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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wadeline Jonathas, and this reminder: each event means *three* Olympic qualifiers

Wadeline Jonathas, and this reminder: each event means *three* Olympic qualifiers

EUGENE, Ore. — If, like most of America, you watched the women’s 400 here at the U.S. track and field Trials a few days ago, and your takeaway was Allyson Felix and her cute daughter, Cammy, and Quanera Hayes and her cute son, Demetrius, and the way the new moms celebrated finishing 1-2 with their kids on the track, Wadeline Jonathas would like you to know that she finished third and she matters just as much, and, for real no knock on anyone else, but if you could tear yourself over this way, you would see the very essence of what it means, really, to be an American, to make it in this country, to represent the United States, red, white and blue, all of that, in the 21st century.

Wadeline Jonathas — Wadie, please — is an immigrant from Haiti. She came to the United States when she was 11. Became an American citizen when she was 17. She didn’t even start running track until she was 16. Didn’t take up the 400 until she was 18. She’s now 23 and going to the Olympics.

Everyone has a story. This is the lesson of Wadeline Jonathas. In her case, it borders on the is-this-for-real? Answer: it’s 100 percent real because there’s so much more to it. At 15, she was homeless. They should make a movie out of The Wadeline Jonathas Story. “One day,” she said with a laugh.

At FINA, generational change -- even (wow), it's 2021, personal emails!

At FINA, generational change -- even (wow), it's 2021, personal emails!

Since this is 2021, you probably have an email address. That email address is almost surely your name @ gmail or Yahoo or Outlook. Or it’s some super-cute thing, or it’s a combo of your name and numbers, like MP8for8Beijing or Usain958yams, again at gmail or Yahoo or Outlook. Like that. Right?

Not to say that things were maybe in need of an update at FINA, the international sports federation that oversees swimming and five other water-related disciplines, four of them Olympic sports (water polo, diving, artistic swimming and open water — the federation is pushing hard for the fifth, high dive), but literally no one at FINA had her or his own individual email. No one.

For years and years, emails went to departments. Not to people. That’s — how it was.

So, back to the 2021 thing. FINA now has, after 35 years, a new executive director, Brent Nowicki, an American lawyer, who succeeds Cornel Marculescu.

One of the first — of many — changes: FINA staff will get their own email addresses.

It’s no small thing.

The Trials, and the change all around us

The Trials, and the change all around us

EUGENE, Ore. — Change is a, perhaps the, only constant in the short time we have to draw breath on Planet Earth.

A day like Monday served as a reminder of how each and all of us is living through a powerful current of change, amplified and accelerated by the pandemic. There is no going back to the way things were.

And that’s OK.

Because it’s OK to consider, for instance, a new way, or ways, of things. In particular, ways sport can help us see differently.

Sport is a prism through which we often can find constructive dialogue about things that sometimes can prove too fraught otherwise. These possibilities drew Monday into sharp relief, underscored not only by racing at the U.S. track and field Trials here at Hayward Field in Eugene but by events in Washington and across the world.

Track and field's racial -- if not racist -- reckoning is not just coming. It's now

Track and field's racial -- if not racist -- reckoning is not just coming. It's now

EUGENE, Ore. — That didn’t take long. All too predictably.

Not even 24 hours after Sha’Carri Richardson sped to victory in the women’s 100 meters here Sunday night at the U.S. Olympic Trials, a British journalist posted to Twitter a note about Richardson’s coach, Dennis Mitchell.

In this tweet, this correspondent pointed out that it had been he in 1998 who had “exclusively” reported that Mitchell had been “let off a doping charge for excessive testosterone, which he claimed was down to drinking beer and having sex four times a day with his wife. ‘It was her birthday, the lady deserved a treat.’“

This note underscores the racial — if not racist — reckoning that track and field must confront. In the year after the murder of George Floyd, this tweet spotlights the undercurrents of the very thing that the British sprint champion Dina Asher-Smith so eloquently wrote about in a briliiant column published last summer in The Telegraph — the “layers and layers of ‘unconscious’ bias at best, and hate at worst, that affect [her] life on a day-to-day basis.”

Ryan Lochte deserves better

Ryan Lochte deserves better

OMAHA, Neb. — Talk about kicking a guy at a down moment. And why?

You want to know why so many people hate so many journalists? Why Donald Trump was on to something, and in a big way? Because of the way Ryan Lochte’s final Olympic Trials swim Friday was reported in the mainstream press.

Lochte finished seventh Friday in the men’s 200-meter individual medley, failing to qualify for the Tokyo Games, what would have been his fifth Olympic Games. He would have been the oldest U.S. male swimmer in history. The 200 IM was his last chance to qualify. Michael Andrew won the race; Chase Kalisz took second.

There’s a disturbing groupthink tendency among my friends and colleagues in the press to report the same story. A particular narrative takes hold, come hell or high water, as if everyone has been drinking from the same Kool-Aid jug, which is not surprising because it’s not a big secret that reporters are insecure and at big events especially talk among themselves to make sure they’re not missing anything their friends at other outlets might have. Even when the race is right in front of everyone’s eyes. A typical convo might be, so the story today is Lochte, right?

After four editions of the swim Trials: a love letter to Omaha

After four editions of the swim Trials: a love letter to Omaha

OMAHA, Neb. — It was 106 degrees here Thursday. Not the kind of day that makes you long for Omaha.

But I’m gonna miss it here.

Rumor is, and only rumor, that this may well be the final time the U.S. swim Trials are held in Omaha. They’ve been here four times in a row: 2008, 2012, 2016 and now 2021. Indianapolis wants 2024 and, to be honest, it kind of feels like a change of pace might well be in order, that the big field house that is Lucas Oil Stadium might well be next.

If that is the case, Omaha has had a great run -- inside the basketball arena, now called CHI Health Center, just up the street from the baseball field, TDAmeritrade Park, home of the NCAA men’s College World Series, which this year gets underway Saturday.