bolt said, declaring his longtime coach, Glen Mills, had warned him about just this sort of thing.

Mills, Bolt said, told him, “ ‘Do not retire and come back to the sport. Don’t ever do that. You have to make sure you’re [ready] to retire.’

“This is why,” Bolt said, “I’m taking it a year a time to make sure I’m ready when I’m ready,” adding, “For me, I think track and field is very difficult, you know what I mean? If you leave track, you put weight on, you pretty much do no running — to come back two years from that and compete, it’s not going to be the same.”

Phelps is living proof that hard work — super hard work, ragingly difficult — can make your dreams come true.

The difference between swimming and track, however, is elemental. For literally millions of people, swimming remains foreign. That is, they can’t swim. Often, they can’t possibly imagine how people move through water.

In contrast, virtually everyone has run. And so almost everyone on Planet Earth has felt at least a glimmer of what it must be like to be Bolt — to feel the wind on your face, the pain in your legs as you try for that top gear.

Bolt, though, doesn’t make it seem like work. He is emblematic of pure joy.

This was what the former International Olympic Committee president, Jacques Rogge, didn’t quite understand when Bolt burst onto the Olympic scene in Beijing in 2008, saying, "I understand the joy. He might have interpreted that in another way, but the way it was perceived was 'catch me if you can'. You don't do that. But he'll learn. He's still a young man."

Bolt turned 30 on August 21, the day before the close of the Rio Games.

There he gave us all more joy — not just the three golds, wrapping up that neat nine in all since Beijing, but the fantastic moment in which, during a men’s 200 semifinal, he and Canada's Andre de Grasse chatting and laughed it up as they crossed the finish line, just two dudes running faster than everyone else but looking for all the world like they were hanging out together at Starbucks.

And then the selfies with the fans -- all of whom were screaming like Usain was the 2016 version of John, Paul, George or Ringo.

Who in the sports world does that?

Bolt. Only Bolt.

“That’s who I am,” he said Friday afternoon, adding a moment later, “It’s just my personality. It just comes out. People really enjoy it. I can be myself.”

The thing is, Bolt, like Phelps, has worked like a dog to do what he has done. He acknowledged as much Friday in saying that he learned a hard lesson after the 2007 IAAF worlds in Osaka, Japan, where he was beaten by Tyson Gay. There he asked Mills what he had to do to get better. Get stronger, Mills said.

Let’s be candid here. Because of his outsize personality and super-big fun quotient, Bolt has largely gotten a free pass from much of the media, and the big world beyond, in regards to doping. If it were anyone else saying this Friday, alarm bells would go off, Mills telling Bolt as Bolt relayed the memory, “You’re slacking off at the gym. If you want to win you have to get stronger,” Bolt adding, that “from then on” he got after it. How, exactly?

Over the years that Bolt has been on top, Jamaica’s anti-doping protocols have been laughably weak. He has gotten hurt, a lot, and made quick recoveries. The sport has been riddled with doping, the men's sprints in particular, and yet Bolt is by significant measure better than everyone else.

All this is by way of observation, not -- to repeat for emphasis, not -- accusation. Bolt has, for the record, been strident in his remarks about the Americans Gay and Justin Gatlin, both of whom have done doping-related time off, even if he has been far more gentle in matters involving allegations around other Jamaicans.

At the same time, it’s also the case that time reveals all and it’s best — particularly in the case of super-human exploits — to be cautious.

Even if Bolt makes anyone reasonable jump up and go, wow — did you just see that?

With the exception of Bolt’s first world record breaker, a 9.72 in the 100 in New York in June 2008, it has been a great privilege to sit on press row for every one of Bolt’s records — indeed, all his Olympic and world championship moments.

For that matter, there was the quiet time spent with him in 2006, in and around Kingston, when Asafa Powell was the Jamaican sprint star and Bolt, barely 20, was the farthest thing from a big name. No pressure. Bolt played soccer with school kids. He goofed around. He readily agreed to pictures up in the hills. He was new to this whole interviewing thing, a game at which he has come to excel, revealing just as much as he wants and no more, when -- as was the case in London in 2012 -- he partied after one victory with three women from the Swedish handball team and was then asked at a news conference if he might be interested in meeting some of the Norwegian women's handball players. (Like, that's a question?)

At his peak, on the blue track at the 2009 IAAF worlds in Berlin, Bolt — 9.58 in the 100, 19.19 in the 200 — simply re-invented the limits of what human beings had thought possible. 

In Daegu, South Korea, at the 2011 IAAF worlds, Bolt was memorably disqualified for a false start in the 100. Since then, his races have followed a familiar pattern — a careful start, the long stride opening up and then thanks for coming, everyone, it’s over, let's get ready for the signature to-di-world pose. In the 100, Gatlin in recent years has proven a tough challenger over the first half of the race but Bolt just too strong over the final half. In the 200, there is no one — no one — who has ever run the curve better than Bolt.

For all these moments, perhaps the most iconic is the 100 at the Moscow at the 2013 IAAF worlds. At the precise instant Bolt crossed the finish line, a lightning bolt flashed in the sky outside Luzhniki Stadium.

Who does that happen to?

Bolt. Only Bolt.

With Bolt, the unthinkable has played out for the world to bear witness.

“Not to brag or anything but a lot of people at 30 have not accomplished everything I have accomplished,” Bolt said Friday, adding, “For me, I’m going to end my career at 31. That’s pretty good.”

Did he ever think, Bolt was asked, about being literally the fastest person on Planet Earth? In all of human history?

He laughed. Of course. Here came the joy, the fun, all of it that will be so absent when he steps off the stage:

“Not at that level,” he said.

“But I always make fun with my friends of such things. One thing I try to do is, if someone tries to run [away] from me," as if anyone could make like a cheetah, maybe, and get away from the one and only Usain Bolt, "I look at them weird — like, what are you doing?”

Track and field athletes can, and do, make money

In American track and field circles, there has for years endured a chronic amount of bitching about whether Olympic-caliber athletes can make a decent — if not better — living at the sport.

Much of the criticism, inevitably, gets directed at the national federation, USA Track & Field. And by extension, its chief executive, Max Siegel.

Preliminary figures made public Thursday shed considerable light on such criticism. The top-line, with a full breakdown below:

Combined, U.S. track and field athletes made at least $14 million in 2016. And 28 athletes made more than $100,000 apiece.

Importantly, those figures do not include shoe deals or appearance fees, the sport’s traditional money pots.

Of course, everyone is entitled to his or her opinion, even if all the whiners and complainers out there remain mired in yesteryear’s tiresome cycle of blame that typically seeks to advance personal agendas but, in truth, gets nobody anywhere. To emphasize: all constructive criticism, from anyone about anything, is always welcome. But: where are solutions? As Dwight Philips, chair of the USATF athletes’ advisory committee, put it in a rueful Nov. 23 post to his blog about missteps in professionalizing the sport, “We are constantly fighting internal battles that have prevented us from advancing this sport.”

Siegel, in line with his mandate, has been offering solutions since he took over five years ago.

Backing up: far too often, what Siegel and USATF do, and what they should be doing, is thoroughly misunderstood.

USATF is not in the business of charity. Nor does it underwrite “I work hard and I deserve to be helped” cases. If you have some talent, and lots and lots of people do, but at the same time you aren’t likely to compete for an Olympic medal, USATF is not likely to help. Nor should it. The federation has x in resource — x way up since 2012 because of Siegel along with chief operating officer Renee Washington and others — but is confronted with a, b, c all the way up to z and beyond in requests.

Entitled is one thing. Entitlement is, you know, another.

Start with the basics:

USATF’s primary mission is to win medals. This is also what the U.S. Olympic Committee demands. Upshot: The U.S. track and field team is winning medals. Bunches — starting with 32 in August at the Rio 2016 Games, the most at a non-boycotted Games since 1932.

U.S. women (Brianna Rollins, Nia Ali, Kristi Catlin) went 1-2-3 for a first-ever sweep in the 100 hurdles. Americans Tianna Bartoletta and Brittney Reese went 1-2 in the women’s long jump, Ryan Crouser and Joe Kovacs 1-2 in the men’s shot put. Matthew Centrowitz Jr. won the men’s 1500, the first American gold in the event since 1908. Paul Chelimo took silver in the 5,000, the first U.S. medal in the event since 1964.

Dalilah Muhammad won the first-ever gold by an American in the women’s 400m hurdles. Michelle Carter won the first-ever gold by an American in the women's shot put. Jenny Simpson's bronze was the first American medal in the women's 1500. Emma Coburn's bronze was the first American medal in the women's steeplechase.

Ashton Eaton reprised his 2012 London gold in the decathlon. So did Christian Taylor in the men’s triple jump. Allyson Felix left Rio with three more medals, bumping her up to nine over her Olympic career; in Rio, she became the most decorated woman in American track and field history.

At the 2016 IAAF world indoors in March in Portland, Oregon, the U.S. team won 23 medals. That tied a record.

At the 2016 IAAF world juniors in July in Bydgoszcz, Poland, the U.S. team won 21 medals. That tied a record. Of those 21, 11 were a meet-best gold. Kenya won five golds, nine overall; Ethiopia won four golds, 10 overall.

At the other end of the age spectrum: the 240-member Team USA won 168 medals at the recently concluded World Masters championships in Perth, Australia. California’s Irene Obera put on a Michael Phelps-like performance in the women’s-80 category. She won eight golds: 100, 200, 80-meter hurdles, 200-meter hurdles, long jump, heptathlon and the 4x100 and 4x400 relays. For good measure, she also won silver in the triple jump and bronze in the high jump. She turns 83 on Dec. 7.

Bottom line, part one: USATF is doing what is mandated to do.

Part two: the facts clearly demonstrate that America’s elite track and field athletes can do quite well financially.

In 2016, according to preliminary figures compiled by USATF and reported Thursday by Siegel in his state-of-the-sport speech, speaking at the federation’s annual meeting in Orlando, Fla., U.S. track and field athletes earned more than $14 million in publicly traceable sources of support.

To reiterate, because this is essential to understand in computing what a top-rank athlete really might have made in total: that figure does not — repeat, not — include personal shoe and sponsorship contracts, appearance fees and other private income.

So: not counting shoe deals and appearance fees, the precise figure in publicly traceable sources of support amounted to $14,053,538.

Breaking that down:

1. Athletes received nearly $7 million in cash from USATF program sources. The exact number: $6,998,604.

Here’s where that figure comes from:

— $2,610,050 in prize money at USATF championship events. This means the U.S. Olympic Trials, the U.S. indoor championships as well as road racing and cross-country championships.

— $1,855,004 from what’s called the “USATF elite athlete revenue distribution plan.” This is the program that gave $10,000 to every athlete taking part in the Rio 2016 Games along with money for medals.

— $1,923,250 in cash stipends. This comes through what’s known as the USATF Tier program.

— $610,300 in travel payments toward the indoors and the Trials.

If you are counting only cash generated through these programs, in 2016 one athlete got more than $100,000. Another 35, representing all event groups, were over $38,000. Further, 85 were over $25,000.

A broader breakdown of athlete income -- that is, cash and more -- can be found below.

2. Athletes got at least $4,445,004 from other publicly available revenue streams.

That means:

— published international prize money earned on the road and track

— Grants from the U.S. Olympic Committee’s “Operation Gold” program

— USATF Foundation grants

3. USATF support programs provided $2,609,930.

This includes U.S. Olympic Training Center programs, health insurance, sport performance workshops and other Tier programs.

For those not inclined to believe such support programs ought to count -- ask any of the Rio 2016 athletes, in particular the distance and middle distance runners, about the contributions of Robert Chapman, the USATF associate director of sports science and medicine. Siegel singled him out, and appropriately, in Thursday's address. The seven Rio medals won by Americans at distances 800 meters and up? Exceeded only in 1984 (nine), 1912 (eight), 1904 (eight).

Math: $6,998,604 + $4,445,004 + $2,609,930 = $14,053,538.

What did this mean for individual athletes? Here is that broader breakdown promised above:

In 2016, 28 athletes, 27 of them on the 2016 Rio team, made more than $100,000.

Siegel did not name names in his talk. But it's logical enough to reason out the exception: Keni Harrison, who would go on in July to set a world record 12.2 in the women’s 100 hurdles after finishing sixth in June at the Trials in Eugene.

In 2016, 111 athletes earned more than $38,000.

In 2016, 179 athletes were over $25,000.

Bottom line — 28 athletes made over $100,000, and for the third time, because when it comes to finances in track and field, this can’t be repeated enough: that does not include shoe deals or appearance fees, where traditionally the real money in the sport can be found.

“These numbers are preliminary but they are a start in an important process,” Siegel said Thursday.

This, too:

USATF membership now stands at 130,000. That makes for a 30 percent increase in paid memberships since 2011.

The national office, based in Indianapolis, is now paying for competition officials’ secondary insurance, including at non-USATF events. In English: this means professional liability insurance for those officials.

In 2016, USATF added four new sponsors: Chobani, Garden of Life, KT and NormaTec.

That means that since 2013 the federation has added 12 new business partners, Siegel saying Thursday, "I believe we’ve just scratched the surface as to where we can go. We have grown equity in the sports marketplace.”

Also Thursday, NBC announced what it called a "historic eight-year partnership" with USATF, 2017 through 2024, to televise at least 18 hours of track and field each year, eight on NBC itself.

If you know how to decode news releases, it's not just intriguing but essential to note this quote from NBC Olympics president Gary Zenkel, citing Siegel by name instead of just the federation generally: “We are pleased to continue our relationship on a long-term basis with USA Track & Field under of the leadership of Max Siegel.”

In answer to the ready critics:

1. Why is this deal hugely significant? Financial details were not immediately available. At the same time, understand that most Olympic sports pay instead of get paid. That is, U.S. Olympic sports federations must pay network production costs in exchange for air time -- just to be seen. Associated Press reported that the new NBC deal will greatly reduce USATF's costs, which have reached nearly $2 million annually.

2. Of course there are more than eight hours of NFL games on a single autumn Sunday. People, this is not the 1980s. Football is now king in so many ways. Track and field is taking steps. With Siegel, and the support of the USATF board, led now by Steve Miller, it is getting there -- again, in steps, not long jump-style leaps. To expect anything else is wholly unrealistic.

The federation is also, Siegel said Thursday, in talks for new agreements with, among others, the Penn Relays, National Black Marathoners Assn. and Running USA.

Further, in 2017 USATF will join up with the American Cancer Society in a bid to raise funds for cancer research and USATF Youth programs.

Next week is due to bring the formal announcement of a new partnership with YWCA USA to make the USATF “Run Jump Throw” program, in concert with Hershey, a part of what YWCA does around the nation.

“Partnership,” Siegel said, “is the key to the growth of any program and any organization.”

It’s a free country. Believe whatever you want. But — facts, please, especially when it comes to what’s really going on at USATF and in American track and field circles. There’s a lot of positive out there, for elite athletes in particular, and there's a lot of leadership, too, and in that context Vin Lananna was on Thursday elected USATF president, replacing Stephanie Hightower, who is now on the IAAF council. Both elements deserve to be acknowledged — as we all aim now toward Tokyo 2020 and the 2021 IAAF outdoor world championships, back in Eugene, the first-ever such IAAF worlds to be staged in these United States.

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.”

The Olympics and President-elect Donald J. Trump

A Romanian friend and I were talking the other day about the campaign for the 2024 Summer Olympics.

If Paris wins, he said, it will be a thoroughly French Olympics. But if it's Los Angeles — that, he said, would be an international Games with the potential to prove truly transformational for the Olympic movement in the 21st century.

Maybe Tuesday’s election of Donald J. Trump has changed everything.

Or maybe — actually, probably — it has changed nothing.

Take a deep breath. Things tend to work out.

Are there any guarantees? No. Promises? No. But that’s not the way life is. And, again, things tend to work out.

Did Trump say all kinds of rude, belittling and worse things during the campaign? Absolutely. Since his election, has he struck a more conciliatory, encompassing tone? For sure. On Thursday at the White House, he met with President Barack Obama, the president saying, “I want to emphasize to you, Mr. President-elect, that we are now going to want to do everything we can to help you succeed because if you succeed, then the country succeeds.”

The last time this sort of weirdness settled over a significant portion of the United States if not beyond, it was January 1981, and Ronald Reagan, a former movie star, was being inaugurated. We all lived through that. Indeed, Reagan was president during the 1984 Summer Games in LA, which all but saved the movement. How much did he personally have to do with those Games? Very little.

If you stop and pause for just a moment, it’s actually quite possible a Trump presidency could be good for the Los Angeles 2024 bid. The committee issued a statement Wednesday that congratulated the president-elect, noted the bid’s “strong bipartisan support at the local, state and federal level” and said it was looking forward to working with Trump to “deliver a ‘new games for a new era.’ “

OK, good PR move. Even so, the Olympics, and particularly the bid process, is all about connections. Here’s what that statement didn’t — couldn’t — say:

Angela Ruggiero, the U.S. women’s ice hockey star, is now chair of the International Olympic Committee’s athletes’ commission. She is also a former contestant on “The Apprentice,” the TV show that Trump starred in for years. Trump was so impressed with her that, afterward, he offered her a job.

So — now the IOC has a direct conduit to the president-elect of the United States. What more do you want?

IOC president Thomas Bach on Wednesday offered a brief statement to Associated Press that said, “Let me congratulate President-elect Trump on his victory and wish him all the best for his term in office for all the people of the United States and of the world.”

Would it have been “better” for the American 2024 effort if Hillary Clinton had prevailed in the electoral college as well as the popular vote?

To be sure, she was, in Olympic circles, something of a known quantity. She led the U.S. delegation to the 1994 Lillehammer Games. She and President Bill Clinton led the American side in Atlanta in 1996. When the 2012 Games campaign was going on, Hillary Clinton, then a senator from New York, traveled to the IOC session in Singapore to lobby for New York.

No disrespect intended whatsoever to Mrs. Clinton but New York got crushed and Atlanta is hardly remembered fondly in many senior Olympic circles.

At any rate, there’s little question that California wanted Hillary. The state went for Mrs. Clinton by roughly 2-1, 61 to 33 percent. The U.S. Olympic Committee turned to LA for 2024 for a variety of reasons — one of which is precisely that California is different, about as far away from Washington, D.C., another potential 2024 candidate, as possible. Far away -- literally and figuratively.

Reflecting on Trump’s election, Stanford political science professor Bruce Cain told the New York Times, referring to California, “We will go back into the mode that we were in during the Bush administration,” meaning George W. Bush, “which is we were the kind of the rebel state.”

We got through the Bush years, too, it should be pointed out. The American experiment did not collapse in on itself. For what it's worth, Bush is a huge proponent of the Olympics, traveling to Beijing in 2008 to watch Michael Phelps and the rest of the U.S. team after opening the 2002 Winter Games in Salt Lake City.

At any rate, who is the former governor of California? Arnold Schwarzenegger. We all lived through that, too.

Who is replacing Trump as host of the successor show “The Celebrity Apprentice,” his debut set for January 2017, just a few days before Trump is due to be inaugurated as president? Schwarzenegger.

People, the world turns in mysterious ways.

Here are some factors that remain immutable:

-- The United States is not Russia nor China, where the strong hand of the national government plays a key Olympic role.

— As the IOC well knows, western governments have a rude habit of change in the seven years between the time a city wins the Games and the opening ceremony. See, for instance, Brazil, the United Kingdom, Greece, Japan and others, including South Korea, site of the 2018 Winter Games, where hundreds of thousands are expected this weekend in the streets in protest against the current president.

And, for that matter, the United States.

Who knows whether Trump would even still be president in 2024?

— The recent demise of the Rome 2024 bid proves emphatically that the mayor — who killed off that bid despite national government and Olympic committee support — is more important in the Olympic bid process than anyone at the national level.

LA mayor Eric Garcetti is a rock star. Indeed, with Clinton’s defeat, a loss that simultaneously made plain how few young Democratic stars there are, Garcetti is uniquely positioned to assume an even more prominent profile.

What tends to win Olympic votes is connection and relationship. The USOC chairman, Larry Probst, and chief executive, Scott Blackmun, along with Ruggiero and longtime IOC member Anita DeFrantz have spent the past several years seeking just that. Along with, now, Garcetti and LA 24 bid leader Casey Wasserman.

For all this, if you were the bid committees in Paris and Budapest, the two remaining 2024 candidates, you might well be feeling suddenly frisky at the prospect of a Trump presidency.

To be super-American about this, and quote Lee Corso, the former American college football coach turned ESPN television personality: not so fast, my friend.

One way to interpret Tuesday’s result is that it makes for a rebuke of multiculturalism and globalization — the very things purportedly at the core of the Olympic soul. If that’s the way the IOC ends up looking at it, that’s going to be very tough for the LA effort. Or, simply put, if the members want to punish the United States for its choice of president -- see Bush 43 -- that's going to be tough, too.

Perhaps, though — “drain the swamp” and all that — it’s more a rejection of Washington and its elites, and by extension global elites. Look, there is no bunch more perceived as a bunch of global elites more than the IOC, a point proven repeatedly in recent months and years with western European rejection of bids in — deep breath — Munich, Hamburg, Stockholm, Oslo, Krakow, St. Moritz, Vienna and, now, Rome.

This is a matter about which the IOC ought to be paying rapt attention. Its increasingly urgent mandate: to remain relevant in our obviously changing world.

So American voters just elected a rhetoric-spewing avowed nationalist?

This bears all the signals of the second act in a global three-act play.

Act One: Brexit. To put an Olympic spin on it, the British vote to leave the European Union came in the aftermath of what many consider the finest Summer Games in recent memory, in London in 2012.

Two: Trump.

Three: next year’s presidential election in France. Would anyone be surprised if the third domino fell, with the candidacy of Marine Le Pen?

Her tweet Tuesday, even before all the votes had been counted stateside:

https://twitter.com/MLP_officiel/status/796235915387699200

Translation: “Congratulations to the new U.S. president Donald Trump and to the free American people.”

As for Hungary:

This past summer, Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán said, referring to Trump, that the ideas of the “upstanding American presidential candidate” and his opposition to “democracy export” could also apply in Europe. Orbán, who has ordered fences built at the Hungarian border in a bid to stop migrants, also said in July, “I am not Donald Trump’s campaigner,” adding, “I myself could not have drawn up better what Europe needs.”

Amid the Trump victory, here was Orbán on Facebook:

Then, speaking Thursday at a European conference, he echoed, “We are two days after the big bang and still alive. What a wonderful world. This also shows that democracy is creative and innovative.”

In even more-important news within the Olympic bubble, the government is due Jan. 1 to take over much of the authority of the Hungarian Olympic Committee. The IOC has long frowned on such intrusions in what it likes to call “autonomy,” meaning appropriate independence from government.

France is not Hungary. But with the French Olympic committee comes a big dose of French government. That's the way things are.

That’s the farthest thing from an issue in the United States. By 1978 law, Congress maintains USOC oversight. But the USOC must run and fund itself.

If all this makes anyone squirm about the rise of “populism” if not nationalism, if there is suddenly a tinge of forlorn regret for the Obama years, let’s have — once more — an Olympic reality check.

Copenhagen, 2009. The president is the new winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. He comes to Denmark to lobby for his hometown, Chicago, in the race for the 2016 Games. Chicago gets kicked to the curb in the first round, with fewer votes even than New York got four years before.

“… I think we’ve learned,” the president said in an interview published last month in New York magazine, “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.”

Coincidence or not: since then, it’s Obama’s Justice Department that has gone after FIFA and has opened a criminal investigation into allegations of state-sponsored Russian doping. Coincidence or not: Loretta Lynch, the former head of Justice’s Eastern District of New York, the office that is leading the charge, is now the attorney general of the United States. She reports to Obama.

It was Obama, recall, who opted to make a political statement in advance of the 2014 Sochi Games by sending a U.S. delegation that was to be headed by the tennis star Billie Jean King and two other athletes. King had to bow out of the opening ceremony delegation because of her mother’s death; she later made it to the closing ceremony.

In three years as IOC president, Bach has met with more than 100 heads of government and state. A notable exception: Obama.

Politicians come and go. That is a vivid lesson of Olympic history. The issue that matters is elemental: where is the best place for the Olympic movement to reimagine its future? That starts with 2024.

Ask your kids.

If you can get them away from their election chatter — and how it’s going to impact their lives, the very currency with the very audience the IOC is chasing — on Snapchat.

Snapchat — which of course is based in the hipster LA neighborhood of Venice Beach.

Race-based character assassination, and more

Anyone who has spent a number of years in journalism recognizes a story written with the full intent of being submitted at the end of the year, maybe as part of a package, to prize juries.

The question is whether the Washington Post story published Friday about USA Track & Field also gets recognized for what it further is: a story laced with implicit bias about the only federation in the U.S. Olympic scene with significant African-American leadership as well as one driven by source interviews animated by the same stupid, tiresome, fourth grade-style playground politics that have in years past all but destroyed USATF.

This story comes after the U.S. track team won 32 medals at the Rio Games, passing the long-targeted 30 mark. Max Siegel is the USATF chief executive. Did either of his two predecessors, Craig Masback or Doug Logan, both mentioned in the Post story, lead a team that got to 30? No. Is that mentioned? No.

Last month, the U.S. Olympic Committee acknowledged that it and the sports it leads are way behind the curve in the placement of women and minorities in key coaching and leadership positions. The exception: USATF. Siegel is African-American. So, too, chief operating officer Renee Washington. So, too, president Stephanie Hightower. Of the 15-member USATF board of directors, 10 are people of color.

Is any of that mentioned? No.

So what is? That Siegel flies business or first-class, or even on a private jet?

People, that’s what business executives do. Why is the black guy getting singled out for that?

Last October, Siegel opened his email to find not one but two vile emails loaded with threats and repeated use of the n-word. Is any of that mentioned? No.

If the point of the story is that Siegel is flying up front while American athletes are sitting in the back — uh, wait. Someone call USA Swimming and ask if the entire team — the entire team — flew to Rio on Mark Cuban’s private jet.

The journalistic jargon for the kind of story the Post published about USATF, and in particular Siegel, is a “takedown.”

The point is not just to try to win prizes but to embarrass Siegel in particular and, as well, because it’s the Washington Post, to get a story in front of Congress, which has oversight over the U.S. Olympic scene.

The problem with this particular effort is that there is, as the famous saying about Oakland goes, no there there.

And it is riddled with fairness issues.

Nowhere in the lengthy story — which runs to some 4,000 words, or roughly 100 copy inches — will one find the words “misconduct” or “wrongdoing.”

The headline itself is so telling: Siegel “has alarmed some insiders with his spending and style.”

What white executive gets called out in one of the country’s leading newspapers on account of his style?

As for the substance:

Just to pick one of the observations in the story about Siegel’s “travel habits,” as the story calls them:

At the world indoor championships in March in Portland, Siegel for sure stayed at The Nines hotel. So did the senior executives of track and field’s world governing body, the International Assn. of Athletics Federations. One of the basics of the USATF top guy’s job is to forge and to maintain a constructive working relationship with IAAF leaders. It’s entirely reasonable to stay at the same hotel.

At any rate, those “habits”? Approved by the USATF board of directors.

His compensation package, loaded with performance bonuses that pushed his package to $1.7 million? Same.

USATF competes for sponsorship dollars against the four primary major leagues and the roughly 30 teams in each league. So to suggest that Siegel’s compensation package should somehow be measured against a “typical non-profit” just misses the mark.

Siegel buys a laptop and the assertion is he did so to save — or somehow evade — all of $112 in sales taxes? One, it’s a work-related laptop so he’s saving USATF money. Second, this is so ticky-tack it’s hard to even know why it was deemed publishable. When was the last time a white chief executive was harassed over $112 in sales tax?

By the way — a guy who took in $1.7 million can’t afford $112? Come on. The double standard is outrageous.

The $500 million Nike deal with USATF that is due to generate $23.7 million in commissions over the length of the deal, through 2039? Like either is a bad thing? One, as the story itself notes, the commission amounts to less than five percent. Two, the story asserts that the role of the two guys getting the commission “has not previously been disclosed.” Except that in the next sentence it says that the 2014 USATF 990 tax form lists the payment.

Wait a minute.  A Form 990 is a public document. Just to be obvious — that means it has in every regard previously been disclosed. The document sits on the USATF website.

The insinuation that there’s something amiss because USATF has done work with Matchbook, a marketing company that once shared office space with Max Siegel Inc.? As Siegel wrote in a memorandum in August to the USATF board of directors, “I do not own a stake in Matchbook Creative, have never owned a stake in the company and do not financially profit from the vendor relationship.”

Meantime, the story is punctuated with quotes critical of Siegel’s leadership “style.” In the interest of fairness, and referring back to the headline about the purported “alarm” of “insiders”:

The juicy quote about “leadership” and “Marie Antoinette” that ends the first copy block comes from the California lawyer David Greifinger, the former USATF board counsel.

Does the story disclose that, as former board counsel, Greifinger would have every reason to want that job back? No. Does it disclose that Greifinger is playing an active role opposing USATF in ongoing litigation — a lawsuit brought by the federation against the 13 former members of its youth committee involving a dispute over meet-registration software? That Greifinger is representing the other side and would thus have ample incentive to be critical of Siegel? No.

Next:

The story asserts that the “office environment” at USATF is now “authoritarian and tense.”

That’s somehow newsworthy? Iron-fisted white executives typically get showered with praise for running a tight ship but the black guy somehow is “authoritarian and tense?” Absurd. It’s also not true. Check with Duffy Mahoney, the USATF director of high performance. Over his nearly 30-year USATF career, he has been through it all and seen it all, the Masback years, the Logan years and more; he loves working with both Washington and Siegel. Is Mahoney quoted in the story? No.

The story offers quotes from the former USATF accounting manager Melissa Bowlby. In one, she says Siegel and Washington have “just made [USATF] their playground.” As for her credibility — maybe someone ought to ask if there is anything the reasonable person might find interesting in her USATF personnel file.

Then there is the email exchange involving Siegel and Jon Drummond, identified in the story as “an influential retired athlete.”

At the time of the exchange, Drummond was chair of the USATF athletes’ committee. The story highlights, in the third paragraph, a snippet in which Siegel says he will “fuck anyone up that goes after me personally.”

The accompanying screenshot farther down does what the story does not — provide the context, in which Siegel also makes plain the difference between what’s business and what’s personal.

In a perfect world, should Siegel be sending those kinds of texts? No. That said, is the recipient someone likely to be offended? Drummond is himself no stranger to attention-getting devices — see his performance at the 2003 Paris world championships, lying down in protest on the track after a false-start call, a stunt that delayed competition for nearly an hour.

At any rate: the idea that someone might drop an f-bomb is hardly news.

This, however, is: Jon Drummond is serving an eight-year doping-related suspension involving the sprinter Tyson Gay that arguably wrecked Gay’s career.

That for sure cuts to Drummond’s credibility. Is that mentioned in the story? No.

Finally, there is this, which underscores the real point of what’s going on at USATF: the organization is changing, for the way better, and a bunch of people who are not ‘insiders” but are on the outside looking in are pissed off about it. So, in the style they know, they are leveraging the Post to pursue petty personal politics, just like in the old days, in the hope that they can for real be “insiders.”

If for some inexplicable reason Siegel were to go, the chief operating officer takes over. That’s Washington.

From the story — an email provided by a former retail and marketing manager in which Washington calls Jill Geer, the federation’s longtime communications director, a “bitch.”

Again: like that’s worth being in the newspaper?

Here’s a good guess about why it’s in the paper. Geer declined to make Siegel available for the story. The reporter couldn’t himself call Geer a bitch in print for that. But, voila — the email.

You know what that is? That’s bitchy.

You might say: to the max.

Rome 2024: it's about time

Maybe corruption is everywhere within and around the Olympic movement. Or maybe not. Maybe an Olympic Games is a financial boondoggle. Or maybe not.

The International Olympic Committee needs to better understand — and then confront — the perception, widely held around the world and particularly in its longstanding base in Europe, that the movement stands not for inspiration but distress. This is a huge problem. This problem is now playing out in the campaign for the 2024 Summer Games. Real life has revealed Agenda 2020, the IOC’s 2014 would-be reform program, for what it always was, mostly lip service. The institution needs big changes in the way in which it selects cities to stage the Games, in particular its franchise, the Summer Olympics.

The ugly implosion over the past few days of the Rome bid for 2024 underscores the seismic fractures.

Virginia Raggi, a 38-year-old lawyer, is Rome’s first female mayor. She was elected in June. Part of what carried her to office was no to the Olympics. So it can hardly be a surprise that this week she made that position formal.

The dig is that she wouldn’t even meet with sports officials before the news conference at which she described the bid as irresponsible. She kept them waiting for 35 minutes. They left. Then she showed up a half-hour late to that news conference, declaring, "In light of the data we have, these Olympics are not sustainable. They will bring only debt.”

In response, those officials, in a lengthy and bitter statement, couldn’t even bring themselves to utter her name.

The statement goes on at length in explaining why the bid team was “disappointed”:

That “prejudice and superficiality have won.” That “this same political force has transformed an extraordinary opportunity for youth and the city into an ideologically, politically and demagogically based decision, and that rather than taking action they have opted to do nothing.” That this “new political force” did “not want to take advantage of the opportunity to launch a significant project of urban redevelopment, as was the result of the 1960 Games in Rome.”

That “the rhetoric around wastefulness has won out over the new, important IOC regulations, created specifically to address waste and projects that are not beneficial for citizens and to involve other cities in the hosting of the Games.”

Italian Olympic Committee president Giovanni Malago further told reporters that Italy — Rome has now dropped out of two races in four years, for 2020 and 2024 — isn’t likely to bid for perhaps the next 20 years.

He also said during the week, “We’ve lost all credibility if we pull out. Because they’ll think people in Italy are not serious.”

Well, no. At least not about staging the Olympics. The Torino 2006 Winter Games were pretty much a logistical train wreck.

But that’s not the point.

The point is that Italy has long been an IOC member stronghold. And yet the “new, important regulations,” meaning Agenda 2020, couldn’t convince the mayor of Rome that an Olympic bid might be worth it.

And she is far from alone.

The underlying cause of the mayor’s concern amounts to the same thing that, to varying degrees, caused no fewer than five European cities to drop out of the 2022 Winter Games campaign, leaving only Beijing and Almaty, Kazakhstan. A sixth, Lviv, Ukraine, dropped out because of war.

It’s all about money and the perception that an Olympics costs way, way, way too much and amounts to way, way, way too much trouble.

The cost figure commonly associated with the 2014 Games in Sochi is $51 billion.

Rio 2016 ran way over budget. London 2012 ran way over budget. Tokyo in 2020 had to start over from scratch with the stadium because it started costing way too much.

Beijing in 2008 ran to a reported $40 billion.

In China, perhaps $40 billion against the national budget amounts to a rounding error. Maybe that’s why last summer the IOC opted for Beijing for 2022.

If money isn’t a problem in China, there’s this: snow. Like, there isn’t really any in the far-off mountains where the 2022 snow events are due to be held.

A system that produces this sort of process and result is irrational if not worse.

Agenda 2020 was supposed to be the answer, at least according to the IOC. And the 2024 race was due to mark the test of the 40-point reform plan.

In the bid context, Agenda 2020 was supposed to turn the tables. Instead of the IOC setting forth a list of demands, cities were supposed to come to the IOC with competing visions for what a Games could and should be.

The evidence clearly shows that politicians and voters understand that Agenda 2020 is not any sort of fix.

Boston opted out -- which at least paved the way for Los Angeles, what should have been the U.S. choice all along.

Hamburg, Germany? Out in a voter referendum.

Now Rome.

That’s three total, and two of the five formal candidates. Left standing, for now: LA, Paris and Budapest, and only the first two are widely viewed as serious contenders. Budapest may yet face a referendum.

And read again that Rome 2024 exit statement — with a focus, at least in significant part, on the idea of an Olympics as an “opportunity to launch a significant project of urban redevelopment.”

No.

The era of the Games as urban catalyst, launched in Barcelona in 1992, is done.

Again: done, finished, no mas.

The day after rejecting the 2024 Olympic bid, meanwhile, Raggi said Rome would be “honored” to help stage the Euro 2020 soccer tournament at Stadio Olimpico — which, it should be obvious, is on the ground. It was extensively rebuilt for the 1990 World Cup and was the site of that tournament’s final.

It’s curious that the lengthy bid committee's exit statement did not address two essential facts noted in the Associated Press report about the mayor’s decision: the Rome 2024 candidacy had been allotted a budget of $27 million and much of that had already been spent.

The IOC won’t make its 2024 decision until next September 13, and yet a bid has already blown through, say, $25 million?

That just highlights, again, the serious disconnect at issue.

To reiterate the premise launched in this space a few days back: the IOC needs to buy itself time to study the bid process from start to finish, with help from leading experts and the aim of making it workable and, more, appealing. This is, at the core, both a governance and PR problem.

The IOC still won’t let its members visit cities bidding for the Games, a result of the late 1990s Salt Lake City corruption scandal. It’s little wonder officials and voters in so many cities don’t trust the IOC when the IOC won’t even trust its own members.

Plus, there’s the FIFA scandal. The allegations of state-sponsored doping in Russia. And more.

The IOC needs time to address these challenges.

The logical way to buy that time is for the IOC to award the Games to Los Angeles in 2024 and Paris in 2028, and in that order.

Budapest is a lovely, lovely city. But it’s not what the IOC, and the Olympics, need right now.

What the Olympics need is a place where 95 percent or more of everything needed for a Games already exists. (Los Angeles, the bid committee this week announcing the intended use of more venues that are already on the ground.) Where the mayor, governor and federal authorities are on board. (Los Angeles.) Where polls show public support at nearly 90 percent. (Los Angeles, and it would be curious indeed to see the results of an independent survey of residents of the city of Paris — not a France poll and not an online survey.)

Where, moreover, the national Olympic committee and bid team have forged a real partnership. (The U.S. Olympic Committee and LA 2024 announced Friday they have come to agreement on the key issue of what’s called a joint marketing agreement. Fights over this agreement produced bid-threatening friction for the Chicago 2016 and New York 2012 efforts. “We talk repeatedly about a high-quality partnership this is, and this is a demonstration of the quality of the partnership,” USOC board chair Larry Probst said.)

California has 12 percent of the American population but accounts for 20 percent of the public companies on the major American markets, including Google, Facebook and Apple, a column in the New York Times reported this week. It’s zero wonder why the IOC president, Thomas Bach, made a visit earlier this year to Silicon Valley.

Because all these conditions are real, a Los Angeles organizing committee would be free to use the Games not as a catalyst for urban renewal. Appropriately, it could reimagine the Games for the 21st century.

There’s this, too, even if few want to acknowledge it in the public space. The IOC has over the past several cycles dismissed the first- and third-largest cities in the United States. LA is the second-biggest. You want to say no thanks to numbers 1, 2 and 3 and somehow expect the United States would come back for another try in 2028? The chances of that are — slim.

Paris is a lovely city as well, rich with Olympic history, and a 2024 Games there would mark the 100th anniversary of the 2024 Games.

But the IOC is not in the anniversary business.

It’s in the relevancy business. And it needs to go where conditions are ripe to sustain — better, advance — that relevance with young people.

LA for 2024, Paris for 2028. It’s about time.

What IOC should do: LA for 2024, Paris for 2028

The Rio 2016 Paralympic Games end Sunday. That’s the 18th of September.

Let’s see if by October 1 the Rome candidacy for the 2024 Summer Games is still alive.

It’s just now under a year — next September 13, at a general assembly in Lima, Peru — until the International Olympic Committee picks the 2024 winner. This can, and should, be a turning point for the Olympic movement.

The question is whether the IOC has the creativity, courage and conviction — basically, the cojones — to do what must be done.

The IOC ought to declare that the next two Games, 2024 and 2028, are going to Los Angeles and to Paris, and in that order, and then spend the next few years figuring out how to make this process work in and for the 21st century.

As it is now, the bid process needs fixing, and in significant ways.

The IOC is by nature traditional if not conservative. Even so, now — now — is the time for the IOC to be bold and brave, to be pro-active. The IOC needs to take back way more control over the thing that is at the core of what it does before events conspire, as they always do, to force institutions into panic and reaction mode.

Better, way better, to take that pressure out of the equation. And confront this:

A Games is supposed to be a celebration. The world has changed around the IOC and the IOC needs to figure out how to better offer its value proposition — one that focuses on celebration, inspiration and innovation.

Three candidates, and maybe two

Next Sept. 13, Los Angeles will be a viable candidate.

Paris, too.

Rome increasingly looks like it’s out. The mayor is on record, many times over, as saying the Games are not her priority.

The feeling is that the Italians are waiting to make an exit announcement simply out of respect for the Paralympics.

If Rome leaves, that would leave three cities.

Or maybe just two.

Budapest may now be facing a voter referendum.

Such ballot measures in Europe have consistently in recent years led to the abrupt end of bids.

A consistent sense is that the Rio Games made for an escape from disaster — as the president Thomas Bach put it in a speech delivered at the opening of the IOC session immediately before the Games, a “long and testing journey.” That is not a good sell to voters.

Nor is it a way to run a franchise — which is, make no mistake, what the Summer Games are to the IOC.

To be clear, this is not a knock on the Budapest bid team. They are a with-it bunch of people. Nor is it a knock on Budapest. It is a very cool city. The 2017 world judo championships will be there. The 2017 swim championships, too.

But the lesson of Athens and 2004 is that the Games make for a major test for a small country, and Hungary is a small country. The lesson of Rio, loud and clear, is that the Games have to stop being the impetus for a massive urban development project. A city has to be ready, with everything, or almost everything, set. From Day One.

Like, for instance, LA. Where 98 percent of stuff is already on the ground and polls consistently show ridiculously high support for the Games.

That way the IOC, and local organizers, can spend the seven years building not buildings but the Olympic spirit.

That spirit — the promotion of friendship, excellence and respect — is what the Olympic Games and the Olympic movement are supposed to be about. It’s the power of one-to-one change for the better in our fragile world, and how that spirit can amplify that very change in a city and country and, by extension, around the world.

That is what is missing when you spend seven years leading up to a Games worrying about construction deadlines and infrastructure budgets.

The real Rio 'legacy'

For emphasis, the Rio experience is likely to have long-lasting import within and on the IOC.

You can see how over and done the IOC is with Brazil, and the headaches that have attended 2016.

Consider things from the IOC perspective:

There essentially was no money; the IOC helped. It helped, too, by sending its top expert, the former Games director Gilbert Felli, to basically live in Brazil for two years to get the project across the finish line. So how do the Brazilians express their appreciation? By seeking to make Bach a witness in a ticket case involving a senior IOC member, Patrick Hickey of Ireland. Hickey says he’s innocent. Maybe he is. Or not. Whatever. Until he was detained in Rio, Hickey served on the IOC’s policy-making executive board. The Brazilian authorities, for whatever reason, have sought to make an example out of Hickey. He was dispatched, like the worst sort of criminal, to a maximum-security prison (without being convicted of a thing), then released to a version of home arrest. He can’t leave Brazil while the wheels of justice grind along.

To summarize:

After everything the IOC afforded Brazil just to get through this "long and testing journey" — time, money, expertise, patience — the payback is an IOC board member up against it and the locals making it such a big deal they want the IOC president himself to answer questions?

This in a county where politics and justice are, to be kind, a little wobbly? The former president of Brazil was just impeached. The president before her, the charismatic guy who cried with passion the day Brazil won the Games in 2009, is now facing criminal charges himself.

You wonder why — despite what he has said about being anywhere else for whatever reason — Bach didn’t attend the opening ceremony of the Paralympics? Don’t wonder.

Which leads to the easy question: looking ahead to 2024 and 2028, who in their right mind wouldn’t want something a whole lot easier?

The signals have been there since the 2022 race

The race for the 2022 Winter Games made it abundantly clear that the bid process is flawed if not irretrievably broken.

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

By the end, IOC had only two left: Beijing, where there’s virtually no snow in the far-off mountains, and Almaty, Kazakhstan. The members, in a vote last summer, went for Beijing.

Once more: a Games cannot be primarily a catalyst for urban improvements. That’s the notion the 1992 Barcelona Games ushered in, and when mayors, governors and prime ministers saw how the Games transformed Barcelona, they all wanted a piece for themselves of that 1992 magic.

That model, as the 2022 and 2024 races underscore, is no longer attractive. For sure, Rio has better transport now than before. But nobody goes into a seventh-grade classroom and says, do you want to know why the Olympics are so great? Because you can ride the bus!

So:

Los Angeles and Paris, and in that order.

Doubtlessly there would be sentiment to award 2024 to Paris because it would be the 100th anniversary of the 1924 Paris Games.

Appropriately, however, anniversaries count for little to nothing. See Atlanta in 1996 (Athens 1896, tried for 1996). And not that security isn’t a real issue everywhere but going to France for the nearer future would only invite screaming headlines for seven years about terrorism instead of, again, inspiration and celebration.

LA and Budapest are the only two cities that over the past several months have been telling a legitimate story. Here’s one way you know: LA’s tagline is “follow the sun.” On Twitter, a Paris consultant has been posting pictures of sunrises and sunsets from around the world accompanied by the hashtag #CelebratetheSun. One even shows the sun in Brazil and observes “it’s everywhere!”

Wow! Really?! Imitation, flattery, all that. But not exactly original.

And the Olympic movement, right now, needs original thinking.

Just to get this out of the way: Yes, live in Los Angeles. No, I am not working for the bid committee. I have covered every single IOC election since 1999. Maybe I have observed and even learned a few things along the way.

Big changes, literally and figuratively

Once 2024 and 2028 were settled, that would give the gift of time. Then the IOC and, as well, governance experts can think about how to reform the process to get good if not great options for the rest of this 21st century.

Again, the time is now. The IOC is staring at three successive Games in Asia — Pyeongchang in 2018, Tokyo 2020, Beijing 2022.  And as NBC’s depressed Rio ratings make clear, big changes in the way people view the Olympics — literally and figuratively — are emerging.

It’s not, by the way, that viewers don’t want live sports. NFL and college football ratings in the United States are still insane. Just to take one example: the overnight number for the New York Giants-Dallas Cowboys game this past Sunday on Fox, a game shown to 90 percent of the country, hit a 16.9. Compare that to the 2015 Giants-Cowboys game, shown to 100 percent of the United States on NBC: 16.7.

Summary: shown to fewer viewers and yet more people tuned in.

The Olympics are not, however, football. And the Usain Bolt and Michael Phelps years are just now, at least purportedly, coming to a close.

This is why, for instance, the Olympic Channel is now up and running online.

That’s an excellent first step. Still, the IOC needs to do more.

The IOC needs to get in way better touch with the technology that is an intuitive part of the youth audience it is trying to reach. That’s why Bach made a tour last year of Silicon Valley’s leading companies.

In that same speech to the members on the opening of the IOC session in Rio, Bach confessed that on that Silicon Valley trip, he was introduced to Vine, the six-second video-sharing app. Before that moment, he had no idea what it was. “Skeptical” at first, he said, he was “converted in about six and a half seconds” after seeing the “fantastic images and emotions,” adding that Vine “completely captures the magic of the digital world.”

Bach is only 62 years old. It’s cool that he doesn’t do skateboarding tricks himself for his squad on Vine. But it’s inexcusable that, as the chief executive of an entity whose mission is connecting with the world’s young people, he had to be virtually smacked upside the head to get to know an app that is central to mainstream youth culture.

Same goes for the bid process. Rio is that smack upside the head. Let’s focus on those “fantastic images and emotions,” and on putting the “magic of the digital world” front and center — that is, inspiration and celebration.

LA for ’24, Paris for ’28. In combo, that would make for a big, and appropriate, first step.

The 'Fancy Bear' bid to stir up chaos

Within hours after the release by Russian hackers of U.S. athletes’ doping results, Victor Conte, the Bay-Area based figure at the center of the BALCO scandal, a guy who knows what’s what when it comes to the doping scene, sent out a note Tuesday to a wide email circle. It said, in part, “This is gonna get ugly.” Gonna get ugly?! This is ugly from the get-go. And it’s likely to stay ugly for the foreseeable future.

This hack operates on a staggering number of levels. There are so many threads to pull: here, there, seemingly everywhere. The whole thing is designed not just to stir public opinion but to stir up nothing less than chaos in world sport and, perhaps, more — to agitate and antagonize governments in public as well as private diplomacy.

The basics:

Following World Anti-Doping Agency reports over the past several months that asserted widespread and state-sponsored doping in Russia, about a third of the Russian Olympic delegation, including virtually the entire track and field team, and the entire Russian Paralympic squad ended up banned from Rio 2016. The Paralympics are still ongoing.

On Tuesday, WADA confirmed that its database had been breached. At issue: confidential medical records of athletes who took part in last month’s Rio Olympics.

WADA further said that hackers gained access via an International Olympic Committee-created account.

The perpetrators, accordng to WADA: Fancy Bear, a Russian entity suspected as well of breaching the Democratic National Committee’s computers.

On Monday, Fancy Bear released information on four American athletes: the gymnast Simone Biles, basketball standout Elena Delle Donne and the tennis stars Serena and Venus Williams.

The documents show that each of the four had permission to take prescription drugs. In some cases, those drugs were used during the Games.

Some of the drugs contained banned substances.

But nobody is facing a doping case.

The reason: the anti-doping rules specifically say that there can be exceptions for certain medicines. Athletes can use a variety of stuff that might otherwise lead to a positive test if, one, they get a doctor’s note and, two, they file the appropriate paperwork.

That paperwork is called, in the jargon, a “therapeutic use exemption.”

To emphasize: there is no suggestion that any of the four have done anything wrong.

U.S. officials have linked Fancy Bear to GRU, the Russian military intelligence agency. For what it’s worth, the Russian government said Tuesday it had no connection to Fancy Bear.

This is the backdrop. From there, the super-obvious starting place:

Within Russia if not elsewhere, many will be tempted to draw the conclusion that the Americans, who won the Olympic medals count in Rio going away, are doping.

It is already widely believed that considerable numbers of U.S. athletes take advantage of TUE exemptions.

To stress: obtaining a TUE is within the rules.

It is also the case that, as in many things, perception is as important than reality, if not more so. Indeed, a Fancy Bear statement declares that U.S. athletes “got their licenses for doping.”

Next:

Tension is high between the IOC and WADA over the Russians. This is sure to add to that. To reiterate: the hack came through an IOC-created account. If you want to appreciate the delicious irony there, or maybe the hackers’ knowing instigation, go right ahead — a WADA hack through an IOC account. Who to blame, and for what?

There’s this:

Legally, do any of the four athletes, American citizens all, have recourse in the U.S. or Canadian court systems (WADA is based in Montreal) for money damages now that private medical records have been breached? Who is responsible for not safeguarding the sort of records that everyone knows — if you have ever been to even one American doctor’s office — is supposed to be private? For this sort of breach, what might be an appropriate remedy?

Then there another super-obvious follow-on:

Every single sports federation and national Olympic committee anywhere and everywhere in the world ought to be wondering: is my data safe?

Then there is the timing:

In mid-August, details emerged about the hack of Russian athlete and whistleblower Yulia Stepanova.

Next week WADA plans a post-Rio “think tank” to explore how it is the anti-doping campaign got into this crack, as well as others. Fancy Bear: “We will also disclose exclusive information about other national Olympic teams later.”

But, to start, there’s the central fact: these are Americans.

So why these four? Could it have anything to do with the fact that three are African-American while Delle Donne earlier this month disclosed she is gay and engaged to be married? Maybe these facts mean nothing. Or maybe it's naive to pretend otherwise.

Biles, moreover, carried the U.S. flag in the Rio Olympic closing ceremony.

The Williams sisters? When Maria Sharapova, the Russian tennis star, who carried the Russian flag into the London 2012 opening ceremony, is in the midst of a two-year ban for meldonium?

Sharapova’s appeal is due to be decided in early October. And WADA has walked back the rules in a number of other meldonium cases because of uncertainty over how long the stuff, which is made in Latvia and is designed to help patients with certain heart-related issues, stays in the body.

Biles acknowledged after the leak that she takes Ritalin or its equivalent for ADHD. It is "nothing to be ashamed of,” she said in a tweet.

https://twitter.com/Simone_Biles/status/775785767855611905

At the same time, it would be a huge surprise if hackers didn’t intend for a parallel to be drawn — and, importantly, distinctions, too — between her and U.S. sprinter Justin Gatlin.

Gatlin has — unfairly — been made into the poster guy for U.S. Olympic scene doping. Truth: he is far more a victim of circumstance.

So: Biles takes Ritalin (or, again, its equivalent). Gatlin took Adderall for ADD. It’s naive once more to pretend someone looking for connection would not see something there.

At the same time:

She gets nothing. He got a year. Why the difference? How can any sort of “fair” system allow such discrepancies? Returning to the Sharapova matter and meldonium: same question.

This is not just about American athletes, meanwhile. It’s about the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, too.

USADA chief executive Tygart, who is a very smart guy, has arguably made himself over the course of this year into the loudest and longest voice for an outright Russian ban.

This would thus seem to be as much about an attempt to embarrass Tygart as it is the four athletes.

In a statement, Tygart said, “It’s unthinkable that in the Olympic movement, hackers would illegally obtain confidential medical information in an attempt to smear athletes to make it look as if they have done something wrong.”

Please. It’s not unthinkable. If revenge is a thing, it’s totally rational if not foreseeable.

Finally, this, and this is where you have to really wonder how this is going to end up.

If none of this had come to pass, if WADA had been left alone, WADA — this is the dead-bang truth — can help the Russians.

In the context of getting back onto the track, for instance: what do the Russians want if not need? Answer: to get complaint again with all the rules so that Russian athletes can compete normally.

For its part, WADA wants, maybe even needs, to get the Russians compliant. And as soon as possible.

The tough sell is getting the rest of the world to believe the Russians are compliant.

That just got a lot, lot tougher.

Lochte gets 10 months: big whoop

Ryan Lochte gets a 10-month suspension. To share the insight offered by a teen observer: big whoop.

You know who the big winner here is? Ryan Lochte.

That conclusion is as undeniable as it is undesirable. It is also, despite the best intentions of Olympic and swim officials, the most profoundly disappointing part of this entire episode — all of it, from start to finish.

From Ryan Lochte’s perspective, it was all about Ryan Lochte on that boozy night in Rio. For the next week, it was all about Ryan Lochte instead of the scores of other athletes, American and otherwise, chasing their own Olympic dreams in Brazil.

Even since then, too. Since being back in the States from Rio, there have been only two main questions — one, how was it and, two, what about Ryan Lochte?

On Wednesday night, in the hours after TMZ broke the story of the 10-month suspension, it was still all about Lochte — instead of the athletes on U.S. Paralympic team or the Paralympic opening ceremony back in Rio.

And it was all about Lochte on Thursday, when the U.S. Olympic Committee and USA Swimming formally announced the sanction. The USA Today headline: “Lochte’s Brazil gas station pals also suspended.”

Dude seriously could not have scripted this any better in advance of being on “Dancing with the Stars.”

Think about this:

In Rio, Lochte put the USOC and USA Swimming between a rock and a hard place. Then he did the exact same thing this week — those sports officials caught between wanting to impose sanction and the deadline of wanting to make that sanction public before next Monday’s season premiere of DWTS.

For that matter, the USOC and USA Swimming were in the same sort of rock-and-hard place dilemma in making it plain Lochte and the three others — Jimmy Feigen, Gunnar Bentz and Jack Conger — had to be expecting a formal response. In embarrassing themselves, they also embarrassed the USOC and USA Swimming. So something had to be done. But what should that something be, and to what purpose?

Lochte also loses $100,000 in medal bonus money. That’s inconsequential in comparison to the four sponsors who have dropped him. But another has already said it intends to pick him up so he is clearly the farthest thing from radioactive.

The other three got four months away from the U.S. national team. Big whoop.

Bentz is back in college at Georgia. Conger is at Texas. They still can swim for their college teams.

Lochte has to do 20 hours of community service, Bentz 10 for violating the Olympic Village curfew rules for athletes under 21. As swimming’s world governing body, FINA, pointed out, the International Olympic Committee insisted on a community service element.

Bottom line:

It’s all profoundly disturbing.

Lochte is not a bad guy. Indeed, he can be a very good guy — always willing to sign autographs, especially for kids. He is personable. He can be very likable.

On the theory that everyone has to navigate his or her own path in this life, let’s be honest: there have to be moments when it can’t be easy being Ryan Lochte, with 12 Olympic medals, when Michael Phelps has 28.

Even so, there is so much that remains so troubling.

In late June, GQ magazine published a feature entitled “The De-Broing of Ryan Lochte,” in which he avowed that the 2016 version of himself that would be on display in Rio would be “more mature.”

After Rio, this from Lochte in People magazine:

“I made things up. I didn’t tell the truth.  And that’s on me. I messed up and made a big mistake, and I’m sorry.”

Even if you want to believe him — and there is, again, a lot of good in Lochte — it’s wholly unclear that he gets it.

To be clear: that is not a referendum on Lochte’s intelligence. He is not dumb. Really, he is not.

“I’ve been thinking about it a lot, because I have a big heart, and I feel like [I] let down a lot of people,” he also told the magazine. “I feel bad that I have let people down.”

All good. Except for what he said next:

“It sucks that it was one of the main focuses of the Olympics. That’s what stinks. The media blew it up and talked about it. It got out of control, and this was all anyone could talk about.”

The media blew it up? Hello?

“Everyone started watching it and they didn’t watch the athletes. That’s another reason why I’m so hurt by it, because it took away from the Games.”

Ryan Lochte is hurting?

Where is the responsibility and accountability?

That whole actions-matter-more-than-words thing, you know.

The straight line from peeing on a gas station wall to lying about it to abandoning your teammates to deal for themselves with the consequences to being featured on one of America’s most popular television shows makes for a discordant message — a bad, very bad disconnect — when it comes to the values the Olympic movement, the USOC and USA Swimming purport to stand for.

Here was Lochte, in Rio, before the partying but after his last race, fifth in the 200-meter IM, off the podium:

“In life, in swimming, in sports, there are always ups and downs. It is what you do when you have those downs who make you what you are.”

Actions, words, etc.

It’s not that Lochte is going on DWTS. It’s that he’s going now — without taking a hard look at who he is and, in particular, the role alcohol plays in his decision-making.

At 32, he knows the bro thing comes with a sell-by date. But talking about it is one thing and acting like the mature role model he should be apparently another. The question he has yet to examine, and far away from the spotlight: why is he saying one thing and doing another?

For the sake of discussion, which requires in this context putting aside for a moment the peeing and the lying — it’s also a fair question to ask whether Lochte should have stuck around Rio. That is, should he have left Brazil when he did?

Should he, in essence, have kept to his regularly scheduled programming?

Or is the idea of “justice” in Brazil so fundamentally different that he did the right thing by getting out of dodge?

Here’s what Lochte should have done:

The moment Conger and Bentz were dragged off a plane, that is the instant Lochte should have called the USOC and USA Swimming and asked, what can or should I do?

Did he?

Looking at this from another angle:

Lochte didn’t hurt anyone. When Phelps was arrested for driving under the influence, it was because he was deemed a menace to the public health. So: why is Lochte getting more?

Because this is apples and oranges. Luckily, Phelps didn’t hurt anyone. And what’s at issue here is reputation and credibility — for Lochte, the USOC and USA Swimming.

In a statement sent to USA Today, Lochte’s lawyer, Jeff Ostrow, said, “We accept the decision as [we] believe it is in everyone’s best interest to move forward, adding in the next paragraph, “That said, in my oinion, while the collective sanctions appear to be harsh when considering what actually happened that day — Ryan did not commit a crime, he did not put the public safety at risk and he did not cheat in his sport — we will leave it to others to evaluate the appropriateness of the penalties.”

That sort of thing is called advocating for your client.

Back to reality: Phelps got six months. U.S. soccer goalie Hope Solo got six months, too. So six was a starting place for Lochte.

And yet — 10 months away from competition won’t achieve anything, practically speaking.

Frankly, it’s laughable.

Yes, it’s 10 months, ending in June 2017, with a plus — just the way Phelps had to stay away from the 2015 world championships in Kazan, Russia, Lochte will now be ineligible for the 2017 worlds in Budapest next July.

So what?

The 10 months is time Lochte would have taken off, anyway.

He was never going to be serious about 2017. In Rio, after that 200 IM, he said:

“It has been a long journey. I think now it is time for me to take a break, mentally and physically, to just get myself back to when I was a little kid having fun again. i can’t say this is my last time swimming. So we will see what happens.”

For two, as the Wall Street Journal reported in a story midway through the Rio Games, Phelps’ lengthy post-London break may now well serve as a template for others, especially older athletes such as Lochte, who is now 32. Why grind away for four solid years when, as Phelps proved conclusively, you can train less — push for maybe 18 months — and still win bunches of medals? For his part, Phelps turned 31 in late June.

For three, in keeping Phelps away from the 2015 Kazan worlds, USA Swimming could not have been any more clear about how it views what is purportedly the marquee event on the FINA calendar in odd-numbered years. Same for Lochte and 2017 in Budapest.

A note: Lochte will now lose out on the chance to win a fifth straight 200 IM worlds gold. Same theme: so what? He already has four, and fifth at the 2016 Olympics hardly makes him the odds-on 2017 favorite.

For four, and this is a nugget that swim geeks would understand immediately but takes just a few words of explanation for a wider audience:

Leaving U.S. college racing aside, because it is measured in yards, there are two kinds of racing at the world-class level, both in meters: long-course events, such as the Olympics or the (2017 Budapest) worlds, which take part in a 50-meter pool, and short-course, over a 25-meter set-up.

Lochte has for years been one of the few U.S. swimmers to excel at both, a mainstay of the U.S. short-course team.

Anytime Lochte wants, he can start racing short-course to get himself back up to speed. So it’s way off the mark, as some might suggest, that Lochte’s career is at a dead-end for two or maybe even three years, until the 2019 long-course worlds, now set for Gwangju, South Korea.

At the DWTS “cast reveal” party this week in New York, Lochte also told People, “I’m excited for, not only myself, but everyone else to forget about what happened and to move forward. I think that’s what the biggest thing is — what we’re gonna do is just move forward and show off my dancing skills.”

Just — so troubling. All around.

Recalibrating the apocalypse narrative

From the Department of the Obvious: many if not most pre-Games reports of the 2016 Rio Olympics bore the tone of prophecies signaling the Biblical end of days.

From the same department: this did not happen.

It is now a week since the 2016 Games came to a close. Thus the logical follow-up question: why, before the August 5 opening ceremony, did Rio produce so many projections if not outright declarations of imminent doom?

And the corollary: going forward, isn’t it worth serious reflection and reconsideration from the many who predicted the sky would fall — not just about what they produced but about the role and value of the Olympics in our fragile world.

To be clear, the Olympics do not represent, nor have they ever, an exercise in perfection. That is not possible nor even in the least bit desirable. What the Olympics stand for is an appeal to our better selves and the notion of certain ideals, in particular friendship, excellence and respect.

To be even more clear, the Olympic movement is itself full of imperfections. This is natural. We are all human, and we are flawed. All the more so the International Olympic Committee.

Yet a Games produces a moment — 17 days, really — when athletes from all over the world, young people in the main, gather and don’t kill each other. This is not meant to be glib. The timeline of human history is replete with conflict over connection. The Olympics provide a way and a means for all of us to explore the things we have in common rather than exploiting our differences.

This is a unique thing in the annals of the human experience. It is worth celebrating.

And yet.

The IOC for sure can, and should, do a better job both of acknowledging its shortcomings and of explaining the constructive things it does, and why. Bid committees, and the follow-on organizing committees, absolutely can and should be held accountable when they over-promise and under-deliver -- see, for instance, the Rio 2016 bid's assertion that it would clean up the local bays and beaches.

Of course, it's news -- appropriately so -- when the oceanfront bike path in Rio collapsed because of high surf, killing two people.

In that spirit, it's also more than legitimate to observe that infrastructure projects in Rio, and in other recent Games cities, were either designed to or in practice have benefitted primarily the affluent. Too, Olympic-related projects have often seen the authorities push people out of their homes. Here is a key example where bid and organizing committees -- pushed by the IOC -- ought to be on the hook from the get-go, required to state in bidding documents what, if any, relocations will be required to deliver promised construction.

For all that:

No one likes criticism, least of all my colleagues, friends and otherwise in the media.

But — to the collective you:

Your scare stories were absurd. Your level of expectation: ridiculous. Your predictions of far-reaching calamity: 100 percent wrong.

The developed world’s assessment and pre-Games judgment of developing Brazil smacked, in many instances, of smug privilege if not the very worst strands of colonialism and imperialism. Why expect Rio to be London or Vancouver?

Social media amplified the predictions of catastrophe. A threat on Reddit was dedicated to the “Apocalympics.”

Consider the Zika thing — which, among other consequences, purportedly led to the withdrawal of many top male golfers from golf’s debut at the Olympics.

The World Health Organization said last Thursday that no one appears to have caught Zika at the Games. That means, according to WHO, “spectators, athletes or anyone associated with the Olympics.”

To be even more direct — not one worker at the Rio golf grounds.

Yet the world’s top guy pros wouldn't or couldn’t go?

Hello, everybody — when did it dawn on you that August in Brazil is like February in the northern hemisphere and the mosquito populations in Rio would be way, way down? I was in Rio from July 28 through August 22 and literally did not see, hear or feel even one mosquito.

For that matter — what of the onset of the virus in Puerto Rico? Or South Florida?

As an entirely reasonable pre-Games CBC story pointed out, there was entirely more risk in Rio from street crime, getting hit by a bus or developing a sexually transmitted disease than from Zika.

Translation: life. Like being out and about in any big city anywhere.

Would you know that from the hysteria level of the reportage?

Which leads, in a direct line, to this kind of abject stupidity from the likes of U.S. women’s soccer team goalie Hope Solo:

Not sharing this!!! Get your own! #zikaproof #RoadToRio

A photo posted by Hope Solo (@hopesolo) on Jul 21, 2016 at 7:57pm PDT

To be clear, accounts of this challenge or that attending an edition of the Olympic Games have been a constant for more than a century. So that’s hardly new.

Twelve years ago, things before the Athens Olympics were in such a state of unease — the first post-9/11 Summer Games — that the Los Angeles Times, where I was then a staff writer, ordered us all to undergo gas-mask and terrorism-response training before flying to Greece.

As if journalists were suddenly going to become first-responders.

Even by Athens standards, however, what was new this time was both the depth and the breadth of it all — the sustained ferocity of the pack and its collective narrative.

Many people don't like change and, by extension, anything new. These were the first-ever Games in South America. A therapist might say these Games represented a variation on the classic "other" -- a source of concern, if not fear, since the dawn of time.

As Oliver Holt of the British outlet Mail on Sunday (his reporting was thoroughly reasonable throughout) observed in a Twitter post:

https://twitter.com/OllieHolt22/status/764523895777009664

Consider the 90-minute HBO “Real Sports” evisceration of the IOC.

Here was the opening sentence of an early July opinion piece in the New York Times:

“It’s official: The Olympic Games in Rio are an unnatural disaster.”

Here was, as the promo blurb for his new book about the Olympics called him, “the renowned sportswriter” David Goldblatt, on July 26 in the Guardian:

“In the face of such multiple disasters and injustices, history seems to offer Rio wriggle room. It can claim that Athens was more last minute and produced more white elephants, Sochi was as least as corrupt and wasteful, Beijing was more repressive, Seoul’s displacements were more widespread and viscous and Atlanta’s social cleansing more thorough. However, Rio is giving all of them a run for their money and adding its own unique injustices and shameful dissembling.”

Here was a history professor in the July 19 issue of Time magazine:

“The Rio Games will be a failure, no matter how successful they might be in terms of athletic accomplishment and spectator enjoyment, because our global sense of an international order has failed. It is a divided, distracted and even defeated international community that is slouching towards Rio.”

Do the Olympics deserve scrutiny? For sure. And for emphasis: journalistic responsibility and holding accountable those in positions of authority is wholly appropriate.

But — what’s also appropriate in the big picture is a more appropriate measure, please, of balance and perspective.

The New York Times' Chris Clarey, in a column published last Friday, summed up aptly:

"Rio deserved a more balanced, less hysterical prologue, just as it deserves a more balanced, less triumphal epilogue."

Is it realistic to expect an Olympic Games to solve every social problem in successive cities? Not in the slightest. The better question: why is that the question in the first instance?

A fair judgment on any Olympics takes 20 years. Look at Barcelona before 1992, and now. The place is totally transformed.

Athens has a ways to go before history can be in any way fair in rendering a verdict on those 2004 Games. Are there sports facilities that are just sitting now in the sun? For sure. At the same time, did the Games bring a new airport and new metro lines — and have they enhanced life, generally speaking?

Same in Rio. New transport lines. New waterfront park makeover. As the New York Times observed in a story published last Sunday, Rio "is altered if not reborn."

In the meantime, it's a real question why the ladies and gentlemen of the press, who are free with criticism when it's someone else,  don’t do the one thing they ask of the people they cover — that is, to be consistent.

Examples:

How many stories were produced before the Sochi 2014 Games about Russia’s anti-gay propaganda law? And after?

How many reports were published before the Beijing 2008 Games about China’s human rights record? And after?

The good news about Rio is not just that disaster was, in fact, averted. It’s not even that a whole bunch of people wrote “gee, I guess that was OK” stories upon their Rio departures.

It’s that Rio has confirmed for increasing numbers within the IOC the realization, after 30 years of the Games as catalyst for wholesale public-policy makeovers, that it really is in a different game. It’s not in the infrastructure business. It’s in the inspiration business.

The consequence: the IOC needs — not should, but needs — to go for the 2024 Games to a city where the sports venues, the transport, the overall logistic package already exist. Essentially, this means either Paris or Los Angeles. Rome and Budapest are also in the race. The IOC will pick next September.

The IOC is recalibrating.

Time for the press to do the same.