No-brainer: only way to make Agenda 2020 real

From the Department of Olympic Smack Talk, and you would think that International Olympic Committee president Thomas Bach’s much-vaunted Agenda 2020 40-point purported reform plan would have taken care of this kind of thing:

Tony Estanguet, the co-president of the Paris 2024 bid, was giving an interview to the Reuters correspondent Julien Pretot in mid-December when the topic turned to politics, French and American.

“We are supported by the city,” meaning officials in the municipality of Paris itself, “the region and the state, who are not on the same political side,” Estanguet said, and no problem with any of that.

“We’ve met several candidates,” a reference to the forthcoming French presidential elections, “and we have the feeling that they all support the bid.” Also no problem. But, then: “There is stability, which may not be the case for Los Angeles, who have a municipal election,” scheduled for, as it turns out, March 7, meaning Tuesday.

Dude. Seriously.

There wasn’t a cloud in the sky Monday in Southern California ahead of Tuesday’s balloting, at which LA mayor Eric Garcetti is widely expected either to be re-elected outright or put in solid position to do so at the May 16 general election. Everything seemed pretty, you know, stable. Even the usually crabby LA Times said a few weeks ago in a piece on the mayor that the city is in the midst of a “renaissance” and in a separate endorsement offered this: “Garcetti is the best — really, the only — choice on the ballot.” Garcetti faces 10 opponents — one nicknamed “Zuma Dog,” another nicknamed “Pinky,” typical LA, typical California — so it’s unclear whether the mayor avoids the May runoff simply because a ballot with that many people is a ballot with that many people.

At any rate: you wonder why Agenda 2020 is in most precincts viewed as rhetoric without reality?

Politics, whether the mayoral election in Los Angeles or this spring’s seemingly volatile presidential race in France or the race for the 2024 Games pitting LA against Paris, is politics.

Though there have been stabs at implementing the reforms, the 2024 campaign marks the first Agenda 2020 race.

In December 2014, the IOC members unanimously bought into Bach’s 40-point plan.

As Bach emphasized in a far-ranging Q&A last week with a German-language outlet, “The Olympic Agenda [2020], initiated by me, [will] for the first time [be] fully applied to the Summer Olympics in 2024.’

To be fair, Bach’s instincts are solid.

The package could — should — have proven itself to be way ahead of the power curve.

To date, however, Agenda 2020 has been mostly noise devoid of substance.

Just words on a page.

In Lima on September 13, when the members make their 2024 choice, the question is whether Agenda 2020 will mean anything more than the paper it’s written on.

Put another way:

Do the members genuinely care about the future, about the strategic vision of the IOC?

The core issue is whether they get — that is, whether Bach can make them understand — that for Agenda 2020 the time is now or never.

The IOC is a multibillion-dollar global entity with a variety of stakeholders. Its primary goal is spreading its values — respect, excellence, friendship— through sport, and particularly its franchise, the Games. Its key mission is figuring out how to stay relevant with its key audience, teens and 20-somethings.

All this makes 2024 a classic case study, and if September 13 in Lima were not a secret ballot but a straightforward corporate-way decision, the sort of thing McKinsey or Bain or Deloitte get hired all the time to assess and provide consulting-style strategic roadmaps for, this would be a no-brainer.

Paris would simply be more of the same — like Athens, Beijing, London, Sochi, Rio and, now Tokyo, government-run bids and follow-on organizing committees that see huge cost overruns skyrocket into exorbitant billions, the No. 1 shock to the system the reputed $51 billion associated with the Sochi 2014 Games.

Paris needs to build an athletes’ village, along with media housing and a swim complex. These three cost centers have repeatedly proven problematic, and the history of recent government-underwritten Games — see the list over the last 20 years from the previous paragraph — shows definitively that the bills inexorably get fat.

When a 17-day sports party ends up costing $51 billion, $40 billion, $30 billion, $20 billion or even *just* $15 billion, you can trace a direct logic line: this is why taxpayers across Europe are now in revolt against the IOC.

Too, this is why, increasingly, social media and the threat of referendum make for an existential threat to the establishment across Europe, in particular the juicy target that is the IOC.

LA, a privately run bid (and, like 1984, Games), stands out as the change option.

Now is precisely the time for that change.

The model of Games as urban development catalyst is — done. That is over.

To reiterate:

That is exactly why taxpayers are so completely and thoroughly pissed off. They don’t want the Games to be a blank check anymore for roads, airports, metro lines and more.

Bach knows this. Again, the logic line: the drafting and enactment of Agenda 2020.

To be explicitly clear, the president has not — and will not — play favorites in public in this 2024 race. He cannot afford to be seen to be favoring Los Angeles or Paris, and will not be seen favoring either. He has not, will not express a position and nothing in this column should be inferred or implied that he has, or will.

That said, he assuredly has a vital interest in making concrete the Agenda 2020 reforms.

He clearly has some work to do in this area — let’s explore — but you can see he is trying to find ways.

In that German-language interview last week, Bach tried out, again, this trial balloon:

“Without Olympic Agenda 2020, we would not have a single candidate for the Games in 2024.”

This is just not true, not helpful and that balloon should be let go.

The truth is that Bach had five candidates when the race formally kicked off in September 2015, and three have already fallen by the wayside: Budapest, Rome and Hamburg.

Agenda 2020 did not save them. If the reforms were of demonstrable utility, maybe the IOC could have helped the respective bid committees better press their cases. But no.

The further truth is that Los Angeles does not in any way, shape or form need Agenda 2020.

Just the opposite: the IOC needs LA to make Agenda 2020.

That IOC evaluation commission team that’s due in town in April is going to find what — that Los Angeles is capable of hosting the Games? Duh.

Let’s explore another tack, please, Mr. President.

“We have to reduce the planning costs,” Bach said, meaning the bid costs. Therefore, “Every facility on which a world championship or a World Cup took place is considered approved. This will determine the discussions of the next time in the IOC.”

This is flawed, too.

Like Staples Center in downtown LA, which has not played host to a world championship but puts on Lakers, Clippers and Kings games on a nightly basis, would have to be approved — but Kazan, Russia, which put on the 2015 world swim championships in a temporary pool in a soccer stadium, would be automatically in?

Beyond which:

The cost of bidding is a problem but it is not the problem. Let’s say you’re a European government. Bach also said, “Europe is the core continent of the Olympic movement. It would not be wise to ignore this,” and as an aside this is indisputably the case but also not the sort of declaration that means going somewhere else (Asia, Australia, the Americas) is mutually exclusive.

Anyway: let’s say a bid campaign runs to the range of 75 million euros. If your federal budget is — pick a number — 2 trillion euros, 75 million is a sneeze.

From the government finance minister’s office, that is.

Not, though, for the taxpayer or the local community organizer. That is an entirely different prism.

Again, the challenge is not those 75 million euros. It’s the $51 billion, $30 billion or $15 billion in infrastructure costs tied to the Games.

This is the thing that must be confronted.

It is the collection of white elephants in the room.

If you prefer, the Olympic Voldemort. Who dares speak out about this thing?

OK, here goes:

These infrastructure projects are the primary drivers, the elemental reason that — since the transformative makeover of Barcelona for 1992 — governments worldwide have sought the Games, because an Olympics as public-works catalyst comes with a fixed seven-year deadline.

In the real world, presidents, prime ministers, governors or mayors have to deal with wonky parliaments or state assemblies or city councils for 20, 30 or 40 years to try to get stuff done, if then.

Bach, same article, trying to have it both ways, acknowledging that the entire thrust of Agenda 2020 is to move away from these projects and yet:

“You have to see the whole picture. This is like in Munich in 1972. Munich might not have a subway today without the Olympic Games. And Rio would not have a functioning transport public transport system. Before the Summer Games, 18 percent of citizens in Rio had access to a proper urban transport system. Now, 63 percent. Tens of thousands benefit from the legacy of the Games day after day.

“In addition to this, a newly designed harbor district, a few hotels with their jobs, the Guanabara Bay is not perfect but much clearer than before because the introduced dirty water is now clarified. The handball hall will be converted into schools.

“The mayor of Rio recently said something that is equally true of the IOC: it was never claimed to be able to solve all political and social problems in Rio with the help of the Olympic Games. But through the Games, investments could be made, investments the inhabitants of Rio could only dream about for 50 years.”

See the conflict?

The problem is, genuinely, the IOC can’t figure out — without going to Los Angeles for 2024 — how to bring Agenda 2020 to life.

From the same article, Bach sought to explain how, after the passage of Agenda 2020 back in December 2014, the IOC almost immediately sought to pressure — my words, not his — the Korean organizers of the PyeongChang 2018 Winter Games to consider moving the bobsled track to Japan.

That would have given the IOC something to show the world. Agenda 2020! See! It works!

“This almost led to an insurrection,” Bach said.

To be honest, this sort of belittling observation does not reflect well on the president or the IOC nor does it constructively serve anyone’s interest.

Facts:

When the IOC approached the Koreans, it was three-plus years after the July 2011 IOC selection for PC for the 2018 Games. The bobsled track was already well past design and into construction. In practice, sunk costs were considerable. Plus, hundreds of people were at work on a job site.

The IOC was asking the Koreans to consider going to Japan — Japan ruled Korea from 1910 until 1945 — meaning Nagano, site of the 1998 Winter Games. Would there be refurbishment costs for the Nagano track? If so, how much? How much would it cost to transport and house athletes? What about TV? What about a range of other issues?

In the end, timing and financial issues made it all, roughly, a wash. So: why would the Koreans invite domestic fury by 1. having to essentially bow to wartime masters 2. on a project, the Winter Olympics, of immense domestic pride, just like 1988 in the summer in Seoul 3. and being made to appear inferior by far-away Europeans on, of all things, precisely the sort of thing Koreans typically do extremely well, a design and manufacturing project?

Better: how could the IOC (first word “International”) not have taken into account these factors in a seemingly blind rush to make something of Agenda 2020? When these Winter Games were in — 2018? Which is two years before (Agenda) — 2020?

Bringing Agenda 2020 forward since:

For Tokyo 2020: the Japanese bid, won in 2013, promised all-in costs of $7.8 billion. Now estimates out of Tokyo are floating around the $25-30 billion range. (Back to PC 2018 for a note of irony: the Koreans in 2014 were suddenly supposed to agree that the Japanese way would be superior because — why?)

For Beijing 2022: the Chinese, $40-billion spenders for 2008, must build a high-speed rail line from the capital up to the mountains, where there is no snow. To keep the financial reporting numbers down, the Chinese have said they have no intention of disclosing the costs of that rail project as part of Olympic spending.

If you wrote all this as fiction — who would believe it?

But it's real, which is why Agenda 2020 — so far — is not.

The Olympic movement, the interviewer in that German-language Q&A piece, said to Bach, “has the impression of the monstrous.”

“Olympic Agenda 2020 will pay for the organization of Games and sustainability,” Bach said. “What we have not foreseen is the change in the process of candidacy — namely, the use of the Games by political anti-establishment movements.”

Such drives “do not work with facts but with slogans — such as ‘gigantism’ or ‘money-laundering.’ We can complain but not change [that]. That is why we have to do something ourselves.”

What the IOC has to do — besides maybe advising Tony Estanguet to play fair — is, again, a no-brainer.

Here’s to the next six months and the notion of the IOC making Agenda 2020 real, and doing just what it did in 1984. Which, not coincidentally, will buy itself time and what it really needs — stability.

Real and significant threats to the IOC

If Frankie Fredericks remains in position as chairperson of the International Olympic Committee’s 2024 evaluation commission past, say, Tuesday, then everybody has a big problem.

At the same time, the real question is whether the IOC itself has big problems.

Very big problems.

Way beyond Frankie Fredericks.

Like whether both the winning Rio 2016 and Tokyo 2020 bids were fixed.

This represents one of two very real and significant threats not only to the IOC’s traditional way of operation but to the presidency of Thomas Bach, elected in 2013.

The other, little-understood, especially by the IOC itself, is this:

Community organizers, particularly in Europe, have discovered the power of social media to amplify grievance and conflict. Who's to blame? The establishment, not limited to but including the state. In this context, there's a ready target: a government-underwritten and -sponsored Olympic bid.

The IOC is in a jam.

These next few months could be among the most significant in its modern history.

Bach, in a German-language interview last Thursday, appropriately noted that the social media-to-referendum connection is “the target of anti-establishment movements that we have in many European countries,” later identifying, again correctly, that the IOC is “also part of this establishment.” Too, he said, “You can not go through,” meaning make a convincing counter-argument, “with facts.”

A starting place is easy.

At the same time, it’s hard, because it means shaking up that establishment.

The era of Games as government-run infrastructure development model has run its course.

Simply and bluntly put, that needs to change — starting with the 2024 campaign, pitting Paris, more of the same (government-run, history all but guaranteeing gargantuan cost overruns) against the change option, Los Angeles (privately run, just like 1984, which ended with $232.5 million surplus).

From the Paris bid books, and ask this elemental question as you remember that the dorms at UCLA exist right now and are more than suitable while the French authorities propose a 126-acre, 3,500-unit to-be-built athletes' village described, variously, as a "significant catalyst" and an "outstanding urban regeneration project": is this what the Olympics are supposed to be about?

"The construction of private housing for ownership or lease will be funded by private developers and any social housing units will be funded by public entities, under the traditional arrangements of urban development projects in France. Transport and other public infrastructure, such as roads, riverbanks, open areas and public facilities will be funded by the state, the region and local authorities, in accordance with the usual split of responsibilities."

Change is never easy. But it is the IOC’s essential option.

Unless the IOC goes to LA, it can’t make a convincing counter-argument, because it literally cannot come up with the winning facts Bach is seeking.

Example:

Bach, in that very same German Q&A, noted that the IOC gave Rio 2016 organizers $1.5 billion.

Again, absolutely true.

But so what?

For the past 20 years, there have been two separate but intricately related budgets in any Olympics. The first is the organizing committee’s operating budget. That’s where the IOC money goes. For Rio, that made up roughly half the Rio 2016 committee’s revenue.

The second is capital investment. That's why the public authorities are so eager to bring a Games home.

In winning the bid in 2009, the Rio people pegged total costs at $14.4 billion.

So nobody was exactly playing hiding the ball.

The total post-Games Rio 2016 tab is not in but given delays, cost over-runs and the economic crisis that devastated Brazil over the past couple years: probably $20 billion. Maybe more.

Look, $1.5 billion is a lot of money. But everything is context. If the IOC president wants to go through with facts, let's compare apples with apples. To use $1.5 billion when the real discussion is probably $20 billion is disingenuous, at best.

This is the sort of stuff that tends to fuel grievance and conflict with the establishment, you know?

All the while, the newspapers are filled with pictures of decrepit swimming pools and busted-up stadiums in Rio, of horrifying budget woes in Tokyo (bid: $7.8 billion, current estimate $25-30 billion) and stories, like Friday’s in Le Monde, suggesting more to come on a scale perhaps unseen since the scandal in the 1990s over Salt Lake City’s winning bid for the 2002 Winter Games.

Salt Lake City won the Games in 1995 after wooing IOC members and their relatives with more than $1 million in cash, gifts and other inducements.

The Salt Lake crisis led to the expulsion or resignation of 10 members and a 50-point reform plan.

Will more details now under wraps in France become public? When? Unclear all around.

For emphasis, even as his name started popping up Friday around the world in media accounts, Frankie Fredericks is assuredly entitled to the presumption of innocence.

Fredericks is arguably the most famous person to hail from the west African nation of Namibia. He has four Olympic silvers in the 100 and 200 meter sprints. He has both a bachelor’s degree in computer science and an MBA from Brigham Young University.

Now 49, he has always been one of the amiable and approachable guys on the international track and field and Olympic scene. He served as a member of the IOC athletes’ commission from 2004-12 and as that panel’s chair from 2008-12; for those last four years, he was on the IOC’s policy-making executive board, too.

He was made a “regular” IOC member in 2012.

Back to 2009, and the IOC session in Copenhagen. That’s where Rio won the 2016 Games. The others in the race: Madrid, Tokyo and Chicago.

Fredericks served at that IOC assembly as what’s called a “scrutineer.” There typically are three. The scrutineers count the electronic votes before passing the results to the IOC president — then Belgium’s Jacques Rogge.

Friday’s account in Le Monde would seem to establish a timeline for the exchange of money. Connecting the dots: what, if anything, got proven? Not clear.

The newspaper report will now trigger an ethics commission inquiry into what IOC spokesman Mark Adams on Friday called “serious allegations.”

The ethics inquiry is perhaps the least of Frankie Fredericks’ concerns. If he has retained reputable legal counsel, this advice would surely have been forthcoming: don’t set foot in France.

A basic rundown:

Ahead of the Copenhagen vote, a company called Matlock Capital Group paid $1.5 million to Pamodzi Consulting, a company founded by Papa Massata Diack, and transferred another $500,000 to Papa Diack’s Russian bank account.

Papa Diack’s father, Lamine, served from 1999-2015 as president of track’s international governing body, the IAAF. He was IOC member from 1999 to 2013.

The son was a former IAAF marketing consultant.

French prosecutors are investigating Diack, father and son, on corruption charges in a separate scandal — the alleged cover-up of Russian doping cases.

In January 2016, citing the Russian matter, the IAAF banned Papa Diack for life.

Le Monde said Matlock is a holding company linked to a Brazilian businessman, Arthur Cesar de Menezes Soares Filho.

Soares reportedly is close to Sergio Cabral, the former governor of the state of Rio.

Cabral stepped down in 2014. He was arrested last November, after the Rio Games, and is now awaiting charges he diverted millions in bribes for the renovation of Maracanā Stadium before soccer’s 2014 World Cup and two other

The IOC picked Rio on October 2, 2009.

That very same day, Le Monde says, Papa Diack transferred $299,300 to Yemi Limited, an offshore company linked to Fredericks.

In an email exchange with the newspaper, Fredericks said, “The payment has nothing to do with the Olympic games,” explaining he had a marketing contract with Pamodzi from 2007-11.

The IAAF has long had a far-reaching marketing agreement with a Japanese company called Dentsu.

It’s unclear whether or not the Dentsu program is or ought to be at issue.

Also uncertain: if the Dentsu program is relevant or material, why or how Fredericks would undertake independent or even related marketing schemes in Africa, as he suggests in the emails published by Le Monde, much less a program worth $300,000, why such a four-year program would be worth $75,000 per year or, critically, why the payment for such a deal would arrive, perhaps coincidentally, on the very same day the IOC picked Rio.

What is clear:

Chicago got kicked out of the 2016 voting on the first round. The president of the United States had been on scene and he was humiliated.

Fredericks was one of the guys counting votes — in position to know, even before Rogge did, what was what. This is fact, not the suggestion of anything amiss. The scrutineers know before the IOC president does.

The Americans were so stung by Chicago’s exit, which followed New York’s loss for 2012, that they sat out the 2020 election — won by Tokyo.

Now come Los Angeles and Paris for the 2024 Olympics.

Who, at least until Friday’s Le Monde report, is sitting as the chair of the IOC committee evaluating the candidates’ so-called “technical” readiness— that is, inspecting factors as sports facilities, roads, airports, hotels and more?

The guy who at the very least knew before almost anyone else that Chicago was out in the very first round is now due to be passing judgment on Los Angeles?

Even if he spent college and grad school in Utah, and is super-familiar with the way things work over here in these United States, how can the IOC allow that?

Isn’t that just a big-time optics problem?

If Frankie Fredericks doesn’t do the right and honorable thing, let’s say by Tuesday latest, you’d have to think it’s going to be done for him.

Meanwhile, stay tuned.

This is, all things considered, preliminary skirmishing. The IOC may yet be looking at very big problems.

Very big.

Social media and the referendum: made for sharing

Snap Inc., the Venice, California-based parent company of Snapchat, went public Thursday. It’s now worth $34 billion.

As the Washington Post pointed out, that’s more than Macy’s and American Airlines. The New York Times noted that $34 billion is more than “the old-line media company CBS,” and about three times the value of the social-media presence that is Twitter.

What does this have to do with the Olympics?

Everything.

Snapchat, for the unfamiliar, is the mobile app that allows you to send pictures and videos that, after a few seconds, self-destruct. Once you learn the basics, you can add filters, everything from rabbit ears to dog noses to whatever. You can also add tags that show where in the world you are.

Grown-ups go — what’s the big deal? Teens go — awesome, mom and dad can’t figure it out.

Snapchat is actually way more. There’s another part to the app, and its NFL content during the recently concluded season drew 42 million unique viewers. Translation: a lot of people. Snapchat literally has changed the way people shoot pictures — as Ad Age pointed out, brands and publishers wanted to reach that sort of massive audience, which in turn meant shooting vertically instead of horizontally for video on mobile phones.

When it comes to Snapchat and social media, the signals of change are all around us. But most grown-ups within the Olympic scene — the International Olympic Committee in particular — have proven way too slow on the pickup.

The ongoing campaign for the 2024 Summer Games, down now to just two candidates, Paris and Los Angeles (see above, Venice, California), is in every way the very first real social-media bid race.

Snap is now worth crazy money. Twitter is the essential news feed. There are roughly 7 billion people on Planet Earth, and Facebook had 1.86 billion monthly active users as of the fourth quarter of 2016. Let’s not forget the pretty pictures on Instagram, the recipes on Pinterest and on and on.

What does this mean?

For a global enterprise such as the Olympics, there assuredly are positives to the way social media can crush time and space. But as the 2024 bid campaign has made abundantly plain, there are negatives, too, with which the Olympic movement must reckon.

Instead of doing so, it is instead facing grave risk.

And its most senior officials barely comprehend what is it at issue.

This is not hyperbole.

Paris is very fond of its bid slogan: “Made for Sharing.” It is super-clear that bid and government officials think it’s super-positive. But history shows that construction and infrastructure costs inevitably skyrocket. What happens when concern over such costs reaches a trigger point? Cue — on social media — outrage, grievance, agitation. What if “Made for Sharing” flips into a negative, and quickly?

Never have the Games been awarded in an era when social media has shown how easy it can be to amplify such grievance and conflict.

See two of the other cities that started this 2024 race: Budapest and Hamburg, Germany.

Both are now out because of social media and, in Hamburg’s case, an attendant referendum, in the case of Budapest, the threat of one.

The warning signs are all blinking red for Paris, too.

To be blunt: the IOC does not fully appreciate this.

Nor does it understand the essentials: how itself to use the power and reach of social media and, on the other hand, how to help those within its orbit blunt or confront social media when employed as an attack on the Olympic movement.

You see this in so many ways.

The IOC’s most important communications outreach remains stuck in 1982 if not before: a beautifully designed and elegantly produced quarterly coffee table-style magazine called Olympic Review.

The IOC says it wants to reach the kids. The kids are glued to their phones. And the IOC puts out a magazine that arrives by snail mail every three months, and then only to a selected mailing list.

Wait, counters the IOC: we have 4.9 million Twitter followers.

That’s not anywhere near top 100 in the world.

The Barcelona soccer team has 20 million. Real Madrid, 22.3 million. LeBron James, the basketball star, has 34.3 million. The soccer star Cristiano Ronaldo, nearly 50.2 million.

Top 10 starts with Justin Timberlake (58.1 million) and goes up to Justin Bieber (No. 2, 91.9 million) and Katy Perry (No.1, 96 million).

Katy Perry says on her bio, “Artist. Activist. Conscious.”

The Olympic values: “Respect. Excellence. Friendship.”

Why is she so big and the IOC so — not?

The Olympic charter is, essentially, a rough facsimile of one of the American organic documents, the Declaration of Independence.

What makes the Olympic movement different from for-profit sports entities is the values at the core of the charter. Those are democratic values — democratic with a little d.

Right now, again no exaggeration, all this is at risk.

The proof is in the races for the 2022 and 2024 Games.

For 2022, five cities in western Europe dropped out of the running, put off by the costs of an Olympics, in particular the $51 billion figure associated with the 2014 Sochi Games.That left the IOC to choose between Beijing and Almaty, Kazakhstan.

The members chose Beijing, site of the 2008 Summer Games, by four votes. The Chinese figure to keep infrastructure outlay down by not including however many billions it’s going to cost to build a high-speed rail line up to the mountains — where there’s no snow.

If you take away a fair accounting of what's what and the humanistic ideals that underpin this entire Olympic thing, you very quickly have to ask what this is all about— and, of course, if this Olympic thing isn't really dealing from a position of weakness.

It’s entirely reasonable to ask what position the IOC is in now.

Two surviving bids. (2024, 2022)

"Choosing" between a totalitarian or autocratic regime. (2022)

In December 2014, the IOC, urged by president Thomas Bach, passed a 40-point purported reform plan dubbed Agenda 2020. Virtually nobody believes that any of the reforms, particularly as they relate to Olympic bids, are meaningful. Why? Because there’’s no factual evidence any of them are real.

Instead, what we have is blather and puffery.

The Rio 2016 Games were nothing less than an organizational and financial calamity. Yet the IOC, in December, called them the “most perfect imperfect Games.”

This sort of thing is why, even before Rio but amid the 2022 campaign implosions, the locals in Boston said no — social-media agitation playing a key role. The U.S. Olympic Committee made the dumb choice early on to go to Boston before reversing course and heading to LA.

Boston’s no-Games activists took their social-media expertise to Germany. A 2015 referendum there sank the Hamburg bid.

It can hardly be coincidental that over time the results of these referendums are, for the IOC, getting worse. A vote four years ago in St. Moritz — in Switzerland, of all places, the IOC’s longtime base — asked voters if they wanted 2022. No, by 53 percent. They tried again last month, again in St. Moritz, for the 2026 Games. No, by 60 percent.

Rome pulled out last fall for different reasons: the mayor said the city had better things to spend money on than the Olympics.

Who, on January 1 of this year, thought a Budapest referendum might be in the offing?

Now the Budapest bid is dead. Layers of government had spent years putting together investment, strategy and branding. It all blew up that quick.

A campaign stitched together by local organizers, Momentum Mozgalom, in a matter of weeks — weeks! — managed to collect 266,151 signatures in favor of holding a referendum on the bid.

Blather:

“It is disappointing that this [Budapest] decision had to be taken — the candidature committee had presented an excellent project, which was built on the reforms contained in Olympic Agenda 2020,” IOC spokesman Mark Adams said, and poor Mark Adams, because if the “reforms” were truly meaningful and the bid truly was so “excellent” it’s hard to see how 266,151 people thought maybe they ought to have a vote on that, and nonetheless he has to get up and say this sort of stuff.

So what is the lesson of Boston, Hamburg, Budapest and, perhaps, Paris?

It’s not who is president of the United States or France or wherever. Donald Trump, whatever. Marine le Pen, François Fillon, Emmanuel Macron, Benoit Hamon, whoever.

Presidential politics matters, but not now in the way most in the media are trying to wrap their minds around. That was then, so 2007, and this is now:

The real threat to the Paris bid — and it is potentially lethal — is social media and the possibility if not probability of a follow-on referendum.

That threat is immediate. It is, too, this spring and summer. It is even after September 13, the day the IOC is due to meet in Lima, Peru, to decide the 2024 winner.

To explain:

In 2017, the ability to communicate directly via social media— and, critically, to organize — is more ready than at any time in human history. See Trump’s presidential campaign. See the so-called women’s marches upon the Trump inauguration. See any number of other examples.

Practically, what this means — for the Olympic scene — is this logic tree:

1. Any democratic society that has a 2. government-run Olympic bid and/or organizing committee but at the same time 3. community activists who 4. are fired up over something, whatever that may be 5. with unfettered access to the internet 6. will inevitably, and probably sooner than later, figure out that they can leverage that activism and gain not just political notoriety but power through social media by seeking a referendum on the Olympic project. Consequently, 7. the referendum absolutely, positively will significantly threaten if not sink the project.

This sound overly dramatic?

It’s not.

This is what the IOC needs, and now, to take stock of.

Social media is not just Katy Perry or Justin Bieber’s marketing fun. It is a tool for political activism and organization. If people sniff out a con or a problem — even if it is not true — it can, and will, explode. If there is concern or anxiety, it can — and will — explode.

Hungary, a democratic parliamentary republic since just 1989: 266,151 signatures on a Budapest 2024 referendum in a matter of weeks.

Just imagine what could be done in France, where democracy has been in action for considerably many more years. That is a powder keg waiting for the spark.

Maybe it’s already lit. Activists say they have collected 5,000 signatures toward a referendum.

The Paris 2024 argument can essentially be boiled down to two factors: One, we’re Paris. Two, it’s 100 years since we held the 1924 Games.

To be clear, there has never been a legitimate poll in Paris assessing public support for the 2024 project.

Let’s say a poll comes out and the yes numbers are at 60. A no campaign that starts looking up only at 10 points — that, given social media, would be so easy to wipe out. The bid would essentially be DOA.

Let’s say further that the IOC were to foolishly opt for sentiment instead of common sense. Even so, the risk to the Paris project extends beyond September 13.

By no means would an IOC vote for Paris in any way stop the prospect of a referendum. Has the IOC even paused for a moment to consider this notion?

Over seven years, the time from awarding a Games to opening ceremony, governments change. If a referendum passes, what is the IOC going to do — go where it’s not wanted? Sue? Oh, sure — litigate (in some forum) and then force the French government to pay, because that is just the thing to make other governments want to take on a Games down the line.

By contrast: LA.

The difference between LA and Paris is as obvious as it is critical.

Paris for 2024 is a government-run enterprise. To reiterate the point made in this space over the past several weeks, recent editions of government-run Olympics have been bloated, and that is why taxpayers are mad as hell and that is why in the west they are both turning on the IOC and turning to social media to agitate: Sochi $51 billion, Beijing 2008 ($40 billion), Rio 2016 (projected $20 billion), Tokyo 2020 (now looking at $25-30 billion when the bid promised $7.8 billion). Given this record, there is no reason to expect anything but the same from Paris.

Los Angeles, the bid and, if it wins, the organizing committee, is privately funded. (Just as in 1984, which produced a $232.5 million surplus.)

What that means: a privately run LA 2024 project is, for the most part, out of the reach of government.

This is why surveys consistently have shown incredible taxpayer support for LA 2024 — 80 percent and higher.

In any democracy, there are always some people who don’t like something. That’s just life.

But if you wanted to start a referendum against LA 2024, it wouldn’t make any sense.

That would be like voting on whether you want the neighborhood grocery store run by Cousin Marvin to be open or closed. What? He’s a private business, just like Mrs. Anderson's bakery down the street. Leave him alone. And her, too.

Beyond which, mindful both of 1984 and of the Boston experience, the LA 2024 people at the outset went around town to hold 30 community meetings — not only to gauge but to build community support.

Did Paris have community meetings in every arrondissement? Hmm. Here is Danielle Simonnet, a Paris councillor for the city’s 20th arrondissement, telling Le Monde in its February 23 editions, “Of course we need a referendum,” later in the story calling Games costs “enormous,” adding, “The bill is going to be salty.”

Also, and this is just common sense talking along with some 30 years of journalism experience, if the LA plan was dicey or not well-cooked, and there needed to be a journalist to expose it, you can believe that journalist would already have found someone in that LA 2024 bid team. Or some soul within the bid team would have reached out to the journalist.

That has not happened, is very unlikely to happen, in Los Angeles.

Because, one, of that neighborhood reach-out in LA and, two, the LA plan is solid and privately funded. Example: the original thinking was, let’s build an expensive athletes’ village downtown. The bid team thought it through and shifted course, to the already-existing dorms at UCLA.

The Paris plan, again to contrast, calls for building a hugely expensive village in what is now a violence-marked banlieue called Seine-Saint Denis.

Wait until someone on the ground in Paris or elsewhere in France, angry about something, figures that out.

That’s what referendums are for: made for sharing, indeed.

A theater-of-the-absurd hearing in Congress

You know what was missing from Tuesday’s theater-of-the-absurd hearing in Congress on what was billed as “ways to improve and strengthen the international anti-doping system?”

Besides, you know, a big check or a ready-to-implement action plan aimed at improving and strengthening the international anti-doping system?

This hearing had nothing to do with either of those things, really. Nothing at all.

It was an excuse for the fine ladies and gentlemen representing various districts of Congress to take pictures with the likes of Michael Phelps and Adam Nelson — gee, who could have predicted that? — and, more to the point, play to the C-SPAN cameras while bashing Russia and touting truth, justice and the American way.

All the while coming off like the camera-seeking hypocrites that skeptics might suggest they are.

Representative Greg Walden, a Republican from Oregon: “Now you’re going to give us confidence that … U.S. athletes, who play by the rules, can compete against other athletes who play by the rules?”

“Thank you,” a smiling Representative Kathy Castor of Florida, a Democrat, told Travis Tygart, the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency chief executive, “for having the intestinal fortitude to stand up for our athletes and clean competition around the world.”

Oh! So that’s what this was about!

“Our” athletes, not “ways to improve and strengthen the international anti-doping system”?

Who woulda thunk?

There were so many choice moments during this nearly 150-minute paean to America the beautiful before the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee of the U.S. House of Representatives' Energy and Commerce Committee (whew).

It was so stirring you might well have expected all in attendance to brandish special cereal-box Captain America power shields if, say, Ivan Drago had bolted into Room 2123 of the Rayburn Building to announce that, of course, he was there to break each and every one of them.

Maybe the best moment, however, was when Rep. Frank Pallone Jr., a Democrat from New Jersey, clearly reading from notes prepared for him, misspoke and referred to the “bobsled and skeletal federation.”

It’s “skeleton.”

There’s so much wrong with Congress having hearings on an issue the elected ladies and gentlemen know virtually nothing about and, more to the point, can’t and aren’t going to do anything about.

But Mr. Pallone’s glitch is altogether so revealing.

So, too, the rhetoric, which in an effort to make one point simply proved the other.

“It starts with the athletes. They own the culture of sport,” Tygart asserted.

“And it’s wonderful — it’s sad it took this scandal to mobilize them in the way that it has but it’s wonderful that they’re now mobilizing and realizing how important this right is to them. They also have to have confidence in the system.”

You'd think it was 1984 all over again, and Marty McFly had just parked his DeLorean on Capitol Hill with the cassette tape blasting Bruce Springsteeen's "No Surrender," or something.

Soviets? Russians? Which? Whatever.

Oh. Still us and them. Got it.

But wait, just to put what Tygart said in some context:

Phelps said he didn’t believe he had ever competed internationally in a totally clean event. Nelson, too.

So what is the only reasonable, logical deduction about the so-called “culture of sport”? The brutal truth?

Athletes all over the world cheat, and if they can get away with it, they damn sure will.

Why?

Because, again, logic:

Illicit performance-enhancing drugs work.

Following that to the stark conclusion:

For many athletes in whatever country — and don’t be fooled, the United States has produced some whopping world-class cheaters — the risk-reward ratio makes for an easy tilt.

Indeed, if you were in the Russian Duma, following Tuesday’s spectacle in Congress, why wouldn’t you hold a hearing in which you splashed pictures on a really big screen and howled in laughter at Lance Armstrong, Floyd Landis, Tyler Hamilton, Marion Jones and scads of baseball stars?

In the background, you could work up a digital sampling loop of Mr. Walden from Oregon saying, “U.S. athletes, who play by the rules …”

Oh, again — in Russia the defining difference is, according to the second of the 2016 reports produced by the Canadian law professor Richard McLaren, “institutional control”?

All that does is point up what happens when you have a federal sport ministry, like they do virtually everywhere else, and when you don’t, as is the case in the United States.

Here, we do our cheating red, white and blue capitalist-style:

To quote Ivan Drago's movie wife, the equally awesome Ludmilla, dismissing allegations that her husband could have used steroids: "He is like your Popeye. He eats his spinach every day!"

Just to underscore the raging hypocrisy of Tuesday’s hearing:

Dial the history books back to 2012, a couple of months before USADA tagged Mr. Armstrong.

That summer, a longtime Wisconsin Republican congressman, Representative Jim Sensenbrenner, sent a letter to the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, the funnel for significant USADA funding, declaring, “USADA’s authority over Armstrong is strained at best.”

Also included were even more laff-out-loud party lines:

“Armstrong, however, has never failed a drug test despite having been tested over 500 times.”

“As attorneys for Armstrong asserted, ‘USADA has created a kangaroo court … ‘ “

“The actions against Armstrong come in the midst of inconsistent treatment against athletes.”

Mr. Sensenbrenner, still a member of Congress, was at the time the chair — he still sits on — the House Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on crime, terrorism and homeland security. That panel held jurisdiction over ONDCP. Moreover, Mr. Sensenbrenner’s district is home to the then-longtime Armstrong sponsor, Trek Bicycles.

Big picture take-away from Tuesday’s event:

The anti-doping campaign is not easily reduced to sound bites and headlines.

It’s complicated.

Making any sort of real progress is going to take way less rhetoric, far more cooperation and considerably more cash.

This field is simply not susceptible to Tuesday's display of red, white and blue.

Or, more to the point, black and white. It’s a lot of grey.

— Russia bad, Russia bad, Russia bad. Got it, Congress.

Over the weekend, the International Olympic Committee, citing a Feb. 21 WADA meeting, sent out a letter referring to the pair of McLaren’s 2016 reports, from December and July, acknowledging that “in many cases the evidence provided may not be sufficient to bring successful cases.”

So even if Russia bad — it is at the core of the notions of truth, justice and the American way that each and every person is afforded the chance to test any and all evidence the authorities say they hold.

If it’s “not sufficient,” you’re free to go. In this context, to compete.

Same deal for Russians, for Americans, for whoever.

As Dr. Richard Budgett, the IOC’s medical director, put it in the statement he submitted Tuesday to Congress, “In accordance with the principles of individual justice, clean athletes should not be sanctioned or punished for the failures of others.”

— Tygart: “If you continue to have sport overseeing investigations, determining compliance, acting as a global regulator of itself, it’s no different than the current status quo, which is the fox guarding the henhouse.”

Tygart’s argument holds intuitive appeal. Moreover, he knows full well that a good many people don’t understand the anti-doping landscape, laced with science, law, politics and diplomacy, so they rely on him — indisputably an expert — to lay out for them in easy-to-follow terms (fox, henhouse) what might seem most constructive.

Fair enough.

At the same time, it’s far from crystal clear that “sport” ought to go anywhere.

Governance is rooted not just in structure but in culture. Eight years ago, the USOC tried to separate the two, when Stephanie Streeter, who had no significant “sport” experience, was named chief executive. She lasted all of a year, resigning amid a 40-0 no confidence vote from the American national governing bodies — that is, from sport.

Culture matters, a lot, and it’s also a fair argument that the anti-doping machinery ought not take significant dollars from sport while churlishly then banishing any and all goodwill, good faith and experience that comes with those dollars to the penalty box.

That’s called rude and ungrateful, and no system can sustain itself like that for long.

— WADA’s 2017 annual budget is $29.7 million. The U.S. government is due this year to put up $2.155 million, or 7.3 percent.

That’s way more than any other country puts up.

That’s one way to look at it.

Another view:

There are 206 national Olympic committees. The U.S. Congress thinks it’s entitled to hold hearings when the American government is putting up 7 percent toward an entity because — why?

Is any other parliamentary or legislative body in the world holding such hearings? No. Obvious question: why not?

Ethiopia recently criminalized sports doping. The new head of the country's track and field federation is Haile Gebrselassie, the distance running great. A 22-year-old marathon runner, Girmay Birahun, is now facing at least three years in Ethiopian prison after testing positive for the controversial Latvian heart medication meldonium; Maria Sharapova is due to return to the tennis tour in April after her sport ban for the same substance was cut from 24 months to 15. Ethiopia, where there's a lot to discuss in the anti-doping scene, is due to contribute a grand total of $3,239 to WADA in 2017. Not a typo — $3,239, and already has paid $3,085.

Should Ethiopia hold a hearing? If it did, should WADA and the IOC send representatives, like they did Tuesday to Washington?

Does Mr. Birahun own the "culture of sport"? Or do only western athletes, and in particular Americans?

Yet another view:

The 2016 U.S. federal budget was, ballpark, $4 trillion. Yes, $2 million is real money. But, context: $2 million over $4 trillion equals pretty close to nothing. And Congress is yapping for more than two hours?

“We can have all the governance review in the world. Which we welcome and we want. I have been in this business for 20 years. And it’s time for change. It’s time to put investment into this business,”  Rob Koehler, the WADA deputy director general, said in response to a question from Representative Chris Collins, a Republican from New York.

“If I look globally at the amount of money being put into national anti-doping organizations,” Koehler said, “it’s simply insufficient. There’s the crux of the issue.”

He added a moment later, “Until that happens, we’ll never see change.”

— The U.S. Olympic Committee is giving USADA $4.6 million this year, up 24 percent from $3.7 million the year before.

That’s real investment, and the USOC should be applauded for seeking to effect real change.

— Much was made Tuesday of a WADA-commissioned report from a team of so-called “independent observers” who reported after the Rio Games that 4,125 of the 11,470 athletes on hand may have shown up in Brazil without being tested even once in 2016, 1,913 in the 10 sports deemed most at risk for cheating, among them track and field, swimming and cycling.

The problem with these numbers is that they are both entirely accurate and thoroughly misleading.

Would more testing be helpful? Probably.

But as the Armstrong case proves, being tested — or passing a test — proves absolutely nothing.

As Sensenbrenner, and even Armstrong himself, noted:

https://twitter.com/lancearmstrong/status/71358750434402306

Passing a test does not prove an athlete is clean.

This is a core misconception.

Testing is not, repeat not, a failsafe. To believe otherwise is naive in the extreme.

— In a similar spirit, it’s not unreasonable if Phelps — who has never given any indication that he is anything but an honest champion — might have had to get up at 6:05 in the morning for drug testing.

You say otherwise?

Here is the way the “whereabouts” system, as it is called, works.

It would defeat the entire purpose of out-of-competition testing for an athlete to know exactly when drug testers are coming. At the same time, it would be entirely unreasonable for Athlete X to be on call 24/7. So the system strikes a balance.

Via the sort of paperwork that Phelps noted Tuesday he repeatedly had to fill out, Athlete X makes himself or herself available to drug testers one hour a day.

Whatever 60 minutes that is — it’s his or her choice.

So, for instance, if the tester shows up at 6:05, it’s because on that form Phelps, or whoever, put, say, 6 to 7 a.m.

Phelps, referring to his baby son Boomer in responding Tuesday to Collins, the New York Republican, said, “I don’t know what I would — how I would even talk to my son about doping in sports.

“Like, I would hope to never have that conversation. I hope we can get it cleared, cleaned up by then. For me, going through everything I’ve done, that’s probably a question I could get asked. I don’t know how I would answer.”

Easy:

Just because you’re American doesn’t mean you’re good, just because you’re Russian doesn’t make you bad.

Everybody has temptations. Do the right thing, son, the way mom and I raised you.

In the meantime, it’s up to the grown-ups to make sure the people running, say, the swim meet have enough money to do every part of what they do the right way.

Also, next time mom and dad will tell those people in Washington to find someone else to take pictures with, OK? Like Ashton Kutcher. When he was doing the same sort of thing daddy did on Tuesday, Ashton blew a kiss to John McCain.

When the presumption of innocence meets la-la land

It’s Oscar Sunday here in Los Angeles. “La La Land” is expected to clean up.

Ladies and gentlemen and boys and girls, let’s turn the lights down low, settle back into our comfy seats with a big tub of popcorn and, what with the weekend's super-interesting script ripped from the Sunday Times over in London tied to a Fancy Bears hack all about Alberto Salazar and Sir Mo Farah and others, let’s revisit some showstoppers from years gone by.

What an interesting idea, just generally speaking: when the presumption of innocence meets la-la land.

But first:

Just like at the movie theater, when they tell you to turn off your cellphone, this disclaimer, brought to you Saturday from the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency:

“Importantly, all athletes, coaches and others under the jurisdiction of the World Anti-Doping Code are innocent and presumed to have complied with the rules unless and until the established anti-doping process declares otherwise. It is grossly unfair and reckless to state, infer or imply differently.”

https://twitter.com/Ry_Madden/status/835659821059735553

Oh, wait.

For clarity: do these rules apply with the same import to Russian athletes?

Because this would be the same U.S. Anti-Doping Agency that over the past 18 months has helped promote the charge to ban each and every Russian athlete because of allegations involving what an independent World Anti-Doping Agency-commissioned report alleged was “institutional control” of the Russian anti-doping control system.

Just to reiterate from the USADA press aide's tweet, italics and underline mine: "all athletes, coaches and others … are innocent and presumed to have complied with the rules unless and until the established anti-doping process declares otherwise.”

For emphasis:

“It is grossly unfair and reckless to state, infer or imply differently.”

A U.S. Congressional subcommittee meets Tuesday to consider “ways to improve and strengthen the anti-doping system.” Perhaps this can be on the agenda.

La, la, la, la, la.

Returning, as we were, to a story seemingly crying out for a Hollywood-style treatment:

The Sunday Times, citing a Fancy Bears hack of a March 2016 USADA report, says Farah and others were given infusions of a research supplement based on the amino acid L-carnitine.

The newspaper says Salazar boasted about the “incredible performance boosting effects” of the stuff and emailed Lance Armstrong before Armstrong was outed for doping: “Lance call me asap! We have tested it and it’s amazing.”

Farah, in a Sunday post to his Facebook feed, said it was “deeply frustrating” to have to respond to such allegations and asserted he was a “clean athlete.”

To reiterate, Farah is, and the others in the Salazar camp are, assuredly entitled to the presumption of innocence.

Scriptwriters out there: do you know what might, just might, make for a really interesting take on the Farah saga? In retrospect, if you will, maybe the turning point in the whole thing?

In 2011, at the IAAF world championships in Daegu, South Korea, Farah lost the 10,000 meters by just this much, to a guy perhaps only true track geeks have ever heard of, Ibrahim Jeilan of Ethiopia.

After some 26 minutes of racing, Farah ran the last lap in 53.36 seconds, which is crazy fast.

It wasn't enough.

Jeilan won, in 27:13.81.

Farah got the silver, in 27.14.07.

Since, Farah has pretty much won everything of import, including both the 5 and 10k races at London 2012 and Rio 2016.

Jeilan isn't exactly a total chump. He was the 2006 world junior 10k champion. He is the 2013 10k world silver medalist.

But since that fateful evening in Daegu, Aug. 28, 2011, their career paths have — diverged.

One might ask: how come?

Moving along, as we were.

In 1978, when I was a second-year student at the Northwestern University Medill School of Journalism in Evanston, Illinois, the best-picture winner was “Annie Hall.” Talk about neurotic. You want neurotic? Here was neurotic: a second-year news writing class, taught by a crusty curmudgeon straight from central casting, Dick Hainey, in which we were taught that one mistake, even one, would get you an automatic failing grade and, son, you deserved to fail and, better yet, start learning to suck it up, because anything less than perfect obviously equals abject failure.

Here is another decree from the oracle atop the mountain that was Professor Hainey, and while anything less than perfect turns out maybe to be not such great advice for life, this next nugget is a worthwhile journalism lesson that has stuck for more than 40 years:

If your mother tells you she loves you — check it out.

In that spirit— and, once more for emphasis, Sir Mo and the others in the Salazar pack are assuredly entitled to the presumption of innocence — let us visit some hits from the wayback machine even as we note that Julia Roberts is, according to Variety, set to produce the film adaptation of the New York Times best-seller “Fool Me Once”:

Armstrong, 1999: “I have been on my deathbed, and I’m not stupid. I can emphatically say I’m not on drugs.”

Armstrong, 2005: “I have never doped. I can say it again but I’ve said it for seven years.”

Armstrong, 2005: “How many times do I have to say it? … Well, it can’t be any clearer than, ‘I’ve never taken drugs.’ “

Armstrong, 2010: “As long as I live, I will deny it. There was absolutely no way I forced people, encouraged people, told people, helped people, facilitated. Absolutely not. 100 percent.”

Armstrong on Twitter, May 2011, as his former teammate Tyler Hamilton was about to go on “60 Minutes”:

https://twitter.com/lancearmstrong/status/71358750434402306

Armstrong, 2013, after USADA got him: “All the fault and all the blame here falls on me. I viewed this situation as one big lie that I repeated a lot of times. I made my decisions. They are my mistakes, and I am sitting here today to acknowledge that and to say I’m sorry for that.”

Hamilton, interview in his Boulder, Colorado, living room, 2005: “I didn’t blood dope, that’s for sure.”

Hamilton, May, 19, 2011, confession letter to family and friends: “During my cycling career, I knowingly broke the rules. I used performance-enhancing drugs. I lied about it, over and over. Worst of all, I hurt people I care about. And while there are reasons for what I did — reasons I hope you’ll understand better after watching — it doesn’t excuse the fact that I did it all, and there’s no way on earth to undo it.”

Hamilton, describing a July 2000 blood transfusion during that year’s Tour de France, as relayed as part of the USADA case against Armstrong:

“The whole process took less than 30 minutes. Kevin Livingston and I received our transfusions in one room and Lance got his in an adjacent room with an adjoining door. During the transfusion Lance was visible from our room, Johan, Pepe and Dr. del Moral were all present and Dr. del Moral went back and forth between the rooms checking on the progress of the re-infusions. Each blood bag was placed on a hook for a picture frame or taped to the wall and we lay on the bed and shivered while the chilly blood re-entered our bodies.”

Floyd Landis, his very own 2007 autobiography, the ironically titled Positively False, chapter 11:

“I did not use performance enhancing drugs in the 2006 Tour de France or any other time in my career. All I ever did was train. I put training first, even before my family. When you want to win, you eat, drink, sleep and breathe cycling. Knowing it’s not forever is what makes it doable. So I made the sacrifices I had to make, and I did so honestly.”

From page 278-79 in the book, Landis describing a post-2006 Tour de France trip back to where he was from, Farmersville, Pennsylvania, amid the largely Mennonite area of Lancaster County:

"One by one, hundreds of people walked across the yard to my parents to congratulate them. One woman went to mother with tears in her eyes. 'She said that she and her husband had lost their son in Iraq seven months before,' Mom said. 'She told me, 'My husband has never gotten over it, but he rides a bicycle and he watched every single stage. He's a different person since your son won. It was like healing to him.' I just felt so blessed that you were able to inspire someone while doing something that you love,' Mom told me. I never rode my bike in order to have an effect on anyone else, but I understand that people are influenced by what they see. When my mom told me this story, I was really touched that I had helped someone."

USADA Reasoned Decision, just one of many harrowing passages describing Landis' doping: “They shared doping advice from Michele Ferrari," the Italian doctor identified by USADA as a key player in the Armstrong scheme, "and when Floyd needed EPO Lance shared that, too.”

Marion Jones, her very own 2004 autobiography, and in big red capital letters about 175 pages in:

“I have always been unequivocal in my opinion. I am against performance-enhancing drugs. I have never taken them and I will never take them.”

Government sentencing memorandum, 2007, United States v. Marion Jones:

“The defendant’s use of performance-enhancing drugs encompassed numerous drugs (THG, EPO, human growth hormone) and delivery systems (sublingual drops, subcutaneous injections) over a substantial course of time. Her use of these substances was goal-oriented, that is, it was designed to further her athletic accomplishments and financial career. Her false statements to the [investigating] agent were focused, hoping not only to deflect the attention of the investigation away from herself, but also to secure the gains achieved by her use of the performance-enhancing substances in the first place. The false statements to the [investigating] agent were the culmination of a long series of public denials by the defendant, often accompanied by baseless attacks on those accusing her regarding her use of these substances."

U.S. District Judge Kenneth Karas, 2007, in sentencing Jones to six months in custody, emphasizing that what she did was not a “momentary lapse in judgment or a one-time mistake but instead a repetition of an attempt to break the law.”

Who knows what will happen at the Oscars?

What the next few weeks or months will bring with Sir Mo, Salazar and others?

Surprises and plot twists galore, perhaps.

La, la, la, la, la, everyone. Keep a watchful eye on your sweet mother and the popcorn.

Less rhetoric, more constructive problem solving

Last December, in the second of his two World Anti-Doping Agency commissioned (but, to be clear, independent) reports into allegations of doping in Russia, the Canadian law professor Richard McLaren wrote:

“It is time for everyone to step down from their positions and end the accusations against each other. I would urge international sport leadership to take account of what is known and contained in the [two] reports, use the information constructively to work together and correct what is wrong.”

It is through that prism that one ought to view, one, the love note the International Olympic Committee dropped in classic late Friday afternoon PR-style on what it called “the reform of the anti-doping system” and, two, the sanctimonious political grandstanding sure to be coming at next Tuesday’s U.S. House of Representative subcommittee hearing on “ways to improve and strengthen the anti-doping system.”

The U.S. Congress and the IOC would do well to listen to Mr. McLaren’s wise counsel.

But no.

Turning to Congress first:

One, you might think the U.S. House of Representatives might have better things to do than hold hearings about Russian doping.

Because, like, that is the House of Representatives for the United States and the allegations about doping involve another country. That country is called Russia. Russia is not the United States.

Maybe the ladies and gentlemen of the 115th Congress might have more pressing priorities in regard to American life. Maybe, you know, jobs. Then again, it’s February. This is why Sports Illustrated features swimsuit models this time of year. It’s silly season.

Two, everything you need to know about how dumb, what an absolute waste of time and resource this hearing is going to be, can be explained in the headline to the committee news release: “Gold medal lineup: Tuesday hearing on anti-doping brings together all-star panel.” For emphasis, “gold medal lineup” is in capital letters.

Wow! Sports stars come to Washington! Congresspeople! Staffers! Get out your cellphones so you can get your selfies with witness No. 4 on the testimony list — “Mr. Michael Phelps, American swimmer and Olympic gold medalist”! Let's count! 28 Olympic medals in all! 23 gold!

Get back to me, anyone, when you tell me how many of those 28 medals Phelps — and I have been there for every single one of his Olympic races, maybe even written a best-selling book with him — has lost to a Russian swimmer.

Hint: zero.

If Congress wants to investigate some current issues involving doping in American sports, since it can turn to subpoena power and everything, here are some suggestions:

— Lance Armstrong is facing the prospect of civil trial. In February 2012, the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles, headed by Andre Birotte Jr., abruptly dropped, without explanation, a two-year criminal investigation into Armstrong’s activities. That October, the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency made its case against Armstrong, revealing that he had, in fact, been doping for years. In April 2014, Birotte was nominated to become a federal judge in LA, where he now sits. How does that happen?

— What’s really on that Tom Brady cellphone? Even a sitting U.S. judge on a circuit court of appeals in New York, in oral argument nearly a year ago, said it made no sense whatsoever for Brady to have destroyed the phone. And is there any connection to that phone’s destruction and these kinds of stories?

— What about the extent and scope of the use of illicit performance-enhancing substances in the NBA and NFL, among other U.S. major pro leagues? Or do you, congresspeople, really think, oh, linebackers are built and run like that naturally?

Moving along:

Three: it is the height of hypocrisy for the legislative arm of the United States government to be holding a hearing into ways to “improve and strengthen the anti-doping system” when, as this space pointed out recently, the American government contributed not one penny to either of the two Pound or two McLaren reports, which together cost $3.7 million.

Suggestion: you want to improve the anti-doping system?

Easy. Like most problems, it can be made way better by throwing money at it.

WADA’s 2017 budget is $29.7 million. The U.S. government’s dues are expected to total $2.155 million. That’s by far the most of any country anywhere. Britain, Russia, Germany: $815,630 apiece.

The U.S. money has for the past several years been funneled through a White House agency called the Office of National Drug Control Policy.

But lookee here, according to a Feb. 17 New York Times account: the Trump Administration may be poised to move ahead with elimination of nine programs, most “perennial targets for conservatives.” One of the nine: ONDCP.

Now that would be something to investigate.

Particularly since — lookee over here, too — the very same Republican chair of this very same subcommittee, Rep. Tim Murphy of Pennsylvania, according to the Wall Street Journal, co-signed a letter sent Thursday to, whaddya know, ONDCP that said:

“On top of opioid overprescribing and heroin overdoses, we believe the United States is now facing another deadly wave: fentanyl.”

The way these sorts of Capitol Hearings hearings typically work is that the members and staffers stroll in, now with cellphones in hand, with a briefing memorandum.

That’s the background they get.

Meaning that’s usually pretty much the sum and substance of what they know about the topic at hand.

These sorts of memos tend to be a matter of public record. This particular memo runs to eight pages and 47 footnotes.

Of those 47, 33 are news stories, press releases, op-eds, TV shows or the Pound or McLaren reports themselves.

A good chunk of most of the others, including a bunch of the first dozen, are who-we-are and what-we-do-documents (No. 2, WADA mission statement, etc.)

So, again, what is this hearing about?

News stories, press releases, op-eds and TV shows.

Not actual reform.

That, to reiterate, would take the one thing the United States government has only marginally been, and may not now at all be, willing to shell out:

Hard cash.

Which brings us to the IOC.

Same issue.

The IOC took in $5.6 billion over the 2013-16 cycle.

In his letter, circulated widely within Olympic circles but not formally addressed to WADA itself, the IOC director general Christophe de Kepper notes that in the first WADA-commissioned independent report, made public last July, Mr. McLaren “describes a ‘state-sponsored system’ whilst in the final full report in December he described an ‘institutional conspiracy.’ "

The IOC panels now studying what’s what, de Kepper said, “will now have to consider what this change means and which individuals, organizations or government authorities may have been involved.”

Oh, please.

If anyone thinks this trail is going to lead to the cellphone of the Russian president, think again. It’s not going to be found, anyway.

Hmm. Weird coincidences, sometimes. Or not. Whatever.

Mr. de Kepper further notes that "it was admitted" by WADA that "in many cases the evidence provided may not be sufficient to bring successful cases." This is a pointed note aimed at the WADA position of an all-out Russian ban and the IOC stance in favor of individual justice. This space, almost alone in the western press, has argued that of course every single person in the world deserves to have his or her case heard on the basis of the evidence against him or her -- not a group grope.

At any rate, along with the possibility if even probability of soaring legal principle and individual justice, at issue with Mr. de Kepper's position, without doubt, is the IOC seeking advantage in a push-and-pull with WADA over who is going to control what over what comes next.

Mr. McLaren made clear what “this change means." See the second paragraph of this column: all involved should be invoking less rhetoric and seeking more cooperation.

In that spirit, here are some words of wisdom that won’t be in any of those footnotes and that won’t be referenced in that IOC letter.

They were spoken at a WADA executive meeting in September by the WADA director general, Olivier Niggli, and for sure the IOC is aware of them, or ought to be on what lawyers would call the theory of constructive notice, because an IOC vice president, Turkey’s Ugur Erdener, was in the room listening.

This sort of thing isn’t ripped from the headlines. No cellphones. No news releases touting gold-medal lineups or all-star panels.

This is the nitty-gritty of the anti-doping scene.

To make an anti-doping system work takes tons of hard grinding, along with patience, science, leadership and collaboration from sports officials and earnest government officials, and it takes a lot more money than is right now at anyone's disposal, especially WADA. The inescapable fact is the IOC has to put up that coin. Governments come and go; congresspeople pose and prance and dither; the IOC is the only big-picture revenue source with an ongoing interest in making sure international sport is as clean as can be.

That’s going to take checks and balances along with trust, will and faith.

As Mr. McLaren said, that means constructive problem-solving.

“The report,” Niggli said in September, referring to Mr. McLaren’s July document, “had generated a lot of comments and discussions over the past few months.

“WADA should not lose the focus, which was that it was an issue with Russia, and WADA still had to deal with that issue.

“It was a very important issue, and the fact that Russia had been cheating everybody for a number of years needed to be addressed. That was the key focus, and it probably should have been the focus of the discussion over the past months, too.

“Unfortunately, the discussion had been on trying to attack WADA and blame the anti-doping system, and that had not been helpful. The members should bear in mind that WADA did not operate in a vacuum.

“WADA was made up of governments and the Olympic movement, and the Olympic movement had been around the table from Day One,” in the late 1990s, “and had supported the work of WADA and the revised World Anti-Doping Code, and it had been paradoxical to see how the entire anti-doping system had been questioned after the McLaren report.

“…  The system was [not] the issue; the issue was how the system was being practiced by some, and the members should not forget the fact that the system had been cheated.

“One could design a great system but if those applying it were cheating, it was difficult to achieve success.”

Exactly.

'The perception and the reality of the Olympic Games must change'

Every now and then the Olympic movement produces one of the really good guys. (And women, too. Stand down, politically correct police.) The Budapest 2024 bid came Wednesday to a crashing end. It became the latest, if predictable, victim of a taxpayer revolt in Europe tied to obscenely bloated and, no coincidence, government-funded Olympic-related infrastructure costs.

Balázs Fürjes led the Budapest 2024 effort. He is one of the world’s really good people. Smart, clever, imaginative, dedicated, devoted, resourceful, patriotic, the vision thing.

It may seem perhaps a small note amid a very big problem confronting the International Olympic Committee that Balázs Fürjes will likely be sidelined, at least for a while, from the Olympic scene.

But it is altogether exceptionally telling.

Ladies and gentlemen, this column marks another in a recent series dedicated to developments in the campaign for the 2024 Games. It is straight talk; there is zero point in anything else at such a critical juncture. Apologies in advance for the length.

It’s not just that the Olympic movement is reeling from the fallout of yet another city from its last two bid races, for the 2022 Winter Games and 2024 Summer Games.

Voters in Europe are, in a phrase, pissed off, and the IOC is at an inflection point, the question being whether the members will do the only sensible thing at their assembly this September — that is, pick a privately funded entity, Los Angeles, for the 2024 Summer Games. The only other candidate left is Paris, another government-funded outfit.

Along with the assembly-line disappearance of so many cities goes a corollary, if little noticed, piece: the human capital that animates the bids, the campaigns, the would-be organizing committees.

This is, in a word, a disaster.

The Olympic movement depends on a lot of things.

It needs money, of course. A significant chunk of which, it should be noted, is American.

It needs technology and other resource.

Mostly, though, it needs people, and what people of goodwill from all corners of our imperfect world can bring to the table: creativity, innovation and inspiration.

That is why the IOC needs LA for 2024.

Yet again, here goes the disclaimer:

Yes, I live in Los Angeles, and have since the end of 1992. I married an LA girl. Our kids were born and grew up in Southern California.

For all that:

I am not an agent for the Los Angeles bid.  I am not a consultant for the Los Angeles bid. I am not being paid by them. I am not, in any way, working for or on behalf of the bid.

If you know anything about the politics and geography of Los Angeles, this would be manifestly plain.

The LA 2024 people are, generally speaking, UCLA people. I teach at the USC journalism school. I live in Palos Verdes, about a half-hour south of USC on the 110 Harbor Freeway. Palos Verdes is USC country. Very close family friends are such USC freaks that they get up every USC football Saturday to claim a Coliseum tailgate space at 3 in the morning. Wednesday is trash day in our neighborhood; when I went out at 6:55 this morning to take our trash cans to the street, I said hi to my neighbor, Richard, who as ever was walking his two dogs; Richard was wearing his cardinal-and-gold USC sweatshirt.

The LA24 bid has been up and going for roughly 18 months. In that time, I have not had one coffee, one lunch, one dinner with the bid team. We have kept a respectful professional distance.

Ed Hula of Around the Rings and I are perhaps the only American reporters to have covered in depth every single IOC bid contest since 1999. I am highly confident I know what I’m talking about when it comes to these campaigns.

This is why — and even if you are a critic of my work, totally fine, you nonetheless ought to acknowledge I have at the least been thoroughly consistent — I was the first journalist anywhere to say that Boston was doomed, that the U.S. Olympic Committee had made a huge mistake and that the USOC needed to re-group and come to LA. That was way back in March 2015.

My French friends in particular may not like how explicitly straightforward this column has been in expressing why, for two years now, LA was the plain answer to the Olympic movement's obvious problem.

C’est la vie. Reminder to all: this is not personal. This is journalism.

The IOC has got itself — and this is its own damn fault — in a crack.

For roughly the past 20 years, the IOC has turned to government-underwritten Games that, time and again, have proven hugely, inappropriately expensive.

This model can be traced to Barcelona in 1992. Those Games jolted mayors, governors, prime ministers and presidents into this realization: the Olympics could serve as a seven-year public policy (that is, public works) catalyst to get built what would otherwise take 20, 30, 40 or more years to get done, if ever.

Short list from many examples: Athens (2004) metro and airport, Beijing (2008) building spree, Sochi (2014) literally two new cities (Adler, Krasnaya Polyana) from scratch.

The problem with government-funded Games is easy to explain. It's a three-step follow:

One, over the seven-year stretch from when the IOC awards a Games to the moment the cauldron is lit at an opening ceremony, governments typically can — and do — change. (See South Korea political turmoil, Winter Games 2018. Same, Rio 2016.)

Two, over those seven years, economic conditions can — and do — change. (See Rio, 2009-16).

Three, as a consequence, government commitments can — and do — change.

What this means, again in easy-to-explain language:

The bill for all those infrastructure projects, which were the in-fact underpinning of everything that led to that cauldron lighting, inevitably become grotesquely fat like yo mama.

Numbers:

$12-15 billion Athens 2004, $40 billion Beijing 2008, $15 billion-ish London 2012, presumed $20-billion Rio 2016, worries over $25-30 billion for Tokyo 2020 when the bid said it would be done for $7.8 billion, and the No. 1 monster, $51 billion, Sochi 2014.

When a bid and follow-on organizing committee are government-financed, who gets stuck with these bills?

This is elemental: taxpayers.

Now, taxpayers in western democracies are saying, no more.

Layered on to the cost concerns:

As events keep proving, taxpayers are fed up to here with the establishment and the “elite.”

The IOC — right or wrong — is the very definition of that.

In a move that underscores the IOC’s ongoing disconnect, president Thomas Bach announced a huge sponsor deal with Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba at last month’s World Economic Forum in Davos. Of all places. Davos, symbol of the global elite.

This is why taxpayers, particularly in Europe, are telling the IOC to go, you know, itself.

This past Sunday, voters in Davos/St. Moritz, in a referendum, said no to the notion of a 2026 Winter Games. Four years before, they had said no to the idea of a 2022 Winter Games.

Indeed, for 2022, six cities in Europe dropped out, five put off to varying degrees by the $51 billion 2014 figure: Oslo, Munich, Stockholm, Davos/St. Moritz and Krakow, Poland. A sixth, Lviv, Ukraine, fell out because of war.

Five cities started for 2024 in September 2015: LA, Paris, Budapest, Rome and Hamburg, Germany.

Hamburg went out in a referendum. With it went the likes of the bid's creative chief executive, Nikolas Hill, and a hugely talented spokeswoman, Susanne Jahrreiss.

Rome pulled out because the mayor said the city had other priorities. Just like, four years beforehand, the prime minister had said the country had better things to spend money on.

Now Budapest is out.

“Many of us are already thinking of when next and how next,” Fürjes said in a late Wednesday night telephone interview from Hungary, adding, “The perception and the reality of the Olympic Games must change.”

This makes for the natural bridge to why LA for 2024.

There is now considerable worldwide talk — look it up, last September I was the first in the press to write at length about this notion — of awarding two Games at one time.

My point was LA 24 and Paris 28, not the other way around.

If there is to be a two-fer, it has to be that way: LA 24, Paris 28.

This space has made this point before so here it is again: the IOC formally accepts bids via national Olympic committees, and 2024 is the end-game for the USOC.

The IOC can not ding the United States of America’s Olympic committee three times — New York for 2012, Chicago for 2016, LA for 2024 — and expect the Americans to keep coming back. That story will be done. Finished. Over. For a long time.

If you want to believe otherwise, fine, maybe you want to believe in unicorns or fairies, too. Line up here: I have a bridge in Brooklyn for you.

Everybody needs to wrap their heads around what is, truly, reality, and the sooner the better, because in the United States it takes private money to run bids and private money to run Games and after $240 million in private money over three bids and some 14 years devoted to the three largest cities in this country, the USOC and all those generous donors would be spent, financially and, probably more important, emotionally. Done. Finished. Over.

That said:

It seems increasingly unlikely there would be a 2024-2028 two-fer. Why? There’s all kinds of resistance.

• From other would-be bidders in Europe: if the French go down for 2024, a bunch of cities would love to bid for 2028. These would likely include Madrid, Budapest, Milan, even St. Petersburg (laugh if you wish but Mr. Putin, still, tends to have significant influence in the Olympic orbit) and, let’s face it, Paris. You can throw all the Brisbane talk you want onto the barbie but no way the IOC is going to Australia in October — not with the way television ratings tanked in September in Sydney in 2000.

• From the IOC members: there was no two-fer in the 2022 Winter Games race, when the race got down to two, just Beijing and Almaty, Kazakhstan, so why a Summer 2024 two-fer? Many of the IOC members already complain they do less than Tarzan’s tailor. Voting on the site of the Games is their one big responsibility. Taking that away would be yanking away the essential perk of membership.

• From LA24: if you are the LA people, why hedge? In a two-dog race, if you are LA, you would have to quietly and humbly like (to take) your chances against Paris.

Why?

What is the IOC’s No. 1 problem?

Again, keeping it simple: as this taxpayer revolt has proven, the IOC has a massive credibility problem.

At the core of that credibility problem is a branding problem.

Let’s put sentimentality away. You like French wine? Awesome. There’s great wine in California, too.

At issue is what is best for the Olympic movement, not just for 2024 but for years into the future.

Paris is talking only 2024. LA is talking 2024 and — beyond, well beyond. That is what is at stake.

Let’s frame what’s what this way:

• Does the IOC want a 2024 Old World Games … in an older city … that will be paid for by government … a government almost surely subject to change/s over seven years … when Frexit is suddenly a major issue … when the government will have to build an athletes’ village … that if history is a reliable guide will cost way more than budgeted … in a precinct that is currently being rocked by violence … not far from where the central stadium was hit by a terror attack … in a city where over seven years the city will no doubt endure public strikes … and the weather every summer, which is why the locals flee, is hot and muggy?

Or:

• Does the IOC want a privately run Games that, because it’s privately run, has no margin for error and has to come in at or under budget, just like 1984 … with an already-built village at UCLA where thousands of college kids happily come and go every day … in perfect California summer sunshine …  in a city where the Olympics have an approval rating nearing 90 percent … in a region and state that’s full of youth, tech and social media and that will, like 1984, kickstart it all over again for the movement for an entire generation?

To reiterate: in Europe, the IOC is getting thrashed but in LA, based on sunny memories from 1984 and 1932, the locals when most recently polled said yes to the Olympic Games to the tune of 88 percent.

When logic is applied, what about this is even remotely a remotely difficult choice?

Earlier this month, the Paris bid unveiled its slogan on the Eiffel Tower to what officials thought was great fanfare: “Made for Sharing.” In English. With great respect to the French academy, because its job is to protect the French language, next came the howls of protest. The next thing you knew, the slogan was suddenly “Venez Partager” along with the English version.

What 16-year-old skateboarder or surfer would possibly care?

https://twitter.com/TonyESTANGUET/status/834374881919762432

In announcing that "sharing" slogan in English, our Paris friends had a good laugh at American expense, they thought, because it was a not-so-subtle play on bridges and walls and the American president. Then it turns out the French authorities are, for security purposes, going to build a wall around the Eiffel Tower.

Karma, people.

Back to Rio, and the government chaos that bedeviled nearly everything there. Whether Marine le Pen wins the French elections this spring or not, who wants to believe that for the next seven years the French government is going to rest in a state of calm serenity?

Rail on Donald Trump, or whatever. A privately funded Los Angeles enterprise means that whatever is going on in Washington is, for the most part, going in Washington. LA is LA is LA. This is the key distinction that underpins a privately organized American bid, and right now this is the secret to what the IOC needs — it needs time, it needs stability and it needs all the other stuff LA and California can bring to the table, in particular creative energy.

The world’s leading brands are based in California. More logic and rational thinking — ask whether this isn’t precisely what the IOC needs a little or maybe a lot of for 2024 and beyond:

The range of Hollywood studios. Disney. Snapchat. Facebook. Apple. Twitter. Netflix. Electronic Arts. Oracle.

Feeling a little more creative? Annex Oregon and Washington just up the Pacific coast: Nike and Microsoft, for starters. Throw in Starbucks. Or, back to LA, The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf (big in Asia, too).

Seriously, why the Olympic movement doesn’t have an association with Starbucks or Coffee Bean — where do young people hang out and soak up the free WiFi, for god’s sake — is beyond common sense.

Balázs Fürjes was careful on the telephone not to endorse either of the remaining two bids. Even so, the IOC president, executive board and members — for that matter, anyone with an interest in the Olympic movement’s future — ought to pay careful attention to his words.

“Something,” he said, “is going in the wrong direction.”

Historic U.S. biathlon gold: family, team, community, country - and belief

Can we be honest with each other? For a great many people, what comes out of Washington, regardless of who is who there, is just noise. What matters is what, truly, matters: family and community.

Indeed, it is the day-to-day stuff of real life, the rituals, the joys and the heartbreaks, the ups and downs of the days that can seemingly take forever and the years that go by in a blink amid children and family and community that bind us all together: the crazy quilt, the rich tapestry that is the United States of America.

This is why Lowell Bailey’s victory Thursday in a 20-kilometer race at the biathlon world championships in Hochfilzen, Austria, is all the more special.

Bailey’s gold medal, in what in biathlon lingo is called the individual event, is the first — for emphasis, the first — biathlon gold for the United States at either the world championships (which date to 1958) or the Winter Games (1960, and see you next February in South Korea).

Bailey hit all 20 targets and, over the final four-kilometer loop, had to ski hard and fast to defeat Ondrej Moravec of the Czech Republic. The winning margin: 3.3 seconds. Martin Fourcade of France, in recent years perhaps the world’s best biathlete, took third.

What Lowell Bailey did Thursday is arguably the hardest thing to do in sports: to win when there is no evidence you can. When all you have is belief. And you, your family, your community, your team have had to sustain that belief — in this instance, on behalf of your country — for more than 20 years.

“It is a belief, a vision,” Max Cobb, the president and chief executive of U.S. Biathlon, said in a late Thursday phone call, “in the power of bringing the right people together and working as hard as you can to bring about something you really believe in and really want.

“All too often in life,” Cobb added, “we sell ourselves short by not daring to dream to do something great and trying to achieve something that seems unachievable — something that rationally seems unachievable.

“It is when you dare to do that great thing that great things happen. That is why today is so emotional.”

Lowell Bailey is 35 years old.

He has been at this biathlon thing a very, very long time. PyeongChang next year will be his fourth Olympics.

Bailey grew up around Lake Placid, New York. There are super-intense local rivalries — there is Saranac Lake, there is the farther-out hamlet of Paul Smiths, there is Lake Placid — but for the rest of us who are not locals there is, you know, Lake Placid, where 37 years ago this week they staged the Winter Games there. Eric Heiden raced and won five times. A pretty big deal hockey game went down between the Americans and Soviets.

That kind of thing, and to grow up in and around Lake Placid is to be part of that culture.

“It was such a thrill to see this,” Sue Cameron, who is literally Lowell Bailey’s next-door neighbor, said in an email.

“Everyone in Lake Placid is over the moon about his gold medal and so proud not only of Lowell but the entire U.S. biathlon team, athletes and coaches.”

Lowell Bailey grew up with a gang of kids that included, among others, Tim Burke and Billy Demong. And, as well, Haley Johnson (2010 Olympics), Annelies Cook (2014 Olympics) and Billy's younger sister, Katy.

"As young racers, all of them were obviously good and in some cases very good," said Kris Cheney-Seymour, 46, the group's first coach who now runs the state-owned nordic ski center at Mount Van Hoevenberg.

"They were by no means the Bad News Bears," he added, "but they also weren’t the prodigies. The dream was born. Probably they and their internal sport mechanisms bought into it first. Their parents were unconditional. And the community believed as well. Every step along the way was, in some ways celebrated, but also there was an inner belief that they could always do it."

Tim Burke, 35, is also a mainstay of the U.S. biathlon program. He has been to three Winter Games. At the 2013 world championships, he took second in this very same individual event.

At the 2010 Vancouver Olympics, Demong became the first American to win Olympic gold in a Nordic event, the 10km individual large hill. He then skied the final lap in a silver medal-winning relay.

Billy Demong and his wife, Katie, now live in Park City, Utah.

“It’s incredible,” he said in a phone call, “to look at the group we grew up with, in a small town, in a small area — and look at how much success came out of that group.”

He added a moment later, “I have always been a bigger believer in groups and culture. We had that when we were kids growing up. We showed up. We pushed each other.” And this: “Part of learning how to win back in the day and believing we could win was coming to grips with the fact that there was not something in the water in Norway that we didn’t have.”

He also said, recalling when his U.S. teammate Johnny Spillane won gold in the 7.5k sprint at the 2003 worlds, the first American to win a gold at the FIS Nordic worlds, that he — Demong — did not cry then. Nor did he — Demong — cry in 2010 in Vancouver.

On Thursday, Billy Demong, watching Lowell Bailey win via livestream on the computer, cried. In excitement. And joy.

He said he called Tim Burke’s mother — Billy, who is now 36 and the father of two young sons, could easily summon Mary Jean Burke’s landline in upstate New York from the memory bank — and “we chatted about how special it was, going back to all of our childhoods.”

He added, “This is what it’s all about.”

Lowell Bailey’s younger sister, Kendra Bailey Davis, 32, was home with her husband, Jeff, and their 6-month-old son, Milo. They were stuck to the computer, too.

“We were just tearing [up],” she said, “and the whole day has been a string of texts and phone calls and video links and social media and real media.

“I did get a chance to video chat with him,” meaning her brother, “after he got home from the medal ceremony and we just stared at each other in disbelief. It’s a pinch-me, when-will-I-wake-up kind of day.”

Lowell Bailey’s younger sister also said, “I know I keep saying it but I don’t have another word: it’s unreal. It’s a dream come true for him and for our family.”

When Lowell Bailey stepped onto the podium, there was a moment when his wife, Erika, and their 8-month-old daughter, Ophelia, joined him.

In Utah, Billy Demong got the screenshot, then immediately dispatched it across the wires to Europe, to Lowell with a message: “You’re gonna want this one.”

This season, Lowell, Erika and Ophelia Bailey have made the biathlon tour a family affair.

“Lowell has some unique qualities in that he can take on a lot of things and still focus on biathlon,” Erika Bailey said late Thursday. “This morning, before the race, he was getting ready to walk out to the race and changing Ophelia’s diaper back in the van. He was able to do that and not get stressed out.”

“For me,” Lowell Bailey said, “it has made all the difference. It is just so great to have Erika and Ophelia here. Biathlon is a brutal sport. You can be on top of the world one day and not the next. Knowing that my family is here, waking up in the morning next to them and seeing their smiling faces — that’s what is’s all about.”

This, too — the crowd cheering him on as the race drew to a close. He knew, everyone knew what was at stake.

Earlier in these 2017 worlds, Bailey had hit every shot in the sprint and finished fourth, just six seconds out of a medal. He missed once in the pursuit, finishing sixth.

Biathlon is incredibly, incredibly hard. You don’t have to understand the intricacies to draw this parallel:

Imagine you run a lap on the track at world-class speed. Say 60 seconds, maybe just under, for 400 meters. Breathing hard? Now go shoot two free throws. Now two more. And do that as quickly as you can.

After Bailey cleaned his final targets, here came this wall of noise — cheers from the stands for an American.

“It was surreal,” Bailey said.

“Until someone gets to see what this atmosphere is like, until you stand alongside the course with 30,000 people screaming, or you stand inside the stadium, you can’t describe how it’s possible in our world of NFL football fans, who doggedly support the home team, how it’s possible for an entire crowd dominated by Norwegians and Germans and definitely not Americans — that they can, in an instant, turn and throw all their support behind an American skier trying to win the first American world championships gold medal …

“Just even thinking back on it gives me goosebumps.”

He also said, “To have something like this happen when I am 35 years old — it’s an amazing thing, amazing for me to experience. I know that the only reason I have stayed in it this long is because I have enjoyed almost every minute of it from when I was 12 years old and picked up a rifle until now, and stepped on that podium.”

That is, really, what it’s really about.

How it, genuinely, works.

A group of kids, boys and girls, in Lake Placid, have big dreams. Some go on to be world-class athletes. Then the likes of Lowell Bailey, Tim Burke and Billy Demong win medals and they inspire young boys and girls now, wherever they might be, to try to be like them.

Just the way, way back when, when Billy made his first Olympic team, Lowell and Tim thought, hey, we can do that.

In Park City, Utah, on Wednesday, Liam Demong, who is 6, played hooky from kindergarten. Liam and Billy went skiing all day. They tore it up to the tune of about 14,000 vertical feet. For Liam, it was a super big day all around. He got to ride up on the chairlift by himself for the very first time, with some cool 10-year-old friends.

About 4:30 in the afternoon, father and son came in for a bit. Liam attacked a chicken pot pie. Then he went back out into the snow, for three hours of ski jumping, which he now says — dad is trying very hard not to be that kind of parent, you know — is his favorite sport.

“I love,” Billy Demong said, “that he loves it.

“I love that there’s a core group of friends he’s doing it with, including his next-door neighbor. It’s like watching the whole thing happen all over again.”

More 2024 straight talk: the hits keep coming

The hits keep coming for the International Olympic Committee, and we are not talking Top-40 radio.

On Sunday, voters in the Swiss Alps — for the second time — said no thanks to an Olympic bid that would have been staged in the posh mountain resorts of St. Moritz and Davos. A state in Switzerland is called a canton. That canton is called Graubuenden. Asked about financing a candidacy for the 2026 Games, 60.1 of voters there said, nope.

Four years ago, the vote against a 2022 bid was 53 percent.

Trend line: not positive. The Swiss say they'll keep exploring 2026 options in another mountain town, Sion, but whatever. In 1999, Sion was the 2006 IOC loser, to Turin, Italy.

Making Sunday’s balloting all the more a disconnect: voting was held amid the two weeks of the 2017 world alpine ski championships in St. Moritz. If ever conditions were ripe to highlight the cool stuff of a high-profile event in a ski resort that twice before had staged the Winter Games, in 1928 and 1948, it was all there.

Instead, disaster. Sixty-forty is a blowout, people.

Actually, Sunday’s balloting makes for the latest in a string of lectures — sorry to use that word, IOC friends, because the good lord knows you don’t like to be told much, if anything — that taxpayers all over Europe have been screaming now for years from the rooftops.

Here is the question:

Are you listening?

Better:

What, finally, will make you hear?

What, ultimately, will make you realize what is what?

The Olympic movement is at — pick your phrase — an inflection point, a turning point, a tipping point.

Voters are not just rejecting the costs of the Games, though that is the biggest factor.

This is also an uncomfortable let’s look-in-the-mirror moment for the members of the IOC.

Voters — see Brexit, Trump, Olympic-related balloting, maybe next the upcoming elections this spring in France — are rejecting everything that goes with what they perceive to be the “elite.”

There could be no more glaring example of the “elite,” right or wrong, fair or not, than the IOC, particularly the IOC going to Davos for a three-week party at what taxpayers perceive to be their expense.

Davos! It was at the super-glitzy Davos get-together just a few weeks ago that the Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba announced a long-term sponsorship of the IOC. To be both clear and fair, from the perspective of the IOC and Alibaba the deal is a coup. Terms were not announced but it reportedly is worth a reported $800 million to an entity, the IOC, that over the four-year cycle 2013-16 announced it intends to take in revenue worth $5.6 billion.

And you wonder why taxpayers are revolting against the Games?

Once more, it is worth heeding the words of Marius Vizer, the president of the International Judo Federation, who said in a speech in Sochi in April 2015:

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

For these remarks, the IOC and president Thomas Bach tried (unsuccessfully) to all but excommunicate Vizer from the Olympic movement.

Time keeps proving Vizer all the more prescient.

In December 2014, the IOC, at Bach’s urging, passed a purported 40-point reform plan dubbed Agenda 2020. To date, as Sunday’s balloting in Switzerland made plain yet once more, Agenda 2020 has proven thoroughly unconvincing to taxpayers anywhere. The reason is clear: there is no fact-based evidence proving that Agenda 2020 amounts to anything but lip service.

Bottom line: the IOC simply cannot carry on the way it has been doing business since the 1992 Barcelona Games ushered in the notion of Games as catalyst for wide-ranging urban transformation project.

That era has come to a crashing, sudden end.

That is what voters in western democracies are saying, and emphatically.

And it’s easy to understand why:

Games-associated costs have become obscene.

$12 to $15 billion in Athens in 2004, $15 billion in London in 2012, a presumed $20 billion in Rio in 2016 (bid documents said $14.4 billion, and that was before a series of delay-related cost overruns), $40 billion in Beijing in 2008 and the killer, a reputed $51 billion in Sochi in 2014.

The Associated Press reports out of Rio recently have just been -- in a word -- grim:

https://twitter.com/StephenWadeAP/status/830584108350849024

https://twitter.com/StephenWadeAP/status/830411202488582146

For 2022, six cities in Europe dropped out, five put off to varying degrees by the $51 billion 2014 figure: Oslo, Munich, Stockholm, Davos/St. Moritz and Krakow, Poland. A sixth, Lviv, Ukraine, fell out because of war.

In Oslo, they didn't just complain about the money -- they complained about stuff like IOC protocol and how many cocktails, fruits and cakes were supposed to be on hand for visits. When Oslo dropped out, the IOC issued a statement that called it a "missed opportunity" and chastised the Norwegians for taking "their decisions on the basis of half-truths and factual inaccuracies."

You wonder why the perception persists -- despite the considerable on-the-ground good work the IOC does around the world each and every day -- that the IOC is elitist?

That 2022 race left the IOC to choose between Beijing, with no snow in the mountains, and Almaty, Kazakhstan. It chose Beijing.

The 2024 race in 2015 started with five cities. It is now down to three.

Hamburg, Germany dropped out after voters said no in a referendum.

Rome dropped out when the mayor said the Games were too expensive amid other priorities. Rome similarly dropped out of the 2020 picture.

Los Angeles, Paris and Budapest are still in.

The IOC will pick the 2024 winner on September 13 by secret ballot at an assembly in Lima, Peru.

September is a long way from February. A lot can, and doubtlessly will, happen.

Even so, the conversations that typically don’t happen in IOC bid campaigns need to happen. Because this campaign can’t be like the others. The Olympic movement literally cannot afford it.

The government-backed Paris 2024 bid, for instance, says its infrastructure costs would total $3.2 billion.

This total ought to be viewed with extreme suspicion. It is the nature of government-backed winning bids in the past 20 years to have made similar we’ll-keep-costs-down promises: Athens, Beijing, London, Sochi, Rio …

Take another look at that Rio athletes' village. Paris needs to build one, too.

Our Paris 2024 friends recently, so everyone should know, have been trying another tack. The Games have never been away from Europe for more than 12 years; the last Games in Europe were in London in 2012; 2024 would obviously be 12 years. Our French friends say, it’s precisely because the crisis is in Europe that the IOC ought to come to Europe for 2024. If the IOC doesn’t come to Europe for 2024, they ask, when will it ever come to Europe again?

Easy: 2028.

When these cities will be lining up because they already have expressed interest: Madrid, Budapest, Milan, St. Petersburg and Paris.

Also, probably some city in Germany.

In case this is not clear: Budapest wants to be the first city in Europe to stage the Games after London. And they have a good story to tell.

In any case, in virtually every country but the United States, sport is an arm of the federal government. Thus bids and Olympic Games tend to be the purview of governments. The logic tree goes like this:

It’s one thing for a federal government somewhere to put up, say, $50 or $80 million to organize and run an Olympic campaign. It’s quite another, as is the case in the United States, to have to raise that money from private donors.

When I wrote a few columns ago that Casey Wasserman, the LA24 bid chair, had gone about raising $35 million, I was wrong.

It was more like $50 million, maybe even a little more.

If Los Angeles does not win for 2024, Wasserman just cannot go back to all those people and say, looking at 2028, “OK, let’s do it all over again because now I think we really might win.”

Not going to happen.

Indeed, we all need to be as crystal clear about these things as possible:

To make Agenda 2020 anything more than just so much talk, the IOC needs for 2024 to grab onto the very thing that for years it has found so sour about the American bid: the fact that it is privately funded instead of government-backed.

A privately funded bid has no wiggle room. When the LA24 people say the bid will be $5.3 billion, it will — just like Peter Ueberroth proved in 1984, when there was no room for error — be $5.3 billion, if not less.

Moreover, this needs to be explicitly understood as well. Plain, forthright talk serves everyone’s interests:

If Los Angeles does not win for 2024, there will be significant resistance where it counts to the notion of there being an American bid for an extremely long time.

By significant, I am being gentle.

By where it counts, I mean U.S. Olympic Committee leadership, the USOC board of directors and at the highest levels of politics and government in the United States as well.

Even the winter sports people get it. They’re in for 2024. They’re not yapping about Denver or Salt Lake for 2026 or 2030.

This is it. 2024. The United States is in for 2024. Only.

This is it.

This is the message that needs to get out, to percolate, to be readily and well understood and absorbed, not just the message but the consequence that the Americans are exceedingly likely not to bid again for a long, long time if 2024 doesn’t go their way.

This is a very different bid campaign than any of the past 20 years. The stakes could not be more significant, perhaps existential, for the modern Olympic movement.

This is it.

Anti-doping reality: we all get what we pay for

Over the past two years, the World Anti-Doping Agency commissioned, in all, four independent reports that trained the spotlight on, and generated considerable controversy worldwide about, allegations of systemic doping in Russia.

Those reports cost a total of $3.7 million, according to WADA.

WADA’s 2016 annual budget totaled $29.6 million. A little math: $3.7 million over $29.6 million would amount to roughly 12.5 percent of the agency’s entire budget. Even spreading the costs out over two years leads to the same problematic conclusion: WADA, perennially cash-strapped, simply does not have that sort of money readily at hand.

In November 2015, WADA president Craig Reedie issued a call to the world’s governments to help pay for investigations.

The response underscores the complexities of reconciling talking the talk with walking the walk in the complex and nuanced world of the anti-doping campaign — where it’s easy, particularly for governments and politicians, to pay lip service to being tough on the use of illicit performance-enhancing drugs but far more problematic to do something about what, at the end, is a problem that challenges the legitimacy of sport and thus inevitably falls on sports officials to confront.

The United States government? It contributed not a penny.

The government of the United Kingdom? Likewise, not a pence.

The government of Germany, which had gone so far as to criminalize doping in sport? Nothing.

The government of Norway, where fair play and clean sport are virtually a mantra? Zero, zip, nada.

In all, WADA says, it had received by the end of 2016 a grand total of $654,903 toward that total of $3.7 million. Romania contributed $2,000. Romania!

For sure clean sport is a laudable goal.

Now the reasonable question for all who say that a level playing field is the goal:

Is this any way, figuratively speaking, to run a railroad?

—

To recap the long story of the investigations into what’s what in Russia:

The Canadian lawyer Dick Pound was asked to chair the first two independent commission reports. They focused on corruption and doping within track and field’s governing body, the International Association of Athletics Federations, or IAAF.

The two reports were released in November 2015 and January 2016.

Total cost for the pair: $1.8 million, per WADA.

The Canadian law professor Richard McLaren headed the next two independent commission reports. They addressed the wider subject of purported systemic abuse in Russia.

He delivered his first report last July. It contained terms such as “state directed oversight,” a “state-directed failsafe system” and more.

The second report was made public in December. It refers repeatedly to “institutional control,” and urged “international sport leadership to take account of what is known and contained in the [July and December] reports, use the information constructively to work together and correct what is wrong.”

Cost for the two reports: $1.9 million, per WADA.

Total, all in, four reports: $3.7 million.

Reedie, recognizing in November 2015 that WADA was looking at a monumental challenge in the months ahead, put out his call to the world’s governments.

In virtually every country but the United States, sport is an arm of a federal ministry. Governments play a key role in WADA governance. Among other things, government funding matches the monies that flow to WADA from sport, and in particular the International Olympic Committee.

Here, according to WADA, is what Reedie’s call for help has brought the agency:

Country	Payment Received From Govt(in USD)		Date Received
Romania	2,000		5-Jan-16
New Zealand	20,000		9-Jun-16
Canada	136,250		12-May-16
Denmark	100,000		28-Apr-16
Japan	187,109		13-Jun-16
Japan-Asia Fund	50,000		23-Dec-16
France	159,544		26-Dec-16
Total		654,903

 —

When the French contribution came in the day after Christmas, WADA took note of it with a thank-you news release that said, in part, it appreciated the “tangible demonstration of France’s ongoing commitment to partner with WADA to uphold the spirit of sport.”

The agency spokesman, Ben Nichols, said in a response to an inquiry, ‘WADA is very grateful for the generous contributions made by governments from seven different countries towards our Special Investigations Fund.

“These additional funds are helping support the agency’s enhanced investigations capacity, which is an increasingly important aspect of our global anti-doping work. WADA of course welcomes and encourages any further contributions from other countries that would also be put to good use in protecting the rights of clean athletes worldwide.”

It might be noted that there are 193 member nation-states in the United Nations and 206 national Olympic committees. (The national Olympic committee of Kuwait has been suspended, in a dispute over governmental interference, since October 27, 2015.)

Seven countries contributed to the "Special Investigations Fund."

Last June, or roughly seven months after Reedie’s call for funding, U.S. Sen. John Thune, a Republican from South Dakota, chair of the Senate Commerce Committee, sent a letter to WADA asking why it had not moved more aggressively to investigate allegations of Russian doping.

The British Parliament summoned Sebastian Coe, the president of the IAAF, to give testimony in December 2015. Parliament is still in a kerfuffle over what Coe knew, didn’t know or might have known.

"The Government is fully supportive of the work of WADA and makes a significant financial contribution to their work annually, via UK Anti-Doping, to help their operational and investigative work,” a British Department for Culture, Media and Sport spokesperson said.

“Sports Minister Tracey Crouch is also one of the European members of the World Anti-Doping Agency's Foundation Board while UKAD, at the request of WADA, is working in Russia to improve their anti-doping regime."

In Norway, fairness and decency are shouted from the top of the cliffs overseeing the fjords as a way of life. There the culture ministry has responsibility for sport.

A spokesperson: “The Norwegian Ministry of Culture follows the WADA budget process closely. Our position regarding funding matters is to make sure that WADA is appropriately funded to carry out its core functions as a regulating, monitoring and supervising body. Norway contributes to WADA's activities through a yearly contribution.”

In Germany, the interior ministry oversees sport. The current minister, Thomas de Maizière, has been something of an anti-doping crusader, in 2015 taking the lead in urging passage of a new law criminalizing anti-doping and then, last summer, in urging “hard decisions and not … generosity” when it came to the Russian track and field team.

A spokeswoman, Lisa Häger, said the ministry received Reedie’s funding request on December 7, 2015.

She also said the ministry “welcomes” the WADA investigations but added:

“Nevertheless, for budget law reasons it is extremely difficult to make available a one-off payment to WADA for its investigations. Under German budget law, German government agencies may allocate funds to agencies not belonging to the federal or state administration only in the form of special allocations that are subject to strict rules and requirements. The case at hand does not really meet the conditions laid down by the legal provisions governing such allocations.

“However, under certain circumstances, the Federal Ministry of the Interior could imagine raising its yearly contribution to the WADA budget to make future investigations possible. Costs incurred by investigations should be borne by all member states since all member states benefit from the investigation results. This would also guarantee fair and transparent procedures.

“For a further debate on financing WADA and its projects, the European Union and its member states, including Germany, have asked WADA to generally discuss WADA’s priorities, core tasks and working methods. We wish to wait for the outcome of this discussion before taking a final decision.”

So which argument might most seem apt:

There’s the easy one: the tediousness of government bureaucracies?

Or the really, really easy one: the sanctimoniousness of government hypocrisy — ministers, senators and others in the public eye looking to leverage sport for easy headlines but unwilling to pay up to do the thankless but essential work it takes to keep the playing field level?

—

Or, perhaps, there is yet another way to frame this?

The United States paid $2.05 million of WADA’s $29.6 million budget. Rounding up, that’s 7 percent.

No other country is even close.

Moreover, the U.S. Olympic Committee last June approved a 24 percent funding increase to USADA. As an Associated Press story put it, the USOC chose “money over words in an effort to fix a worldwide system that [chief executive officer] Scott Blackmun says is broken.”

The move means the USOC will give USADA $4.6 million starting this year, up from $3.7 million.

The USOC and the U.S. federal government supply most of USADA’s money.

Back to WADA:

Germany and the United Kingdom paid in their 2016 negotiated shares, $772,326 apiece. Norway, too, $135,364.

It is indisputably the case that governments work months if not years ahead in the budgeting process.

It is also the case that a few years ago, when USADA went after Lance Armstrong and entourage, a matter that resulted in sanctions for roughly 20 athletes and coaches, the whole thing — including the costs of defending what turned out to be a frivolous lawsuit in U.S. federal court — ran to, and these are rough numbers, less than $500,000.

Why the discrepancy?

Because, and these are key issues going forward as well:

USADA built into its budget a contingency fund just for this sort of unexpected occurrence. WADA had no such thing.

Because of that, USADA was able to handle it at a staff level. WADA had to pay outsiders, and some of those outsiders were lawyers who, logically enough, billed at lawyer rates.

Big picture:

Asking for contributions can seem an odd way to go about seeking funding.

Did WADA ask for a defined amount from governments x or y? (No. Look at the amounts it got.)

What deadline, if any, was provided? (Seemingly open-ended.)

What justification was provided? (That is, what was the advance cost estimate for what turned out to be four investigations, and what was said about why these investigations — at least initially — could not be covered?)

Was anything said about whether a failure to contribute by a particular date would in any way impact the probe? (Seems like no.)

Back to earth: how is WADA supposed to cover, hmm, just over $3 million in unexpected costs?

 —

Maybe there is yet one more way to look at these vexing complexities.

WADA is nearing its 20-year anniversary.

It has seen many accomplishments: the drafting of the world anti-doping code and the subscription to that code by virtually every sporting body and government in our world.

But, as the Russian doping crisis has made plain, the code — and, to a great extent, WADA — represent what in the United States might be called an unfunded mandate. It’s probably the same term, or a variation thereof, all around the world.

That is — an agency is asked to do something but gets little or no money to do it.

If WADA is now going to be charged with investigations, it's only reasonable to ask it internally to tighten controls. Which the agency gets -- it is now building, from the ground up, a staff investigations department.

At the same time, it’s also reasonable that it have the resource to do what it is going to be asked to do.

And there is only one reasonable source. It’s sport. In particular, the IOC.

It's not unreasonable, given that government has such a distinct role in sport in so many countries, for it to have a seat at the WADA table. As the IOC president, Thomas Bach, put it in a speech in South Korea two-plus years ago, “In the past, some have said that sport has nothing to do with politics, or they have said that sport has nothing to do with money or business. And this is just an attitude which is wrong and which we cannot afford anymore. We are living in the middle of society and that means that we have to partner up with the politicians who run this world.”

At the same time, those politicians reasonably can not be expected to give their full attention to doping in sport. They have more pressing problems: war, disease, infrastructure, economic busts and booms and on and on and on.

Besides, when they do turn to sport, they can come up with horrifying discrepancies.

The tennis player Maria Sharapova will return to competition April 26 in Stuttgart. She will have served 15 months off after her two-year doping ban for meldonium, the Latvian heart-attack medicine, was cut by nine months by a sports court that found she had no intent to cheat. Note: this is sport dealing with a sport matter.

Compare: Girmay Birahun, a little-known 22-year-old Ethiopian marathon runner, is now facing at least three years in an Ethiopian prison after testing positive for — meldonium.

Ethiopia, like Germany, criminalized sports doping. This is government dealing with a sport matter.

“I don’t want to support people who have this evil in them,” Haile Gebrselassie, the distance running great who is now head of the country’s track and field federation, told the Independent, a British newspaper, adding a moment later, “Thanks to the government, we also have prison available as a punishment.”

He also said, “In a way I am scared for the athlete, sad for him, for what he will face in jail. Three years minimum, That’s a very bad punishment for someone to face. He will be the first Ethiopian athlete to go to jail and he has been crying non-stop ever since. But I need to work to protect the majority, not the individual.”

Fairness demands the level playing field that so many in so many places pay lip service to.

Talk is cheap. Action takes real money. There’s only one institution that has that real money, and that’s the IOC, flush with broadcast and sponsor revenues.

This, from page 134 of the IOC's  most recent annual report, for 2015:

"For the 2013-2016 Olympiad, the IOC is on track to realize a USD 5.6 billion total revenue target, which would allow it to achieve the overall objective of 90 percent distribution to support the development of sport worldwide.”

Somewhere in that $5.6 billion — again, $5.6 billion, with a b — there is money to fund an anti-doping system that works.

Because about this there can be no argument: ladies and gentlemen, we all get what we pay for.